Discussing the latest challenges and opportunities in the hydrogen market
Addressing challenges to power-to-X with model-based systems engineering
Hydrogen’s potential within various transportation applications is continuing to receive increased attention as the race towards net zero speeds up. At Silverstone’s recent Battery Tech Expo, Nikola Kontic – a solution architect at Japanese software engineering firm Zuken – discussed the latest challenges and opportunities in the hydrogen market.
“By 2025, we want to be in the region of 50% hydrogen, from green hydrogen,” Kontic said as he introduced Zuken’s role within the hydrogen transportation market. “The hybrid market is going to grow very rapidly, and it has big potential. But first, we need to increase our infrastructure and the development of global hydrogen hubs, some of which are already in place.”
According to Kontic, it will be key to the hydrogen transition to power these hubs with renewable energy in order to fully take advantage of the opportunities that hydrogen power could provide.
“This is quite a young market,” he continued. “We’re going to see many regulatory and policy changes, so there’s a lot of uncertainty that we need to try to decrease and be dynamic. With regards to hydrogen technology, there’s a lot of indication that we’re going to come across challenges in the supply chain over the next five years. We need to understand about the materials coming in, the supply, and ensuring that we have the demand for the hydrogen and we are providing it in a timely fashion and in the necessary volumes for the required landscape.”
FLEXIBLE SYSTEMS
In order to effectively scale up hydrogen production, Kontic advised that shifting to a more standardised method of mass production using flexible and modular systems will be crucial.
“We need to manage and reduce the costs of generating hydrogen,” he said. “Innovation can probably help us in that area, but we need to leverage the economies of scale as well as cutting costs through various production methods, speeding up the process, and ensuring that we have resilient architecture in place regarding electrolyser locations and their setup. Consistency of performance, quality and safety are all factors that we need to maintain as we scale up.”
MODEL-BASED SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
So, how can model-based systems engineering help to address some of these challenges?
“The International Council on Systems Engineering often talks about a single source of truth,” Kontic explained. “Zuken’s Genesys systems engineering tool captures all necessary information in one single model definition, so we have a consistent description of that system. The model allows you to go back to understand what the requirements are, what the architecture is, the behaviour, and if we need to adapt this over the product’s life cycle, we can modify the model. This is called flexible modelling.”
Essentially, Genesys ensures the continuous consistency of product model information across its entire life cycle, guaranteeing model compliance with checks and visual guidance. This enables flexible modelling across domains and system levels and allows for intuitive interaction via its user-friendly interface and language. Traceability, role management and reporting capabilities offer enhanced collaboration, and the system can be seamlessly integrated with Zuken’s portfolio, Excel connector and API.
“So just to give you a little bit more of a diagrammatic approach to this, if we look at an electronic system, we’ve got our water supply, the power supply, renewables, control systems and auxiliary,” Kontic explained. “The first thing we’ll want to capture is the requirements for our electrolysis system, how it’s going to work, what is the output, and so on. These requirements will be as they are in our products. Then, you refine them further to UV so you have a specific detail requirement. Now a requirement is linked to the behaviour of the system, a requirement can also say there is a requirement for this component in the system. Some customers need an additional functionality or component, so you can describe that in the system. And you can see in this instance the matrix is understanding traceability, understanding how requirements will be verified, how requirements testify components, etc. Design review processes are very well supported in model-based systems engineering, so you can log your risks and concerns and document them. So again, collaborating with lots of different engineers in a much bigger group is possible, and then you have your verification and validation. So that is all part of the system; at the unit test level, at the subsystem test, at the system level, and then finally, in the customer acceptance test. All of this can be documented within that single model.”
With this and other model-based system engineering tools, Zuken says customers can start to practice capturing this information and communicate it to stakeholders effectively, in order to further accelerate not only the adoption of hydrogen within the transportation sector, but the pace of innovation within hydrogen technologies, systems and production.
