Since 2022, hydrogen energy has become the investment limelight. At the beginning of 2021, hydrogen energy was officially included in the "14th Five-Year Plan". Central and local governments at all levels began to frequently introduce hydrogen energy-related policies, and demonstration city clusters began to enter the implementation stage.
Compared with lithium batteries, which are in full swing, hydrogen fuel cells are still in the early stages of development and have a smaller market share. As of 2021, China has 8,922 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, accounting for 18% of the world's major countries. The hydrogen energy-related plan issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and others proposes that by 2025, my country will have about 50,000 fuel cell vehicles.
Hydrogen Technology has completed a total of 3 rounds of financing, the latest of which was an A+ round of financing of more than 250 million yuan in October 2021. Investors include Shenergy Group, Lingang Group, and Lingang Management Committee Association, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jingneng Group, IDG Capital, Free Trade Zone Fund, etc.
In the fuel cell industry chain, the stack is at the core link in the middle reaches, which can be called the heart of the fuel cell engine system. The fuel cell stack produced by Hydrogen Technology has the characteristics of high power, high power density and high reliability.
The core team of Hydrogen Technology has many years of development, design and trial production capabilities for automotive grade fuel cell stacks and core components. The company’s technology originated from the School of Mechanical and Power Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is a joint venture between Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A typical representative of Lingang Group’s transformation of scientific and technological achievements.
General Manager Yi Peiyun is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Power Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a doctoral supervisor, and a Youth Yangtze River Scholar of the Ministry of Education. He has been engaged in hydrogen fuel cell research and development since 2005. The team has completed major international cooperation projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National 863 Program projects, National Key R&D Program projects, etc., and applied for more than 200 intellectual property rights. Currently, the company has more than 300 employees, 21 of whom are PhDs and 11 have returned from overseas.
This is a startup company hatched from the laboratory of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2017, the founding team officially established Hydrogen Technology and began independent commercial operations.
At present, Hydrogen Technology has developed four fuel cell stack products of 80kW, 100kW, 120kW and 150kW. The latest generation of 230kW products has a volume power density of 6.2kW/L and a rated power conversion rate of 6.2kW/L. All are greater than 50%. Its products adopt the flexible intelligent manufacturing production line independently developed by Hydrogen Technology, combined with a high-precision visual inspection system, and have the characteristics of high precision, high voltage resistance and high reliability.
Dr. Bai Yunfei, COO of Hydrogen Morning Technology, told 36Kr: “Hydrogen Morning Technology’s products cover many different models, and the most shipped ones are 120 kW and 150 kW high-power stacks.”
In addition, Dr. Bai Yunfei revealed that Hydrogen Technology will accelerate the research and development process of high-power stacks in 2022 and complete a breakthrough from 230kW to 300kW in a single stack.
Hydrogen Morning Technology’s battery stacks have been widely used in commercial vehicles, buses, heavy-duty trucks and other application scenarios. At the same time, Hydrogen Morning Technology has also explored application scenarios such as drones, ships and aircraft backup power supplies.
While Hydrogen Technology provides customers with fuel cell stack products, it will also provide overall solutions or membrane electrodes and other component products according to user needs. In addition to stack products, the company has also simultaneously developed fixed power station and electrolyzed water businesses.
The hydrogen fuel cell stack is an electrochemical power generation device that reacts with oxygen through a catalyst to convert hydrogen into electric current (and heat). Its only product is water; and the calorific value of hydrogen is extremely high. High, up to 143MJ/kg. The heat generated by 1kg hydrogen combustion can be equivalent to 3kg of gasoline, and can also reach about 120 times that of ternary lithium batteries. From the perspective of environmental protection and energy density, it is an excellent green energy.
Hydrogen Morning Technology The technology used in the stack is the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell. There are also companies at home and abroad trying the solid fuel cell route and the methanol fuel cell route. Dr. Bai Yunfei told 36Kr that PEM is currently the most mature route for commercialization.
Dr. Bai Yunfei: “The research and development threshold of fuel cells itself is relatively high, and there are difficulties in multi-disciplinary coupling research and development.
First of all, the stack, assembly, and production processes are all designed with high mechanical requirements. Currently, the products are mainly for automobiles, and fuel cells have requirements related to mechanical durability and environmental durability such as earthquake resistance, waterproofing, and dustproofing; then, for bipolar The manufacturing precision of components such as plates and membrane electrodes is extremely high. The depth deviation of the flow channel of the plate is less than 10 microns. After the stack assembly is completed, the maximum deviation of the single cell assembly is less than 0.2 mm. Then in terms of performance consistency, hydrogen and air The flow channel involves fluid mechanics, which requires achieving a flow deviation of less than 5% in hundreds of battery cells; the process in which hydrogen is first decomposed on the anode side, and then passes through the proton exchange membrane to the cathode side to combine with oxygen to generate water, involves electrochemistry, It is necessary to achieve high performance, long durability and low cost; while the fuel cell generates electrical energy, part of the energy will be converted into heat energy, which also involves heat dissipation issues in engineering thermodynamics. Problems in any of the above aspects will affect the output performance, safety and reliability of hydrogen fuel cell operation. ”
Hydrogen fuel cell stacks have different technical routes, and graphite plate and metal plate routes exist. For automotive fuel cell scenarios, the requirements for product volume are higher, and metal plates It is thinner than the graphite plate, so the metal plate stack can achieve greater volume power density and has greater advantages. Dr. Bai Yunfei said that Hydrogen Technology started researching metal plate materials in 2005, which is the earliest research in China. The team of metal plate battery stacks.
Hydrogen Technology’s fuel cell stacks adopt forward research and development design, completely independent design and production, and master the core know-how of membrane electrodes, catalysts, plates and other components. How can control the performance, precision and reliability of stack products to the greatest extent. From a safety perspective, Hydrogen Technology has core patents and technologies in multiple dimensions such as insulation design, overall stack design, and stack reaction rate. , to ensure the safety of hydrogen fuel cells.
Compared with lithium batteries, the hydrogen fuel cell industry still has many problems that need to be solved: imperfect infrastructure; high product prices; stack life needs to be improved; Fuel cell technology also needs to iterate and develop towards higher power products.
Dr. Bai Yunfei told 36Kr that the current unit price of hydrogen fuel cell systems on the market is about 5,000 yuan per kilowatt, although it is lower than before. The unit price of 10,000 yuan per kilowatt has dropped significantly, but is still at a high level. We hope to reduce it by more than 10% per year in the future, and hope to reach the level of 1,000 yuan per kilowatt in 2025.
To achieve the industry phased strategic goal of “making fuel cell stacks comparable in size, life and price to traditional engines”, Hydrogen Morning Technology will continue to increase technology investment and research and development in the future, and research and development will have better performance and higher volumetric power density. High-quality stack products; while reducing costs through industrial extension, domestic substitution, large-scale production, etc.
In May 2022, Hydrogen Technology announced that it would acquire 100% of the equity of Qingdong Technology in the form of a share exchange. Qingdong Technology is one of the few domestic manufacturers of core key materials that independently develops, designs, and produces catalysts and installs them on membrane electrodes in batches.
Dr. Bai Yunfei said that Qingdong Technology’s products are. This has changed the existing gap in the production of domestic high-performance membrane electrodes and the dilemma that domestic automotive membrane electrodes are mainly imported. In the future, Hydrogen Technology and Qingdong Technology will jointly establish an integrated collaborative development system from catalysts, membrane electrodes to stacks. , improve the efficiency of stack research and development, and also reduce the cost of stack technology and design down to the material level.
When asked when the peak of the hydrogen energy industry will arrive, Dr. Bai Yunfei said that when hydrogen energy vehicles will arrive. When the annual output reaches 50,000-100,000, the hydrogen energy industry will usher in a new peak stage of development.