EDUCATIONAL LABS ON HYDROGEN CHAIN: THE HYDROGEN SCHOOL PROJECT

The hydrogen society could become a reality, so training the scientific and technical staff that will deal with the hydrogen field, in particular with fuel cells, is a point of great importance. The Hydrogen School project was realised by HySyLab, the hydrogen R&D laboratory of Environment Park (a scientific and technological park for environment, in Turin), thanks to the financial support of Piedmont Region. It consisted in design, development and realisation of 9 educational labs, HYSYONE^®, based on fuel cell technology, installed in 8 technical secondary schools (one for each Piedmont district). Another lab was installed on a van as a mobile lab, available for demonstration activity.
HYSYONE^® is an energy generation system representative of the hydrogen chain from the production (600 Nml/min H₂ electrolyser) and hydrogen storage (100 Nl @ 5 bar tank) to its final utilisation in a PEMFC stack (200W). Indeed, it allows to control and acquire all the most important parameters of the fuel cell and the gas management system (flow, temperatures, pressures). Therefore this apparatus is not only a simple educational lab, but thanks to its simple and user friendly software of management, it can be considered a small fuel cell stack test station with remote control and data acquisition system.
Potentially the Hydrogen School project can reach up to 6500 students. It consisted also in a training course for teachers before the delivery of the educational labs. All the systems are connected in remote way, in order to facilitate the experience exchange and collecting data. As far as our knowledge is concerned this represents a unique experience in EU community.