W.S.G. Isaac Newton

TotalEnergies Gas Mobility designs, builds, and maintains refueling stations for LNG, CNG, and hydrogen. I joined the team responsible for the Hydrogen Refueling Stations (HRS). A HRS in Breda was suffering from excessive electricity consumption. Three aspects of this problem were investigated: the circulation pump ran continuously, the refrigerant compressors switched on and off ±12 times per hour and the chiller of the high-pressure compressor ran continuously.

New controls were introduced for the components of the latter two problems. The running time of compressors was reduced by 65%, switching on just twice per hour on average. The result was consistent mass flows at the dispenser, stable behaviour inside the refrigerant storage buffers, and issues during refueling.

The running time of the chiller was reduced by 95%. The new control for the chiller is a reactive behaviour where the chiller only turns on during refueling, when the inlet or outlet temperature reaches 15°C or when the compressor has the request to fill up the buffers.

Besides working on the efficiency of the cooling system, I looked into the opportunities of a new programme called Siemens Xcelerator. Using Node-Red, a proof of concept dashboard was created for the Breda HRS. The dashboard displays interpreted real-time data. It enables colleagues to perform quick analysis on the well-being of the station. Also, it offers the user the opportunity to analyse individual refuelings, and analyse the sales during any desired period. The dashboard has multiple pages in which information regarding different parts of the system is analysed. These prove the opportunities the dashboards have for multiple departments. The coding of the dashboard can be applied to other HRS systems, and also to CNG and LNG with minor tweaks.