Life-cycle Based Optimization Of Hydrogen Refueling Station Siting And Sizing

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicle(HFCV)is known as the ultimate green car because of its zero-emission advantages.Currently,HFCV has encountered some difficulties in the promotion while its performance has met practical requirements.There are mainly two reasons for this: the lack of hydrogen refueling infrastructure and the higher price of hydrogen than that of fuel oil with equal energy.The supply of hydrogen in this paper could be regarded as two stages: hydrogen source–hydrogen station and hydrogen station–consumer.The hydrogen refueling station location would have effect on several economic factors in these two stages,such as station construction investment and operating expense,hydrogen life cycle cost and user's cost of driving to a refueling station.As used herein,the hydrogen life cycle cost refers to the sum of the hydrogen production,storage,transportation,ultilization costs,and environmental costs during hydrogen production.In order to reduce HFCV users' consumption of hydrogen and improve the situation of hydrogen refueling infrastructure construction,some models based on optimal cost are proposed in this paper.The major work in this paper is as follows.Firstly,the effect of hydrogen station position on hydrogen life cycle cost which arises in the supply stage of hydrogen from source to station is analyzed.A hydrogen refueling station siting model based on optimal hydrogen life cycle cost is proposed.This model reduces hydrogen life cycle cost by optimizing stations' location and selecting the most appropriate sources,ways of storage and transportation.This model assumes that each of the stations gets hydrogen supply only from a single source,simplifying the hydrogen source selection process.Then the hypothesis of the above model is eliminated,making the model more realistic.In reality,hydrogen can be supplied by multiple hydrogen sources to each hydrogen station.Therefore,on the basis of the above model,multi-source hydrogen supply program is added to optimize hydrogen weight bought from different hydrogen sources by each station.In that optimization process,the ways of storage and transportation would be determined.Besides,rebuilding an existing gas station into a gasoline-hydrogen refueling one is introduced as an alternative option of establishing the site.Based on the improvements above,the total cost including hydrogen refueling station construction and operation costs and hydrogen life cycle costs gets optimized in the resulting hydrogen station siting model.Finally,the refueling cost is introduced to the optimization.The refueling cost defined herein as the cost of hydrogen consumed by driving to a hydrogen refueling station,arises in hydrogen's supply stage from hydrogen station to consumer.Consumer's cost of using hydrogen is defined herein as the sum of refueling cost and purchase cost.The purchase cost refers to the cost of purchasing hydrogen by consumers,being directly proportional to the life cycle cost of hydrogen.A hydrogen station siting model with a Huff model for hydrogen station sizing is proposed,with the objective of consumer's optimal cost of using hydrogen.The Huff model is introduced to estimate the probability that each hydrogen station is selected by demand points,thus the capacity of each station could be determined.After each model was proposed,an example of applying the model for hydrogen station siting was established and solved by the particle swarm optimization algorithm.