Hydrogen Fuel Cells: Driving the Future

Inspiration

We were given some inspiration from a sponsor presentation or pitch that was given on the first day. What was mentioned was some hazards with the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. We then saw this sponsor was looking for something that would advance hydrogen fuel cell safety and assurance that say an automobile would not be in harm's way. Considering that there was some concern about doing more of a gamifying driving project as in the original idea, we found what we wanted to do.

What it does

This code essentially takes a car that is already in the works, there is going to have there be some checks to see if there is any part of the battery that was a high charge/high voltage concern, a low charge/low voltage concern, and even doing the same for fuel pressure and fuel consumption. This would allow us to make sure that we would be able to detect a hydrogen leak as it would happen, while also monitoring and then sending out a call to safely exit the process in general.

How we built it

What we did was we used a Java application to call the Ford API to then keep track of one car throughout the process, updating fuel and battery life concurrently to check those sort of systems in the vehicle. This would the do some prompting to have some inform of error message or something else to get to the user any help in car diagnosis or convey the message there is a fault implicating driving.

Challenges we ran into

As we took on the Bosch challenge to design safer fuel cell vehicles, we were particular challenged by understanding how fuel cell vehicles were designed, what data would be pertinent or possible to measure on the vehicles, and making assumptions about what actuators were present which we could control to automate safety measures.

Finding a common programming language for our team was impossible, so our team chose Java as most of the team members had experience using Java. We chose Java particularly as it was a language that would interface with Ford's API. We chose an IDE that was beginner friendly for the team members who had not used Java; however, we ran into issues with extracting JSON fields from the Ford API and needed to program a workaround for receiving the data we needed to run our test cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Two programmers who never had done Java before ended up doing well learning the basics of Java and all that comes along with learning the language in an environment without the help of something like stack overflow. We also called an API from Java for the very first time as well.

What we learned

From this project we learned how to call API's within a program, in this case we utilized the provided Ford API in order to collect information about the current state of our simulated vehicle that we created. On top of this we also either learned Java or reaffirmed our knowledge of the program as there was a mix of experience levels in coding. Finally we gained experiences in working in a team and quickly figuring out a problem and coming up with solutions.

What's next for Hydrogen Fuel Cells: Driving the Future

Hydrogen Fuel Cells are a very promising technology in development. It is showing to be a potential solution to a new energy resource that is truly sustainable and virtually renewable. What is in store for Hydrogen Fuel Cells is overcoming the challenges of safety that face this technology.