Development of fuel cells and application in electric vehicles in China

The state of the art of fuel cells in China is overviewed in this paper. Although, there are kinds of fuel cells, which include alkaline fuel cell, phosphoric acid fuel cell, solid oxide fuel cell and proton exchange membrane fuel cell, to choose as the power source of electric vehicles, the research and development of fuel cell engine in China focused on the proton exchange membrane fuel cell in recent years. Widely application of proton exchange membrane fuel cell in automobiles will make a contribution to savings on fuel and reduction in the atmospheric pollution. By now, there are a series of issues to be solved in application of the fuel cell to electric vehicles. Those issues include not only production, storage and distribution of the fuel, but also miniaturization of fuel cell engine, redesign of the entire vehicle with fuel cell system, cost reduction and so on. The preliminary analysis of those issues is performed in this paper.