A consortium of three companies is building a mobile hydrogen refuelling station and retrofitting three warehouse forklifts with air-cooled fuel cells to run a week-long trial in a UK warehouse. This matters because most warehouse forklifts today run on lead-acid batteries that take hours to recharge, creating downtime and requiring large battery-changing infrastructure. Hydrogen fuel cells can refuel in minutes and run a full shift, but the technology has not been proven in a real UK warehouse environment with the specific safety and space constraints of indoor operation. If the trial succeeds, the partners aim to show that existing forklift fleets can be converted to hydrogen with minimal vehicle modification—the fuel cell system fits into the standard battery box. This could allow rapid, low-cost deployment across warehouses, reducing reliance on grid electricity for charging and cutting carbon emissions from materials handling. The project also designs the fuel cell system to be transferable to other markets, so the same core technology could power other types of industrial vehicles.
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Intelligent Energy, Air Products and Lohmann Tapes UK are working together to enable the demonstration of a Materials Handling Equipment (MHE) fleet in a warehouse environment in the UK. Intelligent Energy fuel cell technology is to be developed to meet the MHE requirements set out by Jungheinrich and EU legislation with further systems work being undertaken to ensure that design work for this application can also be transferred to other markets. Air Products are to use the experience gained developing indoor refuellers for the US market to design, build and install a mobile H2 refueller at a warehouse location in the UK. Air products will be in charge of the safety case for the refuel and H2 storage. Lohmann Tapes UK is an existing Fuel Cell Component supplier and will provide components enabling the cost down and mass manufacture of fuel cell in order to aid market exploitation. Although not directly involved in the programme, Jungheinrich are supporting the commercial case for the conversion of their MHE vehicles to use fuel cells and providing Factory Acceptance Test facilities along with access to their customers to enable the customer trials. The customer trials are to be conducted over a minimum of a one week period with three Jungheinrich ECE 225 vehicles. However the fuel cell system is designed to fit into the standard size battery box with minimal adaptation needed to the vehicle for installation, enabling potential conversion of existing fleets for early commercial deployment.
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