26 June 2019 TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
FROM LEFT: NIKOLA; RYAN GEHM
generate the hydrogen on-site at scale.
The company is working with Norway-based Nel Hydrogen to de-
velop a standard 70-MPa high-flow fueling station that can produce 8
tons of hydrogen per day and fill an 80-kg tank in 10-15 minutes. Such a
site could support about 150 heavy-duty trucks and 200 cars per day.
Stations will be scalable up to 32 tons of hydrogen per day for
truck depots.
Lease customers will have about a $0.90-per-mile rate that in-
cludes truck payments, maintenance and fuel cost. Public users will
pay less than $6 per kilogram.
“We have new equipment that we’re developing for heavy-duty—
about 300 grams per second—which is five or six times the flow rate of
light-duty,” said Jesse Schneider, Nikola’s executive vice president of
technology, hydrogen and fuel cells. “We are working with essentially all
of the standards organizations [including SAE and ISO]
and directly with industry partners in a memorandum of
understanding (MOU) to enable safe and fast fueling.”
The goal is worldwide standardization for heavy-
duty so that one nozzle will fit all vehicles, and ve-
hicles can fill up at any station in less than 15 minutes.
“We want to learn from the electric-vehicle world and
have one standard,” he said. “This is a big deal.”
(Read more on Schneider, who during his time at
BMW became the SAE Taskforce Chair for the J2601
hydrogen refueling standard for the light- and medi-
um-duty markets, at www.sae.org/news/2018/05/
jesse-schneider-nikola-motors.)
A station will require about 17.6 megawatts to oper-
ate. Renewable sources such as solar panels and wind
turbines will account for at least 30-40% of that, ac-
cording to Schneider, which will help to reduce the cost
New R&D lab: Engineers wanted needed
Nikola Motor is hiring, in a big way.
The company is currently building
a new fuel cell R&D facility in
Arizona, where it can develop,
validate and test its entire heavy-
duty fuel cell system and vehicle,
including membrane electrode
assemblies, stampings, stacks, and
power electronics. A lot of engi-
neering talent is required.
“Ultimately, we need over 300
engineers,” said CEO Trevor Milton,
noting that 130 people currently
work at its Phoenix headquarters.
“We’re going to bring all the testing
under one roof. This is important
because we need to be able to
build something all in-house with-
out having to send [parts and sys-
tems] all over the world for testing.”
Thirty chambers that include
fuel cell and battery test stands
are being built, said Jesse
Schneider, head of technology.
“It’s going to have everything to
be able to test single cell, short
stack, full stack, all the way up to
a full system in a climatized
chamber. That means we can
simulate going to the Arctic Circle
in winter and to Death Valley in
the summertime, and actually do
that under load with a full dyna-
mometer,” he explained.
Milton stressed that he’s look-
ing for engineers who are not
bound by convention. “The prob-
lem with [a lot of] existing truck-
ing engineers is they’re in an
environment where they’re
taught to do a certain thing a
certain way, to make it incremen-
tally better,” he said. “I don’t
want to make it incrementally
better; I want to make it a com-
plete transformation from the
beginning to the end.”
AVL Test Systems is provid-
ing testing equipment to Nikola
for the first phase of its develop-
ment laboratory. AVL’s advanced
testing hardware—including a
heavy-duty chassis dynamom-
eter, fuel cell system testbed, fuel
cell durability testbeds, and a
high-voltage battery test con-
tainer—will be run with its lab
management software suite.
The company will apply tech-
nology and knowledge gained in
fuel cell development for the
light-duty industry. AVL and
HyCentA (Hydrogen Center
Austria, TU Graz) commissioned
what it calls Europe’s “most
modern” fuel cell system integra-
tion testbed for a range of appli-
cations under real load condi-
tions and in dynamic operation.
“In this new lab, Nikola will
be able to apply these same
proven methodologies and tools
to the heavy-duty market,” said
Kyle Kimel, president of AVL
Test Systems.
Ryan Gehm
HYDROGEN
BOOM!
Nikola Two’s digital cockpit includes a 21-inch 4K display and a 12-inch cluster in
front of the driver, with very few buttons.
The never-before-seen Nikola Tre for the European market
features a narrower cab design than the Two.