Professor Jennifer Wen was recently invited as an expert to the US Department of Energy (DoE). The DoE conducted their 2014 Annual Merit Review and Peer Evaluation Meeting (AMR) for the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program and the Vehicle Technologies Office on 16-20 June 2014, in Washington D.C. Her role was to provide comments on projects conducted in 2013-2014.

The DoE is one of the major funders for energy research in the US. During the peak time between 2005 and 2010, it had an annual budget between $220M to $267M in the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program.

For 2013-2014, DoE provided around $123M, to support the advancement of technologies to enable the widespread commercialisation of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies, covering a broad range from hydrogen production, delivery, storage to conversion/fuel cells, applications/technology validation, safety, codes and standards. The ranges of activities supported include basic research as well as system analysis and system integration. For the AMR, the evaluators were invited to participate in the meetings, listen to the presentations given by the principal investigators, raise questions and hold informal discussions with the principal investigators as well as other participants.

All evaluators sat in specially allocated sections in the meeting room but the exact allocations of the projects to individual reviewers were kept confidential. The evaluators were asked to provide comments and scores for five categories including approach to perform the work, accomplishment and progress toward overall DoE goals, collaboration and coordination with other institutions, relevance/potential impact and proposed future work.

Professor Wen’s particular involvement was to asses projects funded in the area of ‘safety, codes and standards’. Her research group has been working in this subject area since 2005, initially through a €1M mono-site Initial Training Network funded by the European Commission. For this research her group teamed up with BP and the Health and Safety Laboratory, an agency of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), to provide doctoral training to 10 early stage researchers.

Currently Professor Wen is working together with University of Ulster and University of Bath on a joint EPSRC project to deliver ‘Integrated safety strategies for onboard hydrogen storage systems’. The project is co-ordinated by Dr Dmitriy Makarov from the University of Ulster and has a total value of £970,514. Warwick is allocated £342,522 to lead partners’ efforts in hazards identification, associated risk assessment and identification of typical car fire scenarios and conduct finite element analysis of tank failure by incorporating the material properties and degradation mechanisms provided by the academic and industrial partners. The overall aim of Warwick’s effort is to develop and validate a predictive tool for hydrogen cylinder fire resistance and formulate recommendations on strategies to improve tank safety.

Related to this, Professor Wen has also secured separate funding from the European Commission for transnational access to hydrogen research facility at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. These tests are aimed to address the key unresolved technological safety issues for hydrogen-powered vehicles, i.e. the increase of fire resistance rating of onboard high pressure hydrogen storage. With state-of-the-art type 4 hydrogen cylinders to be provided by the industrial partner Hexagon Composites ASA, the tests will be designed to demonstrate experimentally the potential of substantial increase of fire resistance rating using innovative thermal protection solutions and obtain data for validation of numerical models and simulations.

Professor Wen currently sits on the Science Board of the EPSRC SUPERGEN Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Hub and she is also on the Scientific Committee of the series of international conferences on hydrogen safety.