Optimization of hydrogen sensor placement for hydrogen leakage monitoring in the fuel cell truck

Hydrogen safety is one of the most important issues for fuel cell vehicles due to the leakage and wide flammability of hydrogen. It is essential to detect the hydrogen leak to support hydrogen safety. The hydrogen sensors are applied to detect a hydrogen leak. However, the traditional hydrogen sensor placement approaches are rule-of-thumb methods. The performance of hydrogen detection system is greatly affected by the number and placement of sensors. In this paper, the sensor placement is optimized using mixed-integer linear programming formulation. Two optimization objectives are investigated: maximization of scenarios coverage and minimization of scenario detection time. The hydrogen leakage scenarios database is established considering three leakage parameters: release rate, release position and release direction. The hydrogen concentration data are provided from experiment by placing twelve hydrogen sensors on the ceiling of hydrogen storage cabin of fuel cell truck and converted into scenarios coverage and scenario detection time. The results show that the number of hydrogen sensors can be greatly reduced with maximum scenarios coverage and minimum scenario detection time by sensor placement optimization.