Advancing hydrogen and fuel cell technologies
Hydrogen energy and the advent of fuel cells represent promising non-polluting or less-polluting energy solutions for the future. A formidable EU initiative known as the Joint Undertaking for Fuel Cells and Hydrogen (FCH-JU) aims to accelerate the market introduction of relevant new technologies. However, this requires a dependable way to monitor and assess the value of emerging technologies. Against this backdrop, the EU-funded project 'Technology monitoring and assessment' (TEMONAS) aimed to facilitate the elaboration of technology roadmaps and evaluate new technology readiness level. The project developed a software tool for monitoring emerging technologies effectively and ranking their proximity to commercialisation. One important feature of the TEMONAS tool is its ability to define a variety of objects such as EU-funded programmes and calls for projects, as well as targets, sources and research organisations. It lists research objects ranging from new materials for use in fuel cells to complete vehicle systems. This enables effective comparisons between technologies. Examples include benchmarking the performance of different car systems and assessing materials used in building vehicle or fuel cell components. Another key feature is dubbed expert judgement mapping, enabling the input of experts using scales to assess emerging technologies and proximity to commercialisation. The system also features a powerful graphic engine to help expert users create advanced graphic data, in addition to facilitating the importation of data and results into popular software packages. The project team identified strong interest from both industry players and funding agencies. It disseminated its progress on building the solution to innovation and technology programme managers from the hydrogen community, as well as to management professionals. In addition to providing the FCH-JU with a solution, the team furthered exploitation and marketed it to research and development consortia, industrial organisations and research agencies. The EU will therefore soon have a viable tool to help accelerate the adoption of valuable technologies in this exciting domain.
Keywords
Fuel cell, hydrogen, emerging technologies, clean transport, vehicle, expert judgement mapping, technology readiness
