ACTC’s Post

Transcript

So LinkedIn community and composites experts out there. This is now further coverage of the JEC World 2024. And I am here together with ACTC, a group member of HRC from China. Maybe you remember last year I've shown you guys with Erich Fries, the managing director of Germany, the XPeng Drone here. Today we have other stuff to show you. And with me now is Viktor Reimer. Maybe you've seen Viktor in our last LinkedIn live, where we were talking about hydrogen, and today is also about hydrogen. So, Viktor, my first question to you is, what's your role at ACTC? My role is to lead a team of engineers to develop a hydrogen pressure vessel that you can see here. The hydrogen pressure vessel, which we use to store hydrogen. The pressure tank we develop reaches more than 700 bars of working pressure and is designed with a high safety factor of around 2.35. My task is to set up a team in China, in Changshu, where ACTC is based to develop the tank. So there, we have all the machinery there already installed. And I did this when I arrived in China in 2020, where I started with one person, that's me. And now we are more than eight people working on the project for pressurized storage; for the pressure vessel to store hydrogen. -So, Viktor, thank you for introducing yourself and your role at ACTC. Now let's move to the HRC group. Tell us about the HRC group in general and ACTC and Engenuity, which I've met already in Burgess Hill (UK) last year. -Well, HRC is an international parts provider, which includes different kind of technologies to make composite parts. And it mainly consists of three areas: Engenuity is the development of the composite analytical development like FEA, CAE and so on. It also includes ACTC, my part, where we make protoypes. So we produce there prototypes for automotive industry. Especially the pressure vessels, which is my personal topic. And the third one is HRC mass manufacturing. The area where we produce parts for the composite industry. Mainly transportation, but also like aviation and cars. Usually it's really strong cars. And of course also some others like transportation for trains and other topics, wind power and construction. -Viktor, now tell us please, about the hydrogen tank. How is that developed within the HRC group? -HRC group we develop the pressure vessel with all three entities of HRC. HRC mass Manufacturing, ACTC as part of HRC and Engenuity, of course. At Engenuity we make all the analytical tasks like finite element analysis and at ACTC we prototype. As you see in the background, this is one of the first prototypes we made at ACTC in Changshu, China. And HRC mass manufacturing support us on topics for later industrialization of the product. So, Viktor, what is your market focus on hydrogen storage tanks? Our market focus is mainly for strong vehicles, heavy duty vehicles. Like for transportation, for truck and trains and hydrogen transportation in special containers. For those we need quite big tanks with more than 150 or 250l. In the background you see a smaller pressure vessel, which is designed for demonstration. We can bring it here easily, but actually we focus on much higher volumes for more than 250l. We also focus on 350 bar and 700 bars. This gives us very good capacity of the pressure vessel to store the hydrogen in a mobile application. So, Viktor, thanks for the explanations. Now, what do we have here on the booth? Can you explain us about the hydrogen tanks? What you see here is our demonstrator to show how we develop products to store hydrogen in a hydrogen pressure vessel. This component is quite complex as this is made not just from carbon fiber. It's also made from metal parts, plastic parts and all the system integration, as you see here. Our other topics that we also implement into the hydrogen storage is sustainability. How to make CO2 footprint of a product lower? How to reduce it? So we look first of all on replacing the materials by materials which use just lower CO2 footprint. Like the plastic liner can be replaced by other materials to be more sustainable. Or the resin, which covers the actual carbon fiber. The resin that we can get from our partners to reduce the CO2 footprint. Currently we have a running project on reduction of the CO2 footprint of the pressure vessel.