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Even though air compressors for traditional vehicles and fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) share many similarities, a fuel cell vehicle cannot directly employ the effective and mass-produced traditional vehicles' air compressors. This is because the fuel cell vehicles have special requirements, such as oil free, low flow rate with high pressure ratio, high efficiency, and low weight and volume. In order to find suitable air compressors to match the fuel cell system (FCS)'s requirements, different air compressors' performance and physical characteristics are compared. These air compressors include screw compressor with expander, roots compressor with expander, turbocompressor, and scroll compressor with expander. The comparison and analysis is both theoretical and practical. Results show that the turbocompressor and the roots compressor/expander have higher performance compared to the others in the aspects of input power, system efficiency, weight, and volume.

In vehicle application, most of time gasoline engines are part load operated, especially in city traffic, part load operation covers most common operation situations, however part load performances deteriorate due to pumping losses and low thermal efficiency. Many different technologies have been applied to improve part load performances. One of them is to adopt over-expanded (Atkinson/Miller) cycle, which uses late/early intake valve closing (LIVC/EIVC) to reduce pumping losses in part load operation. But over-expanded cycle has an intrinsic drawback in that combustion performance deteriorates due to the decline in the effective compression ratio (CR). Combining with high geometry CR may be an ideal solution, however there is a trade-off between maintaining a high CR for good part load fuel consumption and maintaining optimal combustion phasing at higher load.