CUSTOMER SERVICE
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SAFRA has developed a service enabling it to offer maintenance services for its customers’ hydrogen fleets.
Like any other urban mobility vehicle, the full hydrogen bus requires both preventive and corrective maintenance. The vehicle’s chassis, brakes, compressed air and electrical systems, doors and many other components are identical in every respect to what is known in the industry and maintained in conventional workshops by public transport operators. However, certain hydrogen-specific components, such as the fuel cell or battery, require specialist maintenance to ensure not only the vehicle’s condition but also its safety.
The vast majority of hydrogen vehicle checks and maintenance are carried out directly by transport operators. SAFRA provides all its workshop staff with the usual training in vehicle discovery and maintenance, enabling them to handle minor maintenance afterwards.
For specific maintenance work, SAFRA works on :
Whatever their technology, they require no special maintenance. All that’s required is occasional monitoring of their state of health (the famous SOH1 ), to check that they are ageing evenly across the cells. In a hydrogen-powered vehicle, ageing is calendar-based and has little to do with depth of discharge (the DOD2 ), since the cells are only used to a very limited extent, acting only as an energy buffer reservoir to restore additional kW when there is a high demand for power, and also to recover energy generated by the electric motor during braking and deceleration.
no special maintenance, but ageing must be checked, as is done on CNG vehicles with the CID check3.
These are scheduled or hourly checks, depending on vehicle use. The main aim is to visually check the condition of the pipes, and validate the correct operation of the safety sensors (pressure, leakage, temperature), coolant and ionizing cartridge levels, and filter elements. These operations can be carried out by the operator after training, or by the fuel cell supplier during the warranty period, for example.
Full maintenance or tailor-made contracts can be drawn up, giving the operator full financial control over maintenance costs over the long term, as is often the case when launching a new energy sector.