DEVELOPMENT OF SIMULATION TOOLS FOR THE DESIGN OF HYDROGEN RESERVOIRS

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Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, has great potential as an energy carrier and it has many environmental advantages. Hydrogen can be easily generated from renewable energy sources, for example, photovoltaic, wind or hydro, with electrolysers and it is a carbon free combustible. It is why hydrogen-fueled fuel cell and internal combustion engine vehicles are being developed as clean, efficient, advanced technologies for the automotive transportation of the future. The development of adequate on-board energy storage is a major economic and technological barrier to introducing hydrogen vehicles. For the storage of adequate amount of hydrogen on-board such vehicles, solid materials such as metal hydrides (MH), activated carbon (AC), metal oxide frameworks (MOF) and other media are being explored as one option of storing. Sorption of hydrogen in these materials is an exothermic process while desorption is endothermic. It therefore means that the development of efficient hydrogen reservoirs based on solid-gas interactions will require a thorough understanding of the heat and mass transfer processes in those storing materials in order to achieve, in the reservoirs, rates of filling and release of hydrogen as close as possible from the intrinsic kinetics of those materials. Moreover, the cost of construction of a reservoir of almost any size and capacity precludes building many reservoirs in order to find the optimal configuration of the storing beds and heat exchanging elements. Therefore, the only practical way of studying these kinds of hydrogen storing systems is through computer simulation. The proposed project intends to develop tools that would permit to estimate the performances of hydrogen storing systems. These tools will be designed in such a way that they will be easy to adapt to different kinds of reservoir geometry and versatile enough to take into account different reaction mechanisms between hydrogen and the solid storing materials. The goal of the project would to optimize the configurations of the different elements of the reservoir.