Metal hydride hydrogen compressors for energy storage systems: layout features and results of long-term tests

Abstract

This work summarises the results of development and long-term testing of two prototype models of industrial-scale metal-hydride thermal sorption hydrogen compressors, TSC1-3.5/150 (up to 11 Nm 3 h −1 ; water cooling/steam heating) and TSC2-3.5/150 (up to 15 Nm 3 h −1 ; heating and cooling by circulating oil). Both compressors have a two-stage layout utilising LaNi 5 for the stage 1 and La 0.5 Ce 0.5 Ni 5 for stage 2, thus providing hydrogen compression from 0.35 to 15 MPa at a cooling temperature of about 20°C and a heating temperature between 150°C and 160°C. The compressors were operating for one year each and exhibited a satisfactory performance. The results of this work can be used in various medium-to-large scale hydrogen compression applications, including renewable energy systems.

Thermally driven hydrogen compression using metal hydrides

“…However, if to consider the changes with time (A), it is seen that the productivity drop is less pronounced for compressor number 2 while if to take dependences on the number of the absorption‐desorption cycles (B), both ones become very close. Accordingly, it was recommended to set longer cycle times to slow down the drop of compressor productivity during the operation 55 …”

Metal hydride hydrogen storage and compression systems for energy storage technologies

“…However, for the properly designed compressor the deviations are not very high. For example, for the two-stage compressor TSC2-3.5/150 (T L ¼ 15 C, T H ¼ 150 C, 15 Nm 3 /h) developed by Russian company SKTBE under IPCP supervision, the cycle productivity of the first stage (LaNi 5 , P L ¼ 3.5 atm, P H~3 5 atm) was about 75 NL/kg, and for the second stage (La 0.5 Ce 0.5 Ni 5 , P L~3 5 atm, P H ¼ 150 atm) about 100 NL/kg, taking into account cycle time 38 min and three H 2 compression sections in the compressor [27].…”

“…under the authors' supervision has been presented in Ref. [27], as well as in a review [59] and references therein. Both systems use gas cylinder packs as main and MH hydrogen storage units as auxiliary hydrogen storage facilities.…”

“…The available heat can also be used to drive metal hydride hydrogen compressor which provides storage of H 2 as compressed gas. Thermally driven hydrogen compression utilising MH is particularly promising due to several other advantages including absence of moving parts, simplicity in design and operation, high purity of the delivered hydrogen [26,27].…”

Modelling of metal hydride hydrogen compressors from thermodynamics of hydrogen – Metal interactions viewpoint: Part I. Assessment of the performance of metal hydride materials

“…The data characterising three AB 2 -and six AB 5 -type intermetallic alloys, which were used in the development of industrial-scale MHHC's at the authors' institutions [14,16,20,24,25], are listed in Table 1. Table 1 also presents the most important experimentally measured hydrogen sorption properties of these materials including maximum hydrogen absorption capacity as related to the temperatures and hydrogen pressures, entropy and enthalpy changes during H 2 desorption calculated from the van't Hoff dependencies at the plateau midpoints, as well as the calculated hydrogen compression performances.…”