Description

The highly increasing energy demand and reduction of available fossil energy sources have made it important to develop a new technique for energy storage, hydrogen being a good alternative for the future. That is the reason why within this project, the storage of hydrogen as an adsorbed element in metal hydride bottles has been studied, more specifically hydrogen desorption and discharge.
To this end, a two-dimensional axisymmetric model is developed to study the hydrogen desorption reaction and resultant mass and heat transport phenomena inside a metal hydride canister. Moreover, the work has also been focused on experimental tests performed on an in-house fabricated setup using different heating scenarios.
It is important to mention that the studied system has a lot of unknowns, as the metal inside the bottle, as well as the internal canister structure and morphology are not known. That is the reason why an extensive study on the effects of the metal properties on desorption performance is carried out through non-destructive testing (NDT). The numerical model results are explained in detail and compared with experimental data as well, obtaining a good agreement.
Finally, the results obtained can not only be used to select metal hydride materials but also to evaluate the degradation of the canisters in terms of total hydrogen storage capacity.

UPC Commons link

The work is under the scope of the following projects:

• MICAPEM: Parameter estimation, diagnosis and control for the improvement of efficiency and durability of PEM fuel cells (web)