Thermal response of composite hydrogen tank and TPRD during fast fuelling
“Abstract
High-pressure composite tanks are widely used for gaseous hydrogen storage. A safety concern and knowledge gap is the potential overheating of components, including TPRD, during fast fuelling. This study presents a numerical investigation of the thermal response of a 12-litre tank with L/D = 9 under various fuelling conditions, e.g. tank orientation, and a fuelling failure scenario with excessive mass flow rate. The simulation demonstrated that, for a 3-min fuelling duration, the temperature non-uniformity (maximum–bulk difference) in horizontally oriented hydrogen tanks exceeds 29 °C. Vertical top-down fuelling reduces gradients by about 40 %, whereas bottom-up fuelling increases temperature non-uniformity and must be avoided. An extreme fuelling failure scenario with a mass flow rate of 50 g/s shows that hydrogen temperatures can exceed 300 °C. However, TPRD activation remains unlikely due to slow heat transfer to the sensing element. Monitoring only the average temperature is misleading as local temperature may exceed 85 °C and affect liner integrity.”
Hanguang Xie, Sergii Kashkarov, Dmitriy Makarov, Vladimir Molkov, Thermal response of composite hydrogen tank and TPRD during fast fuelling, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 173, 2025, 151376
The full report is accessible via: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2025.151376
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