Design of portable hydrogen tank using adsorption material as storage media: An alternative to Type IV compressed tank

With recent breakthroughs in hydrogen storage in porous materials, this paper presents design concept of portable hydrogen tank that use material-based storage technique at low pressure and cryogenic temperature. The tank is portable to use in applications such as Fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) due to the effective three-layer insulation feature which is able to maintain cryogenic temperature for at least 12.5 days without need of external cooling loop. The portable tank can be employed with a variety of porous absorbents with storage conditions of 77 K and < 100 bars which is significantly less than the internal pressure of 700 bars in the commercial Type IV tank, providing safer and less prone to explosion risk. Apart from the safety benefit in comparison with the commercial Type IV tank, our portable tank features 31% reduction in system weight, 11% higher in system gravimetric capacity, and 42% reduction in material cost. As a result, the portable tank is highly potential to be considered as an alternative to current compressed technology. In addition, we predict the future scenario of porous material performance by extrapolating available experiment data, then evaluate the system capacity of the portable tank, consequently, showing an amazing value which could surpass by far the ultimate target of DOE.