Design and Development of High Pressure Hydrogen Storage Tank Using Glass Fiber as the Stress Bearing Component

The spread of hydrogen energy usage has been majorly checked by issues concerning its storage. May it be stationary storage, locomotive storage, or vehicular storage. Most prominently used hydrogen storage methods such as compressed form, cryogenic form, and chemical methods hydrogen storage still lack behind in meeting the gravimetric density and volumetric density targets set by US Department of Energy. Prominently preferred multilayer composite design which utilizes carbon fiber as its stress bearing component is still under development and has its own merits and demerits such as high cost and thick cylinder walls. This study focuses to take an alternative approach toward the design aspect of these high pressure storage tanks along with the selection of new materials. It compares various properties such as material density and tensile strength of extensively used carbon fiber with proposed tank materials used for this study, i.e., S-glass fiber as well as silicon carbide. The combination of these two new materials provides desired properties to the tank. To study and analyze, various identical models of the tanks were crafted using CAD software and numerical analysis was performed in Ansys Workbench version 16.0. Obtained results in the form of safety factor, highest directional deformation, and equivalent stress were studied and presented under the application of 700 bar pressure.