3D CAD and CFD Modeling for Safety Analysis of Metal Hydride Based Hydrogen Refueling Compressor

With the increasing maturity of hydrogen powered application especially in automotive in the worldwide, the demand of hydrogen refueling station is increasing rapidly. Hydrogen compressor is one of the important elements for hydrogen refueling architecture. Compression of small molecule hydrogen which is easy flammable and explosive is a challenging task. Based on the worldwide trend scenario, metal hydride compressor has a higher potential to be commercialized in hydrogen refueling system due to its several advantages. A new design of metal hydride compressor is proposed using CAD software known as SolidWorks which is able to visualize 3D environment. To justify and enhance functionality, the performance of design has been tested using CFD analysis through ANSYS software. In this work, a new concept which was duplicates two sets of three staged metal hydride compressor by sharing a water bathing system is introduced and designed. The purpose is to increase and provide compression rate for continuous compressed of hydrogen gas by minimizes the metal hydride reaction cycle. The design has met the requirement target which is to provide flexibility on metal hydride alloy replacement.