Hydrogen Transport & Storage

Design & simulation solutions for hydrogen transport & storage.

Achieving high energy density, ensuring safety, and maintaining cost-effectiveness is paramount when designing hydrogen storage and transport systems. Hydrogen atoms are very small, which can lead to their permeation through metallic containers, changing the material property, a process known as hydrogen embrittlement which can significantly increase the likelihood of fracture and failure.

The requirements for robust containment systems, leak detection, and venting strategies pose unique challenges for designers, demanding a level of safety that leaves very little margin for error. Additionally, the storage system must be designed for easy integration into existing infrastructure and applications, such as fuel cell vehicles or stationary power systems, while minimising the impact on performance and usability.

By employing simulation across the design and life cycle of hydrogen storage and transport systems, engineers can gain increased confidence in their designs and better understand potential problems without the need for excessive physical testing.

Composite Vessel/Tank Design and Optimisation

Composite vessels for hydrogen storage must be lightweight, safe and reliable. Designers strive to optimise performance and reduce total materials used.

Ansys simulation tools provide a range of accurate solutions to help meet these design goals, including:

Ansys Composite Prep-post (ACP) to design layered composite structures meeting cryogenic /weight/ performance needs.
Ansys Mechanical for structural integrity accounting for thermal stress effect.
Ansys Mechanical APDL for multiscale cracking analysis.
Ansys Granta to choose materials from an embrittlement and cost perspective.

Adopting these tools and employing them early in the design process results in a lighter and more reliable composite vessel and reduces cost and time to market through smarter material selection and faster, automated design optimisation.

Pipeline

Ensuring safe transport of highly combustible hydrogen and LNG via existing pipelines and/or sea vessels while minimising impact to humans and the environment is crucial.

Ansys high-fidelity fluids and structural simulation capabilities allow the modelling of combustion, dispersion, flow, heat transfer and structural tensile strength on large and complex applications and can be solved fast using widely scalable HPC solvers.

Simulation can aid in the repurposing of existing infrastructure for hydrogen distribution by identifying potential problem areas and help to create better mitigation plans for potential accidents.

Compressor & Pump

When designing compressors and pumps for hydrogen transport, it is important to accurately predict pump cavitation inception and extent, optimize compressor and pump performance and maximise the operating range.

Ansys provides an end-to-end solution from preliminary design to detailed aero-mechanical optimisation. The Ansys solution is fast and accurate, utilising automated meshing, scalable HPC CFD, and FEA solvers to provide machine performance map (and predict pump cavitation) accurately in minutes. The Ansys tool kit is unique in that it allows for a whole design, analysis workflow in single platform with Granta MI (material intelligence) for hydrogen-specific challenges.

Ansys provides accurate prediction of cavitation and its effect on performance degradation or failure while reducing cost and time to market through smarter material selection and faster, automated design workflows.

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