Although the world of green hydrogen may seem very new to us, it really isn’t. It is a fairly old concept, and specifically, the idea of hydrogen as an energy vector has been around for several decades. What has changed is that this ecosystem, which used to be very small, is now getting bigger every day.
Therefore, in today’s post, we discuss general concepts of hydrogen technologies, so that newcomers have a reliable source of knowledge on the subject. Specifically, we will talk about hydrogen refuelling stations, and to begin with, we will review all the names we find out there for this facility.
A hydrogen refuelling station is a facility for refuelling, recharging, filling (it doesn’t matter which verb we use) the internal tanks of a hydrogen vehicle (at another time we would have specifically said a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, but we are no longer so sure that all hydrogen vehicles will use electrochemical cells). A station can be of different types:
- Hydrogen Refuelling Station, the most common form in Spanish. In some sources of information, it is defined as a station that has hydrogen production on-site.
- Hydrogen Refuelling Station, it would be a station without production (the concept most equivalent to current gas stations, a truck comes and refills the tanks).
- Hydrogen Refuelling Station, or more commonly seen written by its initials, HRS. Sometimes it can be seen written as Hydrogen Refilling Station; here, American and British English often come into play. A similar situation occurs with electrolyser and electrolyzer. Both are valid but used on either side of the Atlantic.
Now that we have named it, let’s look at several designs we can find (and thus you will better understand the image in this blog post). We will focus on mobile (portable) station designs since they really derive from these designs we will see now, and we will not cover liquid hydrogen systems either.
- Time fill configuration. This is the simplest and most economical configuration. The compressor works directly against the vehicle’s tank, so a pulse damper is installed to make the flow as stable as possible. Good compressors already include this damper. This configuration is usually used in slow systems.
- Buffered fast fill configuration. This system places a large tank between the compressor and the dispenser, which has the capacity to fill the vehicle on its own. Normally, they are configured with a hysteresis, and the compressor simply turns on when the pressure drops to level X and stops when it reaches level Y.
- Cascaded fast fill configuration. The main feature of this installation is the sequential panel and the storage of gas at three different pressure levels (high, medium, and low). In this case, the compressor fills the station’s tanks, but not the vehicle’s. This configuration is the most refined and makes the best use of the dead volumes of the tanks (we will talk more about dead volume later). When fast filling and efficient compressor use are required, this solution is ideal if the budget allows.
As you can see, at Lean Hydrogen, we know what we’re talking about. Although we are close to reaching two years since we started this adventure, the people behind the company have been in the sector much longer. Back in 2015, we installed Abengoa’s second service station in Spain and also participated in the New Bus Fuel project, which dealt with hydrogen service stations for buses across Europe. From that project, we derived this documentation that we leave for you at the following link, providing you with interesting learning material.
http://newbusfuel.eu/publications/
If you need help with your hydrogen project, don’t hesitate to ask us. We’ll make it seem easy and bring it to a successful conclusion.
