Thermal Performance of Heat Exchanger for Hydrogen Energy Storage: An Advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Approach
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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Metal hydride hydrogen energy storage has been recently used worldwide because of its advantages, which provide a large hydrogen storage capacity and high safety. However, the main disadvantage of this storage is the metal hydride material, which has a low thermal conductivity. This negatively affects the hydrogen kinetic reactions, resulting in slow hydrogen absorption and desorption reactions. This problem significantly influences the overall storage system performance. For these purposes, several techniques have been applied to enhance the overall storage system performance under the improvement of hydrogen kinetic reaction. These techniques include the improvement of heat transfer performance of the storage system by using heat exchangers, the selection of the metal hydride materials/heat transfer fluid, and the appropriate selection of operating conditions for the metal hydride storage system. Therefore, the aim of this study is to enhance the overall storage system performance. The objective is divided into several main points to achieve the study’s aim based on heat transfer enhancement and appropriate operating condition selection. The new internal heat exchanger, namely a semi-cylindrical coil heat exchanger, is proposed and further enhanced by integrating a central return tube. Moreover, external heat exchangers, including a cooling jacket and a newly proposed phase change material (PCM) capsule, are also incorporated to enhance thermal performance. Furthermore, the new internal fin heat exchanger, namely the triple-branched fin is designed to be combined with an internal straight tube for heat transfer enhancement purposes, which is mainly considered the effect of the pressure losses during the heat transfer fluid circulating inside the storage. The various heat exchanger parameters are analysed for the new heat exchanger design to optimise their performance under the effect of these parameters on the average metal hydride bed temperature and hydrogen kinetic reaction during absorption/desorption. Finally, the initial operating conditions of the storage system and heat transfer fluid are investigated to obtain the appropriate operating condition value for the new storage system configurations. The key findings of the present study will provide a better understanding of the heat transfer enhancement for hydrogen kinetic reaction during the absorption and desorption processes under the new heat exchanger designs, which can be useful for hydrogen storage applications, especially in mobile applications. Moreover, the modelling principle, as well as the fundamental analysis of the heat exchanger designs and their performance, can be useful for several engineering applications.
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