Articles techniques et présentations

In this paper, a metallic honeycomb structure is used as a heat exchanger in order to improve the hydrogen refuelling time for an alanate storage system. Using COMSOL software, the heat exchanger structure and the hydride bed are modeled as a two separate media and the governing equations describing the physics phenomena occurring during the loading process, are solved. The simulation results show that for a hexagon cell size of 25.4 mm, connecting the metallic structure to an external cooling source yields to a better heat management and refuelling time. However, the hydrogen loading rate is still lower than one predicted by the kinetics model. For the same studied configuration, cooling tubes are considered to optimise the design of the storage system. By varying the diameter and the number of tubes, it is found that the efficient use of the storage system can be obtained by equipping the hydride bed with 133 cooling tubes, with 6.35 mm of diameter.