Hydrogen storage system integrated with fuel cell

Abstract

Fossil fuels on earth are depleting at an alarming rate and hence we are switching towards renewables sources of energy such as solar, wind, etc. The need for renewable sources of energy is an absolute necessity, especially in the automotive industry. Electric vehicles are a promising venture to provide transportation in the future. Electric vehicles currently are being powered by either a battery or a fuel cell, and later seems to be more efficient. But for a fuel cell vehicle, a major drawback is to provide a viable solution for storing hydrogen fuel, which powers the fuel cell. In this paper, the authors aim to provide a feasible solution for storing hydrogen fuel. The authors have coupled the hydrogen storage system with a fuel cell to observe the power developed when hydrogen is released from the storage. From our experiment, we have obtained hydrogen uptake of 1.1428 wt. % at 50 MPa pressure and 283 K for Ge-doped CNT (7, 8). The same CNT structure when coupled with a fuel cell, provided a constant flow rate of hydrogen and developed 10.057 kW of power from the fuel cell.