Evaluating the impact of pellet densification and graphite addition for design of on-board hydrogen storage in a fixed bed of MOF-5 pellets

摘要

On-board storage of hydrogen is a key challenge in the deployment of fuel cell technology for transportation and distributed energy generation. Hydrogen adsorption capacity of up to 6 wt% has been reported for the metal-organic framework MOF-5, at 30 bar and 77 K. However, powders of MOF-5 suffer from low volumetric storage density and poor thermal conductivity for practical use in adsorptive storage systems. Compaction of MOF-5 to form pellets and inclusion of expanded natural graphite (ENG) has been used to address these issues, but their effect on the overall refueling dynamics for a fixed-bed has not been studied. To this end, we use simulations of multiscale pellet-and-bed model (developed in a companion paper) to analyze the impact of pellet modification on the dynamics of hydrogen refueling under cryogenic conditions. We show that a fixed bed with 0.52 g/cc density pellets is recommended, compared to MOF-5 powder or lower-density pellets. In spite of some loss of gravimetric capacity, the former shows good performance in a fixed bed with improved volumetric capacity and reasonable refueling time. Although individual pellet behavior is improved by addition of ENG to the 0.52 g/cc pellets, this has only a minor effect on refueling dynamics of the fixed bed with pellet size of 6 mm or lower. Finally, the effect of pellet size, density and ENG addition is analyzed and recommendations for fixed bed adsorber design are presented. (C) 2020 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.