On the 24th of August 2022, the official cerimony of the German Renewables Award took place at Altonaer Kaispeicher in Hamburg (Germany).

The initiative of the Renewable Energy Cluster Agency (EEHH) aims to “honour individuals and companies who are advancing the energy transition with novel products and projects”. The awards are presented annually in several categories: Project of the Year, Product Innovation, Student Work, Hydrogen Innovation of the Year, Lifetime Achievement and Best Media Work.

Patrick Kloss, Master’s graduate at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, won the award in the “Student Work of the Year” category for his master thesis entitled “Development of a digital model of a stationary hydrogen storage tank based on room temperature (TiFe) hydride”, which was pursued in the broad frame of HyCARE project.

More information here (DE) and at this link (EN).

HyCARE’s researchers Jussara Barale of the Univerity of Turin (Italy) published the results on the alloy TiFe0.85Mn0.05 and

Abstract:

Moving from basic research to the implementation of hydrogen storage system based on metal hydride, the industrial production of the active material is fundamental. The alloy TiFe0.85Mn0.05 was selected as H2-carrier for a storage plant of about 50 kg of H2. In this work, a batch of 5 kg of TiFe0.85Mn0.05 alloy was synthesized at industrial level and characterized to determine the structure and phase abundance. The H2 sorption properties were investigated, performing studies on long-term cycling study and resistance to poisoning. The alloy absorbs and desorbs hydrogen between 25 bar and 1 bar at 55 °C, storing 1.0H2 wt.%, displaying fast kinetic, good resistance to gas impurities, and storage stability over 250 cycles. The industrial production promotes the formation of a passive layer and a high amount of secondary phases, observing differences in the H2 sorption behaviour compared to samples prepared at laboratory scale. This work highlights how hydrogen sorption properties of metal hydrides are strictly related to the synthesis method.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2022.06.295

The article is available in Open access at this link.