Risk Analysis of the Storage Unit in Hydrogen Refuelling Station

Nowadays consumer demand for local and global environmental quality, in terms of air pollution and, in particular, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, may help to drive to the introduction of zero emission vehicles. At this regard, the hydrogen technology appears to have future market valuablepotential. On the other hand, the use of hydrogen vehicles which requires appropriate infrastructures for production, storage and refuelling stages, presents a lot of safety problems due to the peculiar chemicophysical hydrogen characteristics. Therefore, safe at the most practices are essential for the successful proliferation of hydrogen vehicles. Indeed, to avoid limit hazards it is necessary to implement practices that, if early adopted in the development of a fuelling station project, can allow very low environmental impact, safety being incorporated in the project itself. Such practices generally consist in the integrated use of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), HAZard OPerability (HAZOP) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), which constitute well established standards in reliability engineering. At this regard, however a drawback is the lack of experience and the scarcity of the relevant data collection. In this work, we present the results obtained by the integrated use of FMEA, HAZOP and FTA analyses relevant, for the moment, the high-pressure storage equipment in a hydrogen gas refuelling station. The study, that is intended to obtain elements for improving safety of the system, can constitute a basis for further more refined works.