Design for Reliability and Safety: Challenges and Opportunities in Hydrogen Mobility Assets

Safety and reliability are important performance attributes of any engineered system where humanmachine interactions are present. However, they are usually approached as afterthoughts or, in some cases, unintended consequences of the system design and development process that must be addressed and verified in subsequent design stages. In plain words, safety and reliability are often seen as constraints that add layers of complexity and extra costs to the minimum functional system of interest. No longer. Shell Hydrogen is embedding the Design for Reliability and Safety approach to engineer our products and assets in such a way that safety and reliability are at the core of a concurrent engineering process throughout the system lifecycle. This has been achieved in practice by leveraging systems, reliability, and safety engineering methods along with the experience and expertise of Shell Hydrogen, original equipment manufacturers, and system integrators in designing, building and operating hydrogen assets for mobility applications.
The challenges in implementing this approach are many, ranging from access to historical data on equipment and component safety and reliability performance, to lack of standardization in the industry when dealing with hydrogen related hazards. In this paper we will describe the approach in more detail, some of our early successes and failures during deployment, and the continual improvement journey that lies ahead.