Engineering Models for Refueling Protocol Development: Validation and Recommendations

The PRHYDE project (PRotocol for heavy duty HYDrogEn refueling) funded by the Clean Hydrogen partnership aims at developing recommendations for heavy-duty refueling protocols used for future standardization activities for trucks and other heavy duty transport systems applying hydrogen technologies. Development of a protocol requires a validated approach. Due to the limited time and budget, the experimental data cannot cover the whole possible ranges of protocol parameters such as initial vehicle pressure and temperature, ambient and precooling temperatures, pressure ramp, refueling time, hardware specifications etc. Hence, a validated numerical tool is essential for a safe and efficient protocol development. For this purpose, engineering tools are used. They give good results in a very reasonable computation time of several seconds or minutes. These tools provide the heat parameters estimation in the gas (volume average temperature) and 1D temperature distribution in the tank wall. The following models were used SOFIL (Air Liquide tool), HyFill (by ENGIE) and H2Fills (open access code by NREL). The comparison of modelling results and experimental data demonstrated a good capability of codes to predict the evolution of average gas temperature in function of time. Some recommendations on model validation for the future protocol development are given.