Study on the Inherent Safety of On-board Methanol Reforming Hydrogen Production Fuel Cell System

Methanol as a liquid phase hydrogen storage carrier has broad prospects. Although the on-board methanol reforming hydrogen fuel cell system (MRFC) has long been proposed to replace the traditional hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, the inherent safety of the system itself has rarely been studied. This paper adopted the improved method of Inherently Safer Process Piping (ISPP) to evaluate the pipeline inherent safety of MRFC. The process data such as temperature, pressure, viscosity, and density were obtained by simulating the MRFC in ASPEN HYSYS. The Process Stream Characteristic Index (PSCI) and risk assessment of jet fire and vapor cloud explosion was carried out for the key streams with those simulated data. The results showed the risk ranks of different pipelines in the MRFC and the countermeasures were given according to different risk ranks. Through the in-depth study of the evaluation results, this paper demonstrates the risk degree of the system in more detail and reduces the fuzziness of risk rating. By applying ISPP to the small integrated system of MRFC, this paper realizes the leap of inherent safety assessment method in the object and provides a reference for the inherent safety assessment of relevant objects in the future.