Reliability of Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier-based Energy Storage in a Mobility Applications

Liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHC) are a technology that allows storing hy-drogen in a safe and dense manner by reversible chemical conversion. They consti-tute a very promising option for energy storage, transport, and release combined withelectric power generation by fuel cells in large-scale applications like trains. In orderto establish trains running on LOHC, it is mandatory to ensure the reliability of thesystem. This study evaluates various system configurations concerning reliabilityand resilience. The fault tree analysis method has been used to quantify the prob-ability of failure. The S-P matrix was applied to assess the different failure modes incontext of severity as well as their probability. The MTTF of the system can be morethan doubled by introducing single redundancy for the fuel cell and the reactor, whilemore than two redundant components diminish the positive effect on reliability dueto higher complexity. It is estimated that the systems full functionality is available formore than 97% of its operating time.