Design, development, construction and operation of a novel metal hydride compressor

Metal Hydride Compressors (MHC) is a promising technology for thermal compression of hydrogen. Besides the absence of a necessity for significant mechanical or electrical energy input, this type of compressor has the advantage that no moving parts are involved. A brief review on the reported experimental set ups of metal hydride compressors is carried out and compared to the metal hydride compressor developed and constructed by HYSTORE Technologies Ltd in Cyprus. The compressor built by HYSTORE consists of 6 stages using AB2 and AB5 - type metal hydride alloys. The MHC is operated between 10 C and 80 °C, which is a temperature range that can be supplied by solar thermal collectors. Furthermore, the experimental results showed, that even lower temperatures of 17 C are sufficient thus reducing the demand for cooling capacity. During the operation, the compressor achieved stable compression of hydrogen from 7 bar more than 220 bar. The specific productivity of the compressor achieved values up to 67.2 lH2 kg−1 h−1.