Shannon Krenz

Hydrogen can play a key role as short- and long-term energy storage solution in an energy grid with fluctuating renewable sources. In technologies using hydrogen, there is always the risk of unintended leakages due to the low density of gaseous hydrogen. The risk becomes specifically high in confined areas where leaking hydrogen could easily mix with air and form flammable gas mixtures. In the maritime transportation, large and congested geometries can be subject to accumulation of hydrogen. A mitigation measure for areas where venting is insufficient or even impossible is the installation of catalytic recombiners. The operational behavior can be described with numerical models which are required to optimize the location and to assess the efficiency of the mitigation solution. In the present study, we established an experimental procedure in the REKO-4 facility, a 5.5 m3 vessel, to determine the recombination rate obtained from a recombiner. Based on the experimental data, an engineering correlation was developed to be used for simulations in safety assessments.

International projects study the safety aspects of the storage and long-distance transportation of liquid hydrogen at large scales. Catalytic recombiners, which are today key elements of hydrogen risk mitigation in nuclear power plants, could become an efficient safety device to prevent flammable gas mixtures after liquid hydrogen leakages in closed rooms. This study tackles fundamental questions about the operational behavior of typical recombiner catalysts related to the conditions of the start-up and the termination of the catalytic reaction. For this purpose, small-scale catalyst sheets with coatings containing either platinum or palladium as active materials were exposed to gas mixtures of air and hydrogen of up to 4 vol.% at temperatures between −50 °C and 20 °C. Both platinum and palladium showed variation to performance and had stochastic results. Overall, the initialized platinum catalyst was better than the palladium. The experimental results show that the transfer of the recombiner technology from its current application is not easily possible.