Metal Hydride Heat Pump

Overview


Integrated Metal Hydride Heat Pump System

Metal hydrides are well documented hydrogen storage materials. Funded by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan, this project aims to develop a two-hydride heat pump system to be used with a high temperature fuel cell and a natural gas reformer to increase total heat recovery. The resulting high efficiency system will be used to heat water for stationary applications.

During operation of the system, heat and hydrogen are cycled between the two metal hydrides beds of different types. Depending on the direction of flow, heat will be absorbed from the system’s surroundings and transferred to the hot water reservoir. Using heat from the surroundings provides the potential for significant increases in overall system efficiency.

Material Selection

To aid in the selection of alloys for the metal hydride heat pump, we constructed an object-oriented Metal Hydride Toolbox for MATLAB which enabled automatic equilibrium, kinetic, and thermophysical property evaluation. This Toolbox has been made available at our Github organization page.

We used this toolbox to determine the best combinations out of the more than 100,000 possible hydride pairs from our property database and to inform subsequent experimental investigations.

Preliminary Results

Score Distribution
Distribution of COP of valid hydride pairs at different midpoint temperatures

  • Developed object-oriented Metal Hydride MATLAB Toolbox
  • Assembled database of properties of over 300 hydrides
  • Identified over 1,800 hydride pairs with coefficient of performance (COP) greater than one
  • Developed hydride pair scoring system to focus on top pairs
  • Developed robust models for thermodynamic equilibrium, reaction rates, and thermophysical properties building off prior work


People

Program Manager

Dr. Chao-Ho Lan, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI)

PI

Dr. Timothée Pourpoint, Associate Professor, Purdue University

Researchers

Dr. Tyler Voskuilen, Postdoc (Now at Sandia)
Essene Waters, M.S. Student (current)

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