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by tobinfricke 830 days ago
"It differs from a nickel–metal hydride (NiMH) battery by the use of hydrogen in gaseous form, stored in a pressurized cell at up to 1200 psi (82.7 bar) pressure."

whoah

3 comments

that's not that much. Hydrogen tanks in cars like the Toyota Mirai for instance, stores it at 10000 psi.
That's nuts. 10k PSI. My car has a a CNG tank that is at several hundred PSI and that makes me nervous when filling it up, but 10,000 PSI is way way more than this.
This is one of the reasons hydrogen cars are unlikely to achieve any widespread deployment. But the new proposal is hydrogen-carrying trucks, which is better (larger tanks and bigger scale means more and better maintenance than a typical passenger vehicle can justify) but also, it means extremely high pressure hydrogen tanks on the road with your traffic.

(Of course, it may not happen. Trucking hydrogen around is pretty inefficient and stupid: hopefully it will prove cheaper to pipe electrons around and generate hydrogen on site for whatever industrial process requires it.)

   I owned a number of 2001 CNG Chevy Cavaliers around 2010, purchased through govt. surplus auctions.  Their tanks were 3600 PSI.  The tanks were certified for 15 years with no recertification.  Nothing would stop working but they would no longer be certified.  The tank would get hot while filling so I imagine the fatigue from many cycles of heating up was one factor in the certification period.  Internal corrosion is another factor.  If the natural gas compressor farm does not dry the compress gas then moisture will get into the tank and over many years will corrode the tank.  There's a video out there of a CNG tank explosion at a fueling station somewhere in South America.  No doubt metal fatigue plus corrosion contributed to that failure.   
   So 10,000 PSI for hydrogen is a lot of pressure to be transporting around in a vehicle for multiple years of heating / cooling and possible corrosion.
Scuba tanks are usually filled to 200 bar/3000 psi
And pressurized water reactors are a huge industrial installation running at 155 bar.
There’s a lot more stainless steel and concrete in a pressurized nuclear reactor than an orbiting space station
that should definitely make it disassemble rapidly
Hopefully only on schedule.