How does a hydrogen filling station work?

There’ s a cool sensation in the palm of the hand. It comes from holding the nozzle attached to the fuel dispenser at the new hydrogen filling station. We are in Wiener Neudorf, the site of one of Austria’s five hydrogen refueling stations. Even though it looks like an ordinary gas station at first glance, there are quite a few things here that make it different.

The hydrogen filling station itself is a high-tech facility. Starting already with the storage. The gas awaits customers in racks of cylinders or an above-ground fuel storage tank. Hydrogen is very amenable to compression, so there’s space here to fully fuel around 60 vehicles.

In order to get a similar amount of energy into a hydrogen vehicle as with gasoline or diesel, the fuelling process requires much higher pressure than is needed for storage. This is why hydrogen filling stations have compressors to reduce the volume of the hydrogen by an additional 94%.

The highly compressed fuel undergoes minimal expansion during the fuelling process at the pump. And when hydrogen expands, it warms up. To ensure that temperatures don’t rise too much when refueling, the hydrogen is cooled to minus 40°C before it reaches the nozzle.

The fuelling process is monitored electronically. If all of the measurements are normal, a full tank takes around 3 minutes. 700 bar pressure in the tank means the end of the process. After all, the hydrogen then has an effective volume of 55 cubic meters, equivalent to around 250 full bath tubs.


------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to the OMV YouTube Channel:    / omv  
Follow our Blog: http://blog.omv.com
Follow us on Instagram:   / omv  
Follow us on Facebook:   / omv  
Follow us on LinkedIn:   / omv  
Follow us on Twitter:   / omv  
Follow us on XING: http://www.xing.com/company/omv