Research & innovation for hydrogen – partner of the EU project ROAD TRHYP

19/6/2023

The ROAD TRHYP project has been selected by the European Commission for funding under the Horizon Europe programme, which is dedicated to research and innovation.

The overall objective of the project is to develop and validate a trailer that integrates new thermoplastic composite tubes (Type V) to maximise the quantity of H₂ transported while satisfying end-user requirements (safety, ability to be decontaminated) and enforced regulations at low cost. By the end of the project, the consortium will design a trailer capable of handling a payload of 1.5 tonnes of H₂ with 700 bar tubes. This will enable the number of transport rotations between the site of production and the delivery site to be decreased, hence the reduction of the environmental footprint of transporting compressed hydrogen, and will also enable the compressor at the hydrogen refuelling station to be downsized. In the meantime, the project will investigate fire testing methodologies and safety barriers for Type V adoption.

Air Liquide leads the consortium, and each partner of the project will contribute to boosting the development of new high capacity hydrogen trailers.

In the ROAD TRHYP project, Efectis is in charge of the safety-related work package. Together with our partners, we will conduct all the activities relating to the safety of the new trailers. The goal is to demonstrate the safe design of the type V trailer for high pressure use, by assessing the efficiency of the existing safety and mitigation barriers and by developing new ones if necessary.

First, the main failure scenarios of the trailer will be identified and their consequences will be evaluated. Then, by performing numerical simulations of type V cylinder submitted to designed fires, the thermal loads on the surface of the tube will be assessed. The results will be used as input for the thermomechanical model of our partners, to verify the behaviour of the cylinder under fire conditions.

Finally, we will perform real scale fire tests. In particular, a set of tubes representative of a trailer integration will be put under a standardised fire to study the behaviour of the type V high pressure tubes under fire, to assess the efficiency of the proposed security barriers and to demonstrate the ability of existing numerical tools for such research.

Visit the project at www.road-trhyp.eu

ROAD TRHYP: ROAD trailer design – use of Type V theRmoplastic tube with light composite structure for HYdrogen transPort

For more information, please contact Virginie Drean