Hydrogen storage and distribution systems

Hydrogen storage and transportation or distribution is closely linked together. Hydrogen can be distributed continuously in pipelines or batch wise by ships, trucks, railway or airplanes. All batch transportation requires a storage system but also pipelines can be used as pressure storage system. Hydrogen exhibits the highest heating value per weight of all chemical fuels. Furthermore, hydrogen is regenerative and environment friendly. There are two reasons why hydrogen is not the major fuel of toady’s energy consumption: First of all, hydrogen is just an energy carrier. And, although it is the most abundant element in the universe, it has to be produced, since on earth it only occurs in the form of water. This implies that we have to pay for this energy, which results in a difficult economic task, because since the industrialization we are used to consuming energy for free. The second difficulty with hydrogen as an energy carrier is the low critical temperature of 33 K, i.e. hydrogen is a gas at room temperature. For mobile and in many cases also for stationary applications the volumetric and gravimetric density of hydrogen in a storage system is crucial. Hydrogen can be stored by six different methods and phenomena: high pressure gas cylinders (up to 800 bar), liquid hydrogen in cryogenic tanks (at 21 K), adsorbed hydrogen on materials with a large specific surface area (at T < 100 K), absorbed on interstitial sites in a host metal (at ambient pressure and temperature), chemically bond in covalent and ionic compounds (at ambient pressure), oxidation of reactive metals e.g. Li, Na, Mg, Al, Zn with water. These metals easily react with water to the corresponding hydroxide and liberate the hydrogen from the water. Finally, the metal hydroxides can be thermally reduced to the metals in a solar furnace.     

High-performance permanent magnets

 High-performance permanent magnets (pms) are based on compounds with outstanding intrinsic magnetic properties as well as on optimized microstructures and alloy compositions. The most powerful pm materials at present are RE–TM intermetallic alloys which derive their exceptional magnetic properties from the favourable combination of rare earth metals (RE=Nd, Pr, Sm) with transition metals (TM=Fe, Co), in particular magnets based on (Nd,Pr)₂Fe₁₄B and Sm₂(Co,Cu,Fe,Zr)₁₇. Their development during the last 20 years has involved a dramatic improvement in their performance by a factor of >15 compared with conventional ferrite pms therefore contributing positively to the ever-increasing demand for pms in many (including new) application fields, to the extent that RE–TM pms now account for nearly half of the worldwide market. This review article first gives a brief introduction to the basics of ferromagnetism to confer an insight into the variety of (permanent) magnets, their manufacture and application fields. We then examine the rather complex relationship between the microstructure and the magnetic properties for the two highest-performance and most promising pm materials mentioned. By using numerical micromagnetic simulations on the basis of the Finite Element technique the correlation can be quantitatively predicted, thus providing a powerful tool for the further development of optimized high-performance pms.