Fuel cell vehicles (FCV) have great expectations to help realize a low carbon society. In July 2008, the basic scenarios to utilize FCV were produced by the Fuel Cell Commercialization Conference of Japan (FCCJ). This utilization scenario set the date for initial FCV commercialization to start from 2015, and agreement for this plan was reached between major automobile manufacturers and energy suppliers. Now, most of on board hydrogen storage systems use over-wrapped composite type 3 or type 4 high pressure cylinders. These storage systems still have many features to improve, especially volume efficiency and cost optimization.
This paper presents the recent activities to improve the performance of hydrogen storage systems with aluminum-lined type 3, over-wrapped composite cylinders – utilization of a high strength aluminum alloy , and a hybrid system with composite over-wrap combined with metal hydride storage of hydrogen.
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