It’s the last day of the UK’s first Hydrogen Week. It’s been an excellent opportunity to share news and insights on hydrogen, creating awareness and industry progress.

Please find below a brief overview of hydrogen technology, supply, applications and safety measures to provide you with a simple understanding of its value in the global mission to net-zero.

What NVFCL have to offer

How do FITOK products and services ensure the safety and reliability of hydrogen systems?

Raw Materials and Hydrogen Embrittlement Resistance

Hydrogen embrittlement is a phenomenon in which hydrogen atoms enter the lattice voids of a metal and move diffusely, causing cracks in the material at the defective location after the atoms have recombined or reacted with other substances to form gaseous molecules, resulting in rapid volume expansion leading to cracks at this location. The hydrogen embrittlement cannot be eliminated once it occurs, so it can only be prevented.

Experiments have proven that stainless steels with nickel content greater than 12% and nickel equivalent not less than 28.5% have excellent resistance to hydrogen embrittlement. FITOK has developed the raw material of enhanced-316/316L (designator SH) for hydrogen applications in accordance with industry standards, which has good resistance to hydrogen embrittlement under high pressure and can meet the requirements of various international standards.

Hydrogen Systems

FITOK products for hydrogen systems are designed to deliver the high level of safety, reliability, and high performance for on-vehicle and infrastructure applications.

To ensure the high level of quality and safety for hydrogen systems, FITOK has applied a higher standard in designing, manufacturing and testing. The higher standard covers the raw material specification, brands of resilient sealing parts, tolerance and surface roughness of machined parts, inspection and testing specification, and the EC79 certification. We can provide the high quality and reliable products for your hydrogen systems including:

• 6 Series Tube Fittings
• 6 Series Pipe Fittings
• 20D Series Tube Fittings
• Ball Valves
• Needle Valves
• Check Valves
• Excess Flow Valves
• Filters
• Quick-Connects
• Metal Hoses
• Tubing

Why Hydrogen?

To alleviate the global warming caused by accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, major economies in the world are committed to achieving the goals of “peak carbon emissions” and “carbon neutrality”. Hydrogen, as one of the clean energy sources to replace traditional fossil energy, whose applications are regarded as the main technology direction of the future energy revolution, is therefore gaining increasing attention.

Types Of Hydrogen

Grey

Currently, this is the most common form of hydrogen production. Grey hydrogen is created from natural gas, or methane, using steam methane reformation but without capturing the greenhouse gases made in the process.

Blue

Blue hydrogen uses the same process as grey, except this time the carbon is captured and stored. This makes it much more environmentally friendly, but comes with added technical challenges and a big increase in cost. Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) has been around a while, with the technology being used by heavy industry and power generation companies burning fossil fuels. The technology can capture up to 90% of the CO2 produced, so it isn’t perfect but clearly a massive improvement. Most of the time, this CO2 is then transported by a pipeline and stored deep underground, often in salt caverns or depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Countries which do not have access to such underground options will find it very challenging to establish a blue hydrogen industry, and it may be more cost-effective to develop green hydrogen as their primary solution.

Green

The utopian vision of the future is a net-zero world where all our electricity and fuel is produced by emission-free sources. In the context of this piece, that means a fully-scaled green hydrogen industry on a global scale. It has the potential to be a major part in solving the intermittent generating capacity of most renewable energy sources. Excess electricity can be used to create hydrogen, which is then stored as a gas or liquid until needed. It faces many challenges, but the momentum behind it is growing with governments around the world recognising the potential benefits and developing policies to help drive development and adoption.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles

Among the many applications, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen refuelling stations are in the spotlight of governments and the industry. For instance, both China and Germany released strategic plan on the development in this field. With the rapid development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and the continuous growth of hydrogen refuelling stations and other infrastructure construction.

Development Required

Common problems in hydrogen applications such as easy leakage, hydrogen embrittlement, and high pressure and low temperature working conditions are also becoming more and more prominent, and how to ensure the safety and reliability of hydrogen systems has become one of the key concerns in the industry. Therefore, selection of suitable products with high safety in different applications is the optimal solution for a safe and reliable hydrogen system.