DOE OSTI2019
The objective of this three-year project was to develop a pipe coupler for high-pressure (100bar service, 350bar burst) composite hydrogen pipelines, without the use of elastomeric sealing mechanisms (e.g. o-rings), thereby avoiding seal maintenance costs and effort associated with digging up subterranean lines over a pipe’s lifetime of up to 50 years. The project aimed to build on past designs at (TRL 3), to adapt their use to hydrogen delivery and test in a relevant environment (TRL 5). This work is toward the DOE’s objective to reduce the technical barrier of high as-installed cost of pipelines, by utilizing fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) pipe. Further DOE targets include those from the Fuel Cell Technologies Office Multi-Year Research, Development, and Demonstration Plan: Milestone 1.5: Coordinating with the H2 Production and Storage sub-programs, identify optimized delivery pathways that meet a H2 delivery and dispensing cost of <\$ 2/gge for use in consumer vehicles. (4Q, 2020) Milestone 6.3: By 2020, reduce the cost of hydrogen delivery from the point of production to the point of use in consumer vehicles to <\$ 2/gge of hydrogen for the gaseous delivery pathway (4Q, 2020). This project headed by Automated Dynamics (now Trelleborg) with partners Savanah River National Laboratory, and NOV Fiber Glass Systems, emerged due to a similar previous project with the DOE, completed by SNRL and NOV Fiber Glass Systems (formerly Fiberspar) in 2014, that evaluated the mechanical suitability of FRP (composite) lines for these same high pressures. That projected concluded with a favorable outlook on using composite lines and required a suitable pipe coupler. The resulting coupler design from this current project employs electrofusion due to its proven use on low pressure unreinforced lines and for its simplicity in the field. This electrofusion coupler design utilizes established concepts for pipe couplers and combines them in a new and unique method. Existing pipe couplers are employed on thermoset pipes in high pressure, with elastomeric seals as the sealing mechanism, and on thermoplastic low-pressure pipes by way of electrofusion. However, no EF coupler is available for composite pipelines for 350bar hydrogen containment.