• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.284-291
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• 1997

A hydrogen liquefaction equipment by direct cooling has been designed and built at KIST. Cool-down characteristics and liquefaction performance of the equipment have been investigated. The hydrogen liquefaction equipment consists of a GM refrigerator, a liquefaction velssel, a radiation shield and a cryostat. It is found that the hydrogen starts to be liquefied in the liquefaction vessel after 40~50 minutes of cool-down from the gas state of 270K. The effect of natural convection phenomena of charged gas in liquefaction vessel on the cool-down characteristics is evaluated by comparing with those in vacuum of liquefaction vessel. It is seen that the cool-down time of a liquefaction vessel is substantially increased in vacuum environment of liquefaction vessel. The experiments have been performed for 1~5 atm of hydrogen pressure to investigate the influence of hydrogen pressure on the liquefaction rate and figure of merit(FOM). It is found that both liquefaction rate and FOM are increased as the charged hydrogen pressure is increased.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.131-139
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• 2000

A direct hydrogen liquefaction equipment has been developed and tested, which consists of a GM refrigerator, a liquefaction vessel, a radiation shield, a cryostat, and an ortho-para converter with catalyst. The effect of ortho-para hydrogen conversion on the performance of hydrogen liquefaction has been investigated. The time needed for the hydrogen liquefaction process with hydrogen pressure charge of 4 atm was delayed to around 75 minutes, and the liquefied mass flow rate of the hydrogen was about 0.0150∼ 0.0205 g/s when the hydrogen was liquefied with the direct hydrogen liquefaction system considering ortho-para conversion. With ortho-para conversion, the liquefied mass flow rate decreased up to 20%. Considering ortho-para conversion, there were up to 30% increase in the work input per unit liquefied mass flow rate. When the ortho-para conversion was considered, FOM decreased to be about 0.031∼0.045.

• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.41-48
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• 2020

The present study discussed the thermodynamic analysis of the hydrogen liquefaction process to build a hydrogen liquefaction pilot plant with a small capacity (0.5 ton/day). A 2-stage Brayton cycle utilizing LNG/LN2 cold energy was suggested to be built in Korea for the hydrogen liquefaction pilot plant with a small capacity. Thermodynamic analysis on the effect of various variables on the efficiency of hydrogen liquefaction process was performed. As a result, the CASE in which the ortho-para conversion catalyst was infiltrated inside the heat exchanger showed the best process efficiency. Finally, thermodynamic analysis was performed on the effect of turbo expander compression ratio on the hydrogen liquefaction process and it was confirmed that an optimal turbo expander compression ratio exists.

• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2020

As hydrogen utilization becomes more active recently, a large amount of hydrogen should be supplied safely. Among the three supply methods, liquefied hydrogen, which is an optimal method of storage and transportation convenience and high safety, has a low temperature of -253℃, which is complicated by the liquefaction process and consumes a lot of electricity, resulting in high operating costs. In order to reduce the electrical energy required for liquefaction and to raise the efficiency, hydrogen is cooled by using a mixed refrigerant in a precooling step. The electricity required for the precooling process of the mixed refrigerant can be reduced by using the cold energy of LNG. Actually, LNG cold energy is used in refrigeration warehouse and air liquefaction separation process, and a lot of power reduction is achieved. The purpose of this study is to replace the electric power by using LNG cold energy instead of the electric air-cooler to lower the temperature of the hydrogen and refrigerant that are increased due to the compression in the hydrogen liquefaction process. The required energy was obtained by simulating mixed refrigerant (MR) hydrogen liquefaction system with LNG cold heat and electric system. In addition, the power replacement rate of the electric process were obtained with the pressure, the temperature of LNG, the rate of latent heat utilization, and the hydrogen liquefaction capacity, Therefore, optimization of the hydrogen liquefaction system using LNG cold energy was carried out.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1-5
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• 2011

For the hydrogen liquefaction, the large amount of energy is consumed, because precooling, liquefaction and ortho/para conversion heats should be eliminated. In this paper the basic design and thermal analysis are carried out to reduce the energy consumption by using LNG cold energy for precooling process in hydrogen liquefaction processes. The LNG cold energy utilization for hydrogen precooling enables not only to get energy saving for liquefaction, but to recover the wasted cold energy to sea water at the LNG terminal. The results show that the energy saving rate for liquefaction using LNG cold energy is almost 75% of current industrial hydrogen liquefaction plant. The demand flow-rate of LNG is only 15T/D for 1T/D hydrogen liquefaction.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

This paper reviews the development status of magnetic refrigeration system for hydrogen liquefaction. There is no doubt that hydrogen is one of most important energy sources in the near future. In particular, liquid hydrogen can be utilized for infrastructure construction consisting of storage and transportation. Liquid hydrogen is in cryogenic temperatures and therefore high efficient liquefaction method must be studied. Magnetic refrigeration which uses the magneto-caloric effect has potential to realize not only the higher liquefaction efficiency > 50 %, but also to be environmentally friendly and cost effective. Our hydrogen magnetic refrigeration system consists of Carnot cycle for liquefaction stage and AMR (active magnetic regenerator) cycle for precooling stages. For the Carnot cycle, we develop the high efficient system > 80 % liquefaction efficiency by using the heat pipe. For the AMR cycle, we studied two kinds of displacer systems, which transferred the working fluid. We confirmed the AMR effect with the cooling temperature span of 12 K for 1.8 T of the magnetic field and 6 second of the cycle. By using the simulation, we estimate the total efficiency of the hydrogen liquefaction plant for 10 kg/day. A FOM of 0.47 is obtained in the magnetic refrigeration system operation temperature between 20 K and 77 K including LN2 work input.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.349-358
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• 1999

Thermodynamic cycle analysis has been performed to maximize the liquid amount for various hydrogen liquefaction systems using GM(Gifford-McMahon) refrigerator. Since the present authors' previous experiments showed that the liquefaction rate was approximately 5.1mg/s in a direct contact with a commercial GM refrigerator, the purpose of this study is to predict how much the liquefaction rate can be increased in different configurations and with improved heat exchanger performance. The optimal operating conditions have been analytically sought with real properties of normal hydrogen for the single-stage GM precooled L-H(Linde-Hampson) system, the two-stage GM direct contact system, the two-stage GM precooled L-H system and the two-stage helium GM-JT (Joule-Thomson) system. The maximum liquefaction rate has been predicted to be only about 7 times greater than the previous experiment, when the two-stage precooling is employed and the effectiveness of heat exchangers approaches to 99.0%. It is concluded that the liquefaction rate is limited mainly by the cooling capacity of the current GM refrigerators and a larger scale of hydrogen liquefaction is possible with a greater capacity of cryocooler at 60-70 K range.

• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.53-64
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• 1998

Thermal analysis on a Linde-Hampson hydrogen liquefaction system using cryogenic refrigerators as precooling has been carried out. Three commercially available models of cryogenic refrigerators, such as CTI l020CP, CVI CGR009 and CVI CGR011, are considered in the performance analysis. The effect of ortho-para conversion process during hydrogen liquefaction is also studied in detail. The results obtained indicate that the optimal hydrogen mass flow rate and the optimal compressed pressure exist for the maximum hydrogen liquefaction rate. The optimal compressed pressure is increased in the range of 80 - 120 bar with an increase in the hydrogen mass flow rate. It is also found that better performance could be obtained with a cryogenic refrigerator, which produces high cooling capacity at precooling temperature in the range of 80 - 100 K.

• International Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.39-50
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• 2000

Thermodynamic cycle analysis is presented to estimate the maximum liquefaction rate of hydrogen for various systems using a Gifford-McMahon(GM) cryocooler. Since the present authors` previous experiments showed that the gaseous hydrogen was liquefied approximately at the rate of 5.1 mg/s from the direct contact with a commercial two-stage GM refrigerator, this study has been proposed to predict how much the liquefaction rate can be increased in different configurations using the GM cooler and with improved heat exchangers. The optimal operating conditions have been analytically sought with real properties of normal hydrogen for the Linde-Hampson(L-H) system precooled by single-stage GM, the direct-contact system with two-stage GM, the L-H system precooled by two-stage GM, and the direct-contact system with helium GM-JT (Joule-Thomson). The maximum liquefaction rate has been predicted to be only about 7 times greater than the previous experiment, even though the highly effective heat exchangers may be employed. It is concluded that the liquefaction rate is limited mainly because of the cooling capacity of the commercially available GM cryocoolers and a practical scale of hydrogen liquefaction is possible only if the GM cooler has a greater capacity at 70-100 K.

• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.571-577
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• 2020

Thermal analysis was performed for a cold box of a hydrogen liquefaction pilot plant with 0.5 ton/day capacity. The pilot plant has adopted a hydrogen liquefaction process using two-stage helium Brayton cycle with precooling of liquid nitrogen. The cold box for hydrogen liquefaction has generally vacuum insulation but inevitable heat invasion by conduction and radiation exists. The heat loads were calculated for cold box internals according to multilayer insulation emissivity. Total heat load of 181.7 W is estimated for emissivity of 0.03 considered in field condition.