Regulations and research on RC&S for hydrogen storage relevant to transport and vehicle issues with special focus on composite containments

Developers interested in high pressure storage of hydrogen for mobile use increasingly rely on composite cylinders for onboard storage or transport of dangerous goods. Thus, composite materials and systems deserve special consideration. History gives interesting background information important to the understanding of the current situation as to regulations, codes and standards. Based on this review, origins of different regulations for the storage of hydrogen as dangerous good and as propellant for vehicles will be examined. Both categories started out using steel and sometimes aluminium as cylinder material. With composite materials becoming more common, a new problem emerged: vital input for regulations on composite pressure systems was initially derived from decades of experience with steel cylinders. As a result, both regulatory fields suffer somewhat from this common basis. Only recent developments regarding requirements for composite cylinders have begun to go more and more separate ways. Thus these differences lead to some shortcomings in regulation with respect to composite storage systems. In principle, in spite of separate development, these deficits are in both applications very much the same: there are uncertainties in the prediction of safe service life, in retesting procedures of composite cylinders and in their intervals. Hence, different aspects of uncertainties and relevant approaches to solutions will be explained. •Some aspects of composites are not taken into account for cylinders' approvals.•The high LC-robustness of CFRP goes along with a high scatter.•Demonstration of minimum properties is not appropriate for CFRP-cylinders.•The alternatively proposed probabilistic approval approach requires higher effort.•This allows an optimisation to purpose of containments in mass production.