Comparison of design approaches on the design lifetime prediction of gaseous hydrogen storage tanks

Stationary tubular hydrogen storage tanks often consist of parallel connected short pipes. The influence of gaseous hydrogen on the lifetime can be assessed following the German AD 2000 code (2021) for pressure vessels. The AD 2000 code proposes a crack initiation criterion based on S-N curves, which should be considered especially for newly designed storage tanks. Due to the special design of the tanks, the lifetime might be also assessed according to the ASME B31.12 (2019), which is a worldwide standard accepted for hydrogen pipelines. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the lifetime assessment of a hydrogen storage tank with the fracture mechanics-based approach of the ASME B31.12, where the influence of different input parameters (e.g. the initial crack depth and aspect ratio, stress intensity factor solution, fatigue crack growth law) are investigated. The results of the two different design philosophies from AD 2000 and the ASME B31.12 codes are compared and differences in the allowable number of loading cycles for the lifetime prediction of hydrogen storage tanks are discussed.