Analysis of Power-to-gas-to-X systems with metal hydride storage based on coupled electrochemical and thermodynamic simulation

Power-to-gas-to-X systems consisting of photovoltaic cells, proton-exchange membrane electrolysis, hydrogen storage based on metal hydrides, proton-exchange membrane fuel cells and buffer batteries could be used to meet heat and electricity demands of homes, businesses, or small districts. The actual size of the individual components and their interplay have to be optimized for the technical and economic feasibility of the overall system. A simulation-based optimization workflow would be a suitable way to accomplish this task, but there are hardly any tools that can simultaneously simulate power, fluid and heat flows of such systems and efficiently perform their optimization. In this paper, a multiphysical energy system simulation and optimization tool is introduced which models electrochemical and thermodynamic processes simultaneously, including modern equations of state and an own numerical solver for the arising differential–algebraic system of equations, and provides new methods for the calibration of parameters of the metal hydride storage, proton-exchange membrane electrolyzer and fuel cell as well as a metamodel-based approach for sizing optimization. As a demonstrator for the novel tool, a simulation model of a hydrogen lab is successfully set up based on experimental results. The novel tool is able to extract polarization and jump curves of the fuel cell, determine a first temperature and pressure dependency of the efficiency of the electrolysis coupled with the metal hydride storage and speed up sizing optimization through metamodeling by a factor 262.1 at 4.9% and 32.7 at 3.3% accuracy.