Design of metal hydride reactor with embedded helical coil using optimization methods

Abstract

Metal hydride offers an efficient and cost-effective method to store hydrogen. In this study, Taguchi method coupled with grey relational analysis was used to optimize the design parameters i.e., diameter of helical tube (dh), major diameter of helical tube (dm), number of turns of helical tube (N) and velocity of heat transfer fluid (Vf) for the helical tube heat exchanger embedded inside metal hydride bed to achieve minimum desorption time (td) for 80% desorption and minimum outlet temperature (T0) of heat transfer fluid (HTF). The performance of all experiments in the orthogonal array used for Taguchi and Grey relational analysis was evaluated by 3-D numerical simulations performed in commercial software COMSOL 5.3a. This stepwise methodology is significantly computationally efficient as the number of required simulations reduced by 90% as compared to the traditional parametric study-based methodology. Further, this methodology enables to estimate an optimized level of the parameters by considering all the objective functions (td, T0) simultaneously. Later, the performance of the optimally designed systems was compared with the orthogonal array experiments and it was found out that the optimized system designs have better performance in terms of the objective parameters i.e., td and T0 when compared with the other experiments of orthogonal array. These optimized systems will then be used for refrigeration and cooling applications.