Statistics, Lessons Learned, and Recommendations from Analysis of the First 40 Fueling Station Component Failure Events in Hycred

Safety, risk, and reliability issues are vital to ensure the continuous and profitable operation of hydrogen technologies. To address this gap, UMD and NREL have developed and validated a structure for a hydrogen component reliability database, (HyCReD) [1]. HyCReD which can be used to collect and analyze hydrogen component reliability data to be used in QRA, process safety, and reliability engineering studies. The first 40 events coded in HyCReD presented in this work were used to validate the structure. We present detailed breakdowns of the first 40 fueling station component failure events by station subsystem, functional group, component, and component failure modes. We determined that the dispensing process and bulk storage were the two subsystems with the highest number of associated events. In terms of functional groups, the dispensing process and sensing and control groups were the two in which most associated components were present. The components in which most events occurred were nozzles, hoses and valves. The dominant failure mode observed in these events was an external leak of hydrogen to the environment. The initial results show that the HyCReD taxonomy and reporting structure provide important, detailed insights into the dominant reliability concerns for hydrogen fueling stations. We are actively seeking more participants to provide data for us to code; with more events from participants, we can obtain the first hydrogen-specific component failure rates. These results will provide actionable reliability engineering-based insights to enable prioritizing maintenance activities, eliminate costly downtime, and improve future station designs.