Hydrogen will play a key role in the transformation towards a carbon-neutral society. By comparison with current usage, it is estimated that global hydrogen requirements will increase fivefold by 2050 to some 550 million tons. But in order to store hydrogen, enormous amounts of energy are needed. During liquefaction, approximately a third of the energy content of hydrogen is lost, which makes the process largely uneconomical. In the Horizon Europe project HyLICAL with a budget of some five million euros, a team including the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), TU Darmstadt and the start-up MAGNOTHERM wants to significantly improve the technologies for storing liquid hydrogen. To this end, the team is building on magnetocaloric materials that change their temperature when they are exposed to a magnetic field.
HZDR