Dr.-Ing. Christian Spitta
head of
Department hydrogen infrastructure
phone: +49-203-7598-4277
c.spitta(at)zbt.de
In terms of gas analyzing ZBT has a more than 15 years experience: The quality of hydrogen as fuel is defined in the international standards ISO 14687-2:2012 and EN 17124:2018. In these standards a broad list of impurities is defined with threshold values down to the ppb-level. Only a few independent laboratories worldwide are capable of measuring hydrogen in accordance to these standards.
Within the German Hy-Lab project, which is coordinated by ZBT, ZBT has built up a hydrogen quality laboratory and developed analytical methods with the capability to analyze the hydrogen quality according to these international standards. For calibration purpose a mass-flow-controller and a gas mixing pump based gas dilution system and methods for sample preparation and sample transfer have been developed.
Impurity | ISO 14687:2019 EN 17124:2018 [µmol/mol] | Analytical Method | Detection Limit [µmol/mol] |
Water | 5 | QCM | 1 |
Total Hydrocarbons | 2 | GC-PED | 0.01* |
Methane | 100 | GC-PED | 0.01 |
Oxygen | 5 | GC-PED | 0.012 |
Helium | 300 | EI-MS | 0.01 |
Argon | 300 | GC-PED | 0.05 |
Nitrogen | 300 | GC-PED | 0.05 |
Carbon Dioxide | 2 | IMR-MS | 0.075 |
Carbon Monoxide | 0.2 | GC-PED | 0.01 |
Total sulphur compounds | 0.004 | TD-GC-SCD | 0.0002 (H2S) |
Formaldehyde | 0.2 | IMR-MS | 0.01 |
Formic Acid | 0.2 | IMR-MS | 0.01 |
Ammonia | 0.1 | IMR-MS | 0.01 |
Halogenated compounds | 0.05 | IMR-MS | 0.01 (CHCl3) |
A Hydrogen sampling Module (Hy-SaM) has been developed for hydrogen sampling at HRS and other parts of the hydrogen supply chain:
ZBT is closely cooperating with the Clean energy partnership (CEP) as external partner and the German H2 Mobility. Several sampling campaigns at HRS have been performed.
In addition to these German activities, ZBT has established a European network and is involved in several EU projects. Within Hydraite ZBT will be established as European hydrogen quality laboratory. Furthermore, in the EU project MetroHyVe2 methodological investigations for hydrogen metering, analysis, sampling and online analysis will be undertaken.