International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

The development of ecological and efficient vehicles powered by hydrogen or electricity is one of the priorities of the automotive industry at the moment. These new propulsion systems should come as a replacement for the internal combustion engines, which use gasoline or diesel fuel and therefore produce toxic emissions. One of the problems, that hydrogen powered vehicles face, is hydrogen storage and that is the main topic of our paper Conventional technologies for hydrogen storage, like high pressure and cryogenic reservoirs, have many drawbacks in terms of compactness, mass (weight), efficiency and safety. In order to get over these problems, there have been many researches throughout the years in effort to develop new, commercially available technologies. The most advanced storage technologies today, are tanks filled with metal hydrides which absorb hydrogen by forming chemical bonds with it, and tanks filled with large contact surface materials that are able to adsorb hydrogen. In this paper we will present the requirements that these solutions have to fulfill, their current level of development and the expectations for future improvement and usage.

The new and modified method of experimental determination of the vessel weight and the coordinates of its center of gravity without launching using inflatable elastic containers are shown in this article.