META TITLE: Hydrogen Refuelling Station | Neometrix
Five Minutes to Full, at 350 Bar.
A fuel-cell bus is only genuinely useful if refuelling it feels like refuelling a diesel one. That single requirement — a full tank in minutes, then another vehicle right behind it — drives almost every design decision in Neometrix's hydrogen refuelling station: hydrogen comes in from a tube trailer or an on-site electrolyser, gets conditioned, compressed, banked at 500 bar(g), chilled to the T20 category, and delivered into a fuel-cell vehicle at H35, in a containerised layout handling roughly 150 kg/day with back-to-back fills about five minutes apart.
You Cannot Fill a 350 Bar Tank From 350 Bar Storage
Gas moves down a pressure gradient and stops the instant that gradient runs out. So the station deliberately banks its inventory at around 500 bar(g) — the storage pressure is not the fuel-delivery pressure, and that gap is the entire reason the compressor exists in the first place. Without it, filling would slow to a crawl as the storage and vehicle pressures converged.
A Fast Fill Heats the Tank
Pushing gas into a vehicle's tank quickly compresses the gas already inside almost adiabatically, and a composite tank liner has a hard temperature limit near 85 °C. So the hydrogen is deliberately chilled on its way to the nozzle — the T20 category, roughly −20 °C — in a heat exchanger placed as close to the nozzle as the pipework physically allows. Get the pre-cooling location wrong and the fill has to slow down or fall back to a conservative mode to avoid overheating the tank.
Purity Is a Specification, Not a Courtesy
Fuel-cell catalysts are poisoned by carbon monoxide and sulphur contamination at parts-per-billion levels, which is an extraordinarily tight tolerance. An online gas analyser to ISO 14687 continuously watches the incoming hydrogen, and the inlet filter exists — in the specification's own explicit language — specifically for rust carried over from upstream cascades, not as a generic precaution.
Two Very Different Inlets, One Station
Hydrogen can arrive by tube trailer at around 350 bar(g), which needs decanting and two-stage pressure reduction as the trailer gradually empties — or from an on-site electrolyser at around 20 bar(g), which needs essentially the opposite handling. The station is built to accept both from day one, so on-site hydrogen production capability can be added later without rebuilding the entire front end of the station.
We Build the Station, Not the Compressor
The diaphragm compressor, the dispenser, the nozzles and the approved storage vessels are all proprietary bought-in equipment — tenders specifically require those components to carry approval based on past installations. Neometrix engineers and builds everything around them: the decant and pressure-reduction system, storage sequencing, pre-cooling, dispensing control, and the full safety and controls package. No specific delivered station is claimed on this page — this describes a reference ~150 kg/day containerised station engineered to order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does a hydrogen refuelling station need to compress gas to a higher pressure than what's actually delivered to the vehicle?
Because gas only flows from higher pressure to lower pressure, and the flow stops entirely once the two pressures equalise. If a station stored hydrogen at the same 350 bar(g) it delivers to a vehicle, filling would start fast but slow to an unusably long crawl as the storage and vehicle tank pressures converged, especially toward the end of the fill. By deliberately banking inventory at a higher pressure — around 500 bar(g) — there's always enough pressure differential to maintain a fast fill rate for the vehicle's target pressure throughout the entire fill, including back-to-back fills for a queue of vehicles.
Why does hydrogen need to be chilled before it goes into a vehicle's tank during refuelling?
Because filling a tank quickly compresses the gas already inside it, and that compression happens fast enough to be nearly adiabatic -- meaning the gas heats up significantly rather than losing that heat to its surroundings during the process. Composite hydrogen tank liners have a hard temperature limit, typically around 85°C, that can't be safely exceeded. To keep the tank within that limit while still filling quickly, the incoming hydrogen is pre-chilled -- commonly to the "T20" category, around −20°C -- in a heat exchanger placed as close to the nozzle as possible, so the cooling effect isn't lost to ambient heat pickup in the pipework before it reaches the vehicle.
Get In Touch
For full specifications, RFQs, or a technical discussion about the hydrogen refuelling station:
- Product page: Hydrogen Refuelling Station
- Email: contact@neometrixgroup.com
- Phone: +91-7777-876-876
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