Sustainable resilience of hydrogen energy system

Resilience is the capacity of complex system to be recovered after a sudden change of the indicator. Energy resilience is the ability of energy system to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various challenges to normal operation. Loss of resilience can cause loss of valuable energy system services, and may even lead to rapid transitions or shifts into qualitatively different situations and configurations. The resilience of a system can be achieved by reducing its probability of failure as well as reducing the consequences from such failures and the time to recovery. The resilience of a system relates to the magnitude of disturbance required to fundamentally disrupt the system causing a dramatic shift to another state of the system. Restoring a system to its previous state can be complex, expensive and sometime even impossible. Research suggests that to restore some systems to their previous state requires a return to the conditions well before the point of collapse. Hydrogen energy system is complex system, which include: production, utilization and storage of hydrogen. It is imminent to any hydrogen system to verify potential vulnerability of the system structure. In this respect, it is of paramount importance to dwell to the potential catastrophic events of the hydrogen system. It is of interest to investigate the essential characteristics of hydrogen system which may lead to the resilience change. In this paper special attention is devoted to the selection of the indicators which are reflecting potential change of resilience of the hydrogen system. Resilience index is used as the parameter for the assessment of the potential hazard events. Particular attention was focused on chemical, physical and technical parameters of the hydrogen system elements. Copyright (C) 2011, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.