You can now register as participant to the 5th International Conference on Hydrogen Safety (ICHS 5) to be held from September 9 to 11 in Brussels.

Visit our website and click on “Early Bird Conference Registration”!

Just in case you always wanted to know some more about the activities of HySafe and maybe also meet some of the representatives of the the association …

come to Hannover in April, in particular on Thursday April 11. There is a Group Exhibit “Hydrogen and Fuel Cells” as part of the Hannover Industrial Fair in hall 23. On April 11 at 11:00 HySafe will present itself for a full hour and hopefully answer all your questions.

Learn more about the group exhibit

here: http://www.h2fc-fair.com/

and about the Technical Forum

here: http://www.h2fc-fair.com/hm13/forum/technical-forum.html

We look forward to meeting you there!

Since February 28, 2013 HySafe is an official partner (type A liaison) of the Technical Committee No. 197 “Hydrogen Technologies” of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). This was decided during the TC’s plenary meeting which was held in Montréal (Québec, Canada).

ISO TC 197 is generally acknowledged as the leading entity in the world to develop consensus-based international standard documents for hydrogen technologies. A number of standards both for mobile and stationary applications have been published, more are in the making, and a number of new topics have been proposed during the recent plenary meeting.

While quite a number of persons associated with HySafe are already active in the TC and its workings groups anyway, they are doing so as representatives of their national standardization bodies. Now HySafe has the possibility to directly and independently participate in the work of the TC including commenting on draft documents and being involved in the work of individual working groups.

HySafe is very honoured to be accepted as an official liaison partner by a body like this and takes this as a challenge to fulfill its mission at this level.

Brussels, January 20, 2013 – Preparations for the 5th International Conference on Hydrogen Safety (ICHS2013) to be held in Brussels from September 9-11 are progressing well. A world-renowned insurance company FM Global from Johnston (Rhode Island, USA) became the first sponsor of the conference.

HySafe president Andrei Tchouvelev welcomed the new sponsor saying: “We are very pleased to have FM Global as our Bronze Sponsor. FM Global has been a loyal supporter of the ICHS since its inception in 2005. We are looking forward for their active participation in the conference program.”

Dr. Sergey B. Dorofeev, research director for fire hazards and protection, at FM Global explained the reasons for his company to become sponsor: “FM Global is constantly monitoring the development of new technologies including hydrogen and modern research in loss prevention. ICHS with its focus on safety, scientific quality and new technologies is an excellent venue to disseminate research results and promote safety culture.”

Sponsoring is still possible for interested companies and other parties. Details are available from our website (see below).

HySafe is the global association for the safety of hydrogen, in particular concerning its use as energy storage medium and fuel on the basis of renewable primary energies. HySafe is a non-profit association under Belgian law and has 33 members, mainly research institutions and companies from Europe, North America, and Asia. More details on HySafe are available under http://www.hysafe.info/.

The International Conference on Hydrogen Safety (ICHS) is held every other year and organized by HySafe. ICHS is the global top event for the field of hydrogen safety. Previous conferences were held in Pisa (2005), San Sebastian (2007), Ajaccio (2009), and San Francisco (2011). More details on ICHS 2013 are available under http://www.ichs2013.com/.

FM Global provides comprehensive global commercial and industrial property insurance, engineering-driven underwriting and risk management solutions, groundbreaking property loss prevention research and prompt, professional claims handling. More details on ICHS 2013 are available under http://www.fmglobal.com/.

A safety training for professionals was held on October 17 in Berlin by HySafe. The training, held on the premises of the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, gave an overview of the safety matters associated with hydrogen handling and dealt with a number of topics in detail.

Speakers were HySafe president Andrei Tchouvelev as well as Hervé Barthélémy and Ulrich Schmidtchen, members of the HySafe board as chairmen for industry relations and PR, respectively.

The 14 participants had also the opportunity to look at a hydrogen laboratory and to study the various measures for explosion protection and other safety installed there.

While HySafe has already organized basic safety courses at various occasions this was a first step towards a higher level aiming at professionals. Based on the feedback from the participants the association will improve the offers of this kind of event in order to make it still more attractive. Announcements when and where more trainings will be held will be published here on this website in due time.

On October 16-17, 2012, by the IA HySafe in the framework of its Research Committee activity and in cooperation with JRC IET Petten, a two-day workshop dedicated to Hydrogen Safety Research Priorities was held. The workshop was organized back-to-back with IA HySafe General Assembly (October 15, 2012) and was hosted by BAM in Berlin, Germany.

The main idea of the Workshop was to bring together stakeholders who can address the existing knowledge gaps in the area of the hydrogen safety, including identification and prioritization of such gaps from the standpoint of scientific knowledge, both experimental and theoretical as well as numerical.
The experience highlighting these gaps which was obtained during both practical applications (industry) and risk assessment should serve as reference point for further analysis.

The Workshop, which is essentially a meeting between scientists and industry representatives, included 16 invited lectures covering different aspects of the contemporary status in industrial and research demands.

The program logically included two sections:

• knowledge gaps as they are addressed by industry
• knowledge gaps and state-of-the-art by research.

The presentations are available for download:

1. DeVaal – Smarter Solutions for a Clean Energy Future
2. Ruban – Knowledge Gaps Industry Perspectives
3. Kirchner – Hydrogen Activities of TOTAL Germany
4. Oyama and Kamiya – Commercialization Barriers and Issues for Large Scale Hydrogen Infrastructures
5. Jordan – Transferring Scientific Results into Engineering Correlations
6. LaChance – Information Needed to Support Hydrogen Codes and Standards
7. Hooker – Hydrogen Ignition and Light up Probabilities Part 1
8. Hooker – Hydrogen Ignition and Light up Probabilities Part 2
9. Baraldi-Onboard-Compressed-Hydrogen-Storage-Fast-Filling
10. Paraschivoiu – Simulation of Hydrogen Release from Reservoirs with Irregular and Variable Openings
11. Baraldi-Notional-Nozzle-Models-for-Hydrogen-Releases-from-High-Pressure-Systems
12. Middha – Release and Dispersion Perspectives from GexCon
13. Kessler Kinetics of AlH3 decomposition and subsequent Al oxidation Hydrogen Jetfires
14. Kotchourko – Recent advances and knowledge gaps in hydrogen combustion
15. Vaagsaether – DDT and Detonations – knowledge gaps
16. Molkov – Progress and gaps in hydrogen safety science and engineering
17. Ekoto – R&D Needs for Reduced Order H2 Release and Ignition Behavior Models – The SNL Perspective

The workshop achieved its objective and was a success and brought significant value to its participants and organizers. Next key step, as was discussed and agreed upon by the workshop participants, is the preparation of a comprehensive report that would serve as a guidance document for decision making authorities for funding of pre-normative research in hydrogen safety globally. The report itself then may serve as a platform for a topical lecture at the ICHS in Brussels, while thematically clustered presentations and discussions at the workshop will form foundation for contributed papers to ICHS2013 with their consecutive publication in one of the HySafe special issues of IJHE.

The General Assembly of HySafe was held on October 15 in Berlin on the premises of BAM, the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing which is one of the founder members.

One item of the agenda was the election of the committee chairs. The present chairmen were re-elected:

• Hervé Barthélémy (Industry Relations)
• Marco Carcassi (ICHS Conference)
• Alexei Kotchourko (Research)
• Ulrich Schmidtchen (PR and Dissemination)

One important topic in the work plan for the association for 2013 is the International Conference on Hydrogen Safety (ICHS) which will be held in Brussels in 2013 for the 5^th time. It is co-organized by HySafe and JRC (Joint Research Centre) IET of the European Commission. Another is the progress towards an international magazine on hydrogen safety. There is a cooperation with the International Association for Hydrogen Energy which publishes the International Journal for Hydrogen Energy. Some issues will be entirely devoted to the topic of safety in regular intervals.

The Association set the course for expanding its strategic relations with JRC IET, US DoE, IEA HIA and relevant Japanese organizations as well as its research coordination, knowledge dissemination and industry relations activities.

It is planned to hold the next General Assembly in conjunction with the ICHS in September 2013 in Brussels.

A training course on hydrogen safety will be held in October in Berlin in conjunction with the annual meeting of the HySafe members.

Read more and register here

Detailed program etc. will be published here as soon as possible.

An international workshop on hydrogen safety was held on June 3 in Toronto in conjunction with the World Hydrogen Energy Conference (WHEC). Participants from Europe, the Americas, and Asia got useful information about safe laboratories, filling stations, and general handling of hydrogen.

Education is one of the fields of activity of HySafe. The association will continue to prepare events like this. Come back occasionally to this website to learn more about dates and locations.

HySafe is making good progress with the preparations for the 5th International Conference on Hydrogen Safety which will be held from September 9 to 11, 2013, in Brussels. A two-day meeting of the Scientific and Organisational Committees was held on May 3 and 4 in Brussels to discuss scope, budget, technical matters and more. Included was a visit to the venue, the Charlemagne building. The European Commission, host of the ICHS 2013, provided the space for the conference. A member of the EU PR department showed the HySafe officials around and explained the meeting rooms, technical equipment, spaces available for coffee breaks and press conferences, and much more.

The participants left Brussels with the well-founded feeling that this conference as well will be successful and thus form another link of the chain which started in 2005 in Pisa with the first ICHS.