Hydrogen energy is considered as an important secondary energy because it has the merits of high combustion efficiency,clean
combustion product,low cost for storage and multiple applications.Recently,the development of lightweight
high-pressure hydrogen storage tank becomes the current tendency to solve the problem of high-efficiency onboard hydrogen storage.The metal hydride
hydrogen compressor(MHHC),which integrated with hydrogen compression and purification,is regarded as a key equipment for hydrogen refueling station.In this paper,the principle and characteristics of MHHC were briefly introduced,and a rare earth based alloy with good hydrogen storage properties,(Mm-Ml-Ca)(Ni-Al)_5 was developed as the alloy for MHHC.With this alloy,a compressor with hydrogen capacity of 1000 L and product hydrogen pressure of 40.0 MPa has been designed and built.It can saturate with hydrogen at less than 3.0 MPa of feed hydrogen gas(98% purity) at 20 ℃ and produce hydrogen with pressure of greater than 40.0 MPa and purity of 99.9999% at 165 ℃.The thermal efficiency of the compressor is calculated to be 21.9%.