350 vs 500 vs 700 vs 1000 bar — the hydrogen storage trade-off, computed.
Enter the hydrogen mass your mission needs. The calculator returns the tank volume, tank weight and system-level penalty at each storage pressure — recommends the right tier for a mass-critical, volume-critical or balanced design — and shows the closest MEYER HDRX catalog cylinders, including R&D safety-factor configurations down to 1.5×. Driven by real H₂ density curves and Type IV PET cylinder mass scaling.
Reserve added on top of usable H₂ mass to size the cylinder.
Note: cylinder mass uses Type IV scaling calibrated to a 6.8 L cylinder at 1050 bar burst weighing 2.3 kg. System mass adds an estimated regulator and valve penalty that scales linearly with inlet pressure (≈40% heavier at 700 bar vs 300 bar). Reserve and safety factor apply to all tiers equally. The 1000 bar tier is shown for R&D comparison; MEYER custom programmes cover up to 700 bar inlet today.
Required H₂ mass + reserve → required volume = mass / density(P, T). H₂ density at 25 °C is taken from a real-gas table (NIST-derived), accounting for Z > 1 above 200 bar.
Type IV PET cylinder mass scales linearly with burst-pressure × volume:
m_cyl = K_PET × volume × burst_pressure
K_PET = 0.000322 kg/(L·bar of burst), calibrated against the MEYER HDRX-068 reference (6.8 L at 1050 bar burst → 2.3 kg).
The regulator, service valve, fittings, and fill nozzle scale with inlet pressure. The model adds an indicative system-mass overhead per tier:
For larger systems (vehicle, launch), scale these proportionally.
Infrastructure availability acts as a hard filter — if you’ve selected “350 bar only,” 700 bar is excluded from recommendation regardless of mass / volume score.
For programme-specific cylinder design, send us your H₂ mass, mission profile, envelope constraints, and refuelling infrastructure — we’ll give you cylinder specs, regulator pairing, and ballpark cost in 3 working days.