The fast charge / discharge of the MH containers will be achieved by optimising geometry, size and layout of metal hydride beds to be characterised by improved heat exchange performance. The optimisation, on the basis of advanced engineering solution (composition, and layout of the MH bed) will be carried out on the basis of experimental tests of the prototypes and their thermal modelling. The manufacturing cost issues will be very important. The cost reduction will be achieved by the optimisation of the design of the MH containers (increase the size without loss of dynamic performance), as well as its adaptation to mass production. The ways of the optimisation will be based on the approach recently suggested by German project participants (HZG) as applied to light weight MH materials.

The MH containers have to provide maximum reversible hydrogen storage capacity at the operating temperatures (20–50 °C) and H₂ pressures (5–200 bar for surface applications and 3–20 bar for the underground ones). Taking into account specifics of the application where system weight is not critical, the containers may not be optimised towards light weight. However, main requirement is in fast charge dynamics to provide hydrogen refuelling time shorter than 15 minutes.

For MH containers for H₂ compression the cost implications are less critical. At the same time, fast H₂ charge / discharge dynamics (improved heat transfer performances) is very important to provide maximum throughput capacity. Reducing the weight of the container is important for this application since it will result in the reduction of heat losses in the course of temperature cycling and thus will increase the efficiency of thermally driven hydrogen compression.