Hydrogen Tank Manufacturing: Steel to ABB Robots

A hydrogen car or truck carries its fuel in a few cylinders that hold gas at up to 700 bar and have to stay safe for years of filling and emptying. Hydrogen tank manufacturing is the business of making those cylinders, and over a few decades it has moved from heavy steel bottles to carbon fibre wound over a plastic liner. This post covers how hydrogen was stored before composites, how filament winding machines and the first robots got into tank plants, what changed in 2026 with robotic lamination and new tank shapes, and where ABB robots could take over handling and inspection.

The high pressure hydrogen tank of a Toyota Mirai, shown in a cut open car at the 2016 São Paulo motor show. Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From steel bottles to wound carbon fibre

Hydrogen has been moved and stored in steel for a long time. Germany's first 240 kilometre hydrogen pipeline, in the Rhine-Ruhr area, was built in 1938 from regular pipe steel and still runs today. Industrial gas went out in Type I cylinders, made entirely of steel or aluminium. They are simple and tough but heavy, and they top out around 200 bar for steel and 175 bar for aluminium. A welding shop or a laboratory can live with that. A vehicle carrying hydrogen at those pressures would need a huge, heavy tank to get any useful range.

A truck with a hydrogen tube trailer, the long steel cylinders used to move compressed gas by road. Photo: Privateconfidential1970 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

So makers started wrapping the cylinder. Type II tanks wind glass, aramid or carbon fibre around a metal cylinder and reach about 300 bar. Type III tanks put a full composite shell over an aluminium or steel liner and reach 700 bar. Type IV tanks, like those in the Toyota Mirai, use a polymer liner wrapped in carbon fibre, also rated for 700 bar. The first Type IV tanks for 700 bar were demonstrated in 2001, and the Toyota FCHV was among the first fuel cell vehicles on the road with them.

A Toyota FCHV, one of the first fuel cell vehicles on the road with Type IV tanks. Photo: Hatsukari715 / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Every one of these wrapped tanks is made by filament winding. Fibres soaked in resin are wound under tension over a rotating mandrel. In a gas tank the mandrel is the liner itself, so it stays inside the finished part and stops the gas from leaking out. For LPG and CNG containers the usual tool is a four-axis winding machine. Industrial robots came into the process around 2005 to 2007, when MF Tech in France and TANIQ in the Netherlands began winding with six-axis robots, which can reach shapes a lathe-style machine cannot.

Filament winding of the P80 solid rocket motor case: fibre bands laid over a rotating mandrel. Photo: Gdipasquale1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Hydrogen tank manufacturing in 2026

The pressure now is on volume. Mikrosam, a winding machine builder based in Prilep, North Macedonia, has described complete automated lines for hydrogen tanks with fast fibre splicing and spool changes, automatic resin mixing, robot or gantry manipulators, continuous curing ovens and quality control software. The company has also said its newest winders run at more than five metres of fibre per second with very high fibre tension. The carbon overwrap is the costly part of a tank. Researchers keep looking for ways to put fibre only where the load needs it, especially in the domed ends.

A Toyota Mirai with its battery and hydrogen tank exposed, showing how the tank sits under the rear of the car. Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In September 2026 the German robotic lamination company Cevotec named KCompositeLab of Seoul its sales partner in South Korea. KCompositeLab will support makers of aerostructures and composite pressure vessels with Cevotec's SAMBA systems, in which robots place individual fibre patches on complex moulds. The same month CompositesWorld reported that HÖRMANN Vehicle Engineering in Chemnitz is leading HyWheelTank, a project running from July 2026 to October 2028 that will test carbon fibre ring pressure vessels inside the wheels of a wheel loader on real building sites.

A Caterpillar 950 GC wheel loader. HyWheelTank will test ring shaped hydrogen tanks inside the wheels of a loader. Photo: Oto Zapletal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

No ABB robot has been reported in a hydrogen tank line, so what follows is a possibility. A finished tank is long and heavy, and its surface needs careful handling, so an arm such as the ABB IRB 6700 could load liners into winders and move wound tanks into curing ovens. Fitted with a fibre placement head, the same kind of arm could reinforce domes, a process our post on carbon fibre composites covers. GoFa CRB 15000 cobots could fit valves and bosses or carry inspection sensors, and the whole cell can be laid out first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large panel at dhp technology, the size of robot that could load liners and move wound tanks. Photo: ABB

What comes next for tank plants

The first push is toward fewer manual steps. Many lines still need people to load liners, splice fibre, carry tanks between stations and check them at the end. Robots can take most of that handling, and conveyors with robot pickers can link winding, curing and testing into one flow. Fuel cell makers are moving the same way, as our post on fuel cell stack assembly shows. At home the effect is indirect: cheaper tanks would help hydrogen cars, buses and backup power systems compete with batteries.

A hydrogen fuel cell truck on show at IAA Transportation in Hanover, 2024. Photo: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tank shapes are changing as well. HyWheelTank swaps the simple cylinder for rings that fit the space inside a wheel, and Type V tanks drop the liner altogether, with designs rated up to 1,000 bar. Those shapes are hard to wind on a classic machine, which favours six-axis robots, fibre patch placement and other ways of laying fibre on curved surfaces. Every tank also has to be checked before it holds gas at 700 bar, so automated inspection will take up more of the line.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Cost, safety and skills are the open problems. Carbon fibre is expensive, and a robot cell only pays off if the line runs at volume, which depends on how fast hydrogen vehicles sell. Tanks must be pressure tested and certified, and handling has to be gentle enough that a robot gripper never becomes the source of damage that inspection then has to find. Programming winding paths and patch layouts takes people who understand both composites and robots, and few plants have enough of them yet.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

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