AZL Launches Thermoplastic Pressure Vessel Benchmarking Project with Toyota

AZL Joint Partner Projects bring engineers and decision-makers from participating companies actively into the process, combining technical depth with strategic perspective.

As global transformation towards sustainable hydrogen storage accelerates, thermoplastic composites emerge as a transformative opportunity. Building on long-standing collaborations with leading companies across the value chain, AZL Aachen GmbH has launched a new Joint Partner Project titled 'Thermoplastic Pressure Vessels – Benchmarking Design-for-Manufacturing Strategies to Optimize Material Efficiency and Cost.' Among the first participants, Toyota Motor Europe underscores the strategic importance of comparative evaluation of design and manufacturing concepts for thermoplastic composite pressure vessels.

Advancing Innovation in Thermoplastic Composites
Thermoplastic composites offer unique advantages for high-pressure vessel applications, including automation, energy efficiency, recyclability and reprocessability. However, when thermoset-based design principles are applied unchanged, the intrinsic processing and performance potential of thermoplastics remains largely untapped.

For this reason, AZL's new project adopts a holistic approach encompassing thermoplastic-focused vessel designs, manufacturing processes and material configurations to maximize economic and technical performance.

Dr. Martin Kerschbaum, Manager ME22 at Toyota Motor Europe, describes Toyota's motivation for participating in the project: "The use of thermoplastic resins in the manufacture of high-pressure hydrogen storage vessels is of great interest to Toyota. This is because it offers potential advantages in terms of design, processing, performance and circularity. Comparing and evaluating different design and manufacturing strategies for high-pressure vessels based on thermoplastic composite materials is of critical importance. Gaining additional insights into key factors affecting material efficiency, manufacturing scalability and realistic cost structure scenarios is an important part of this process. The applications, the structured approach of AZL that combines knowledge accumulated in composite materials and manufacturing systems with expertise across the entire value chain, provides valuable input to Toyota for the development of innovative storage systems."

A Structured and Comparative Development Framework
The nine-month project brings together international industry partners to investigate new thermoplastic vessel concepts. The project comprises three work packages:

WP1: Market and Technology Overview – mapping current technologies, certification protocols and relevant intellectual property.

WP2: Conceptual Design and Manufacturing Strategies – development of vessel architectures optimized for thermoplastics, evaluation of design variants and definition of manufacturing system concepts.

WP3: Performance, Cost and Manufacturing Benchmarking – quantifying material usage, recyclability, cycle times, unit cost and carbon impact to guide industrial decision-making processes.

From Knowledge to Competitive Advantage
AZL Joint Partner Projects bring engineers and decision-makers from participating companies actively into the process, combining technical depth with strategic importance. Participants gain not only access to engineering outputs and benchmarking data, but also develop in-house expertise to communicate more effectively with customers, suppliers and investors in hydrogen and CNG markets.

Philipp Fröhlig, Head of Industrial Services at AZL Aachen GmbH, states: "AZL Joint Partner Projects create trusted environments for knowledge sharing. Our goal is to enable each participant to make sound technical and commercial decisions for their own product roadmap. Whether new players or established companies, all firms benefit from collective benchmarking, faster learning with firsthand information and a shared understanding of the factors that determine efficiency and competitiveness in thermoplastic pressure vessel technologies."

AZL's Proven Expertise in Pressure Vessel Technologies
AZL is long recognized as a leading industrial centre in the field of composite pressure vessels. Previous Joint Partner Projects and R&D programmes covered hydrogen and CNG vessel design, filament and towpreg winding and thermoplastic processing technologies. Within the RWTH Aachen University ecosystem, AZL brings together design, simulation, manufacturing and testing infrastructure for component development, prototyping and manufacturing system development.

This expertise is further strengthened through the AZL Joint Collaboration Group "Composite Pipes & Vessels," a dedicated platform for continuous collaboration, knowledge sharing and networking across the global composites industry. The new project builds on this foundation, offering participants both short-term insights and long-term strategic connections.

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