Hydrogen can be used as a storage for electric energy. Hydrogen may become an energy vector, whichcould be used and transported easily. For the hydrogen sector to develop and mature, production, storageand consumption should be researched and optimized.This PhD is dedicated to hydrogen solid storage in metal hydride. This technology consists in usinga reversible and exothermic chemical reaction between an alloy and hydrogen. The hydrogen is capturedinside the metal lattice and can be released with the endothermic opposite reaction. The main factors whichimpact the performance of this technology are the choice of material, the heat flow management and thesystem used. Its main advantages lay on safety and energy compactness. Its main drawbacks come from theweight of the system. When the material absorb hydrogen, its volume increases. To contain this materialin an airtight environment, it is mandatory to know how stress develop on the container that contains thematerial. The cycles of dilatation and contraction of the material, when it is loading or unloading hydrogen,is called breathing.This research begins with a large spectrum presentation of hydrogen. Then comes a chemical and structuralcharacterization of the material : LaNiCoMnAl. Its Composition-Temperature-Pressure characteristicsare given. The material exhibits granular properties and is structurally characterize using laser grain sizing,shape measurement and X-Ray tomography. The typical length scale of LaNiCoMnAl particles is 20 micrometers.The third and fourth chapters are concerned with the experimental behavior. A sample is placed ina stress controlled environment where its density is measured during cycling. The other experiment places asample in a fixed volume. In that case, the stress exerted on the material is recorded and measured duringcycling. In the last chapter, numerical simulations using the Discrete Element Method are used. The materialis modeled by X shaped clusters and studied with different friction parameters and boundary conditions.Following other works done on other materials, these experiment showed a different behavior of LaNi-CoMnAl compared to Ti-Cr-V. During breathing, LaNiCoMnAl exhibits a decrease in density even whensubmitted to a relatively large stress. The rate at which the density decreases is lowered when the confinementpressure increases. When the material is placed in a fixed volume, the stress increases with increasingpoured mass. Numerical simulations show a decrease in density when the friction parameter is high enough.It validates the hypothesis that material parameters play a major role in the macroscopic behavior of metalhydride during breathing.