Accurate, safe and cheap hydrogen detectors functioning under a wide range of conditions are a vital ingredient for using hydrogen as an energy carrier. A novel, safe and cheap way to detect hydrogen is using optical detectors based on thin film hydrides. Recently, we found that hafnium is capable of detecting hydrogen under an extremely wide sensing range. In addition, we showed that hafnium has thermodynamics that cannot be explained on the basis of a classical solid solution model. Although hafnium can be used over a wide range of pressures, it can only probe until hydrogen pressures up to 100 Pa. Therefore, we consider other materials (Ta, PdAu, HfNi) that have similar beneficial properties as hafnium, but can measure higher hydrogen pressures. We propose to study the structural properties to gain insights in the applicability as a sensor and the thermodynamics of these materials.