Nanotechnological Aspects in Materials for Hydrogen Storage

Abstract

A nanotechnological app#roach aims at making tailor‐made developments for storage materials by combining different scientific disciplines and focussing on processes on the microscale. The approach has already been successful in achieving major advances in the field of novel solid materials for hydrogen storage. However, further breakthroughs are necessary to reach the goal of storage systems for fuel cell‐driven, mobile applications.

Nanomaterials for renewable energy production and storage

“…[253][254][255][256][257][258] An increased surface area and porosity in nanostructures offer additional binding sites on the surface and in the pores that could increase storage mainly through physisorption. The possibility of storing a significant amount of hydrogen on high surface area density materials has been a key driver in the investigation of the hydrogen sorption properties of nanotubes, graphite sheets, metal-organic frameworks and template ordered porous carbons.…”

“…217,[253][254][255][256][257][258] Nanomaterials can increase the kinetics of uptake and release; the sorption characteristics can be fine-tuned by controlling the particle sizes. With a metal hydride (whether the hydrogen is stored interstitially or held by complex ligands) the kinetics of both absorption and desorption, and the heat transfer, can be improved by an order of magnitude simply by reducing the grain size of the metal.…”

“…The fundamental mechanisms for solid-state hydrogen storage include chemisorption and physisorption. 217,[253][254][255][256][257] Physisorption mainly involves the adsorption of hydrogen molecules on the surface of materials through the van der Waals interaction. [253][254][255][256][257] The van der Waals force is a weak intermolecular force.…”

Pillared Graphene: A New 3-D Network Nanostructure for Enhanced Hydrogen Storage

“…22,23 Their high surface area combined with the increased adsorption sites leads to higher storage capacities establishing them as better candidate materials than CNTs. 4,22 Nevertheless, carbon based materials possess a superior structural stability and amenability to a wide range of processing conditions, keeping them in the race for commercial applications. The only thing that is missing is a way to increase their storage capacity.…”

“…2,3 Controversially, high temperature materials like Mg-based alloys can reach a theoretical maximum capacity of 7.6 wt %, suffering though from poor hydrogenation/ dehydrogenation kinetics and thermodynamics. [3][4][5] In every case, metal alloys, besides the cost, are heavy for commercial production focused on mobile applications.On the other hand, light nanoporous materials can store hydrogen by physisorption that allows fast loading and unloading. However, as the interaction between H 2 and host material is dominated by weak van der Waals forces, only a small amount of H 2 can be stored at room temperature.…”