National Lab Develops Material for Safe Hydrogen Storage

(Energy.gov)

Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California have designed a new composite material that allows hydrogen to be stored safely and at high densities, while still making it easily accessible. The team’s findings appear online in the journal Nature Materials (paid subscription required).

The inability to find a storage medium for hydrogen has slowed progress in using this clean, lightweight energy source as a replacement for fossil fuels. The storage material needs to be able to absorb hydrogen to keep stable the stored hydrogen gas. At the same time, the storage material must release hydrogen on demand with a small rise in temperature, thus limiting the amount of energy needed.

Researchers have tried locking hydrogen into solids, packing larger quantities of hydrogen into smaller volumes with low reactivity, to keep this volatile gas stable. However, most of these solids can only absorb a small amount of hydrogen and require extreme hot or cold temperatures to boost their overall energy efficiency.

The team from Berkeley Lab — part of the U.S. Department of Energy — have designed a new composite material for hydrogen storage with nanoparticles of magnesium metal sprinkled through a matrix of polymethyl methacrylate, a polymer related to Plexiglas. This pliable nanotech composite absorbs and releases hydrogen at modest temperatures without oxidizing the metal. The lab says this is a major breakthrough for hydrogen storage, batteries, and fuel cells.

The Berkeley Lab scientists used TEAM 0.5 — the world’s most powerful electron microscope at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, located on the same campus — to observe individual magnesium nanocrystals dispersed throughout the polymer. The high-resolution imaging enabled the researchers to track atomic-level defects in an otherwise-ordered crystalline framework. The lab says these images provided insights into the behavior of hydrogen with this new class of storage materials.

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