Hydrogen Storage Material May Exceed DOE Standards

A team of investigators may have just discovered a class of power-storing materials that may easily exceed the benchmarks set by the DOE in terms of hydrogen storage.

The US Department of Energy is intent in funding research into hydrogen storage, because this technology is what will make the cars of the future possible.

Given the creeping influence of global warming and climate change on the world, developing methods of keeping carbon dioxide levels in check is critical. The emission of other greenhouse gases needs to be kept in check as well.

But storing hydrogen inside batteries is a very complex task, researchers admit, saying that most materials can only store limited amounts of the stuff. But research is ongoing to find new ones.

Rice University experts recently managed a breakthrough in this field, when they discovered the amazing hydrogen-storage abilities of a class of materials known as metallacarborane.

The material is better at storing hydrogen than what the DOE's benchmarks call for under the Hydrogen Program for 2015. This is tremendous news for the industry.

“A single metal atom can bind multiple hydrogen molecules, but metals also tend to aggregate. Without something to hold them, they clump into a blob and are useless,” explains Boris Yakobson.

He is a theoretical physicist at Rice, and also the leader of the new investigation. He is also the author of a new study detailing the findings, which appears in the latest online issue of the esteemed Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Basically, what the new material does is used a combination of the transition metals scandium and titanium in a way that allows them to hold a load of hydrogen molecules.

While it does so firmly, its grip of the hydrogen molecules is not so tight that they cannot be extracted again when they are needed.

According to theoretical predictions, a metallacarboranes matrix can hold up to 8.8 percent of its weight in hydrogen atoms, a benchmark that reaches and perhaps even exceeds that set by the DOE.

The team leader says that the discovery catches on new meaning when considering that technologies already exist to construct materials that can engulf and fix hydrogen gas.

If these scaffoldings are made of the new class of materials, then the efficiency of the resulting energy storage devices would be outstanding by today's standards.