Abstract
Hydrogen is a promising alternative energy carrier that can potentially facilitate the transition from fossil fuels to sources of clean energy because of its prominent advantages such as high energy density (142 MJ kg−1; ref. 1), great variety of potential sources (for example water, biomass, organic matter), light weight, and low environmental impact (water is the sole combustion product). However, there remains a challenge to produce a material capable of simultaneously optimizing two conflicting criteria—absorbing hydrogen strongly enough to form a stable thermodynamic state, but weakly enough to release it on-demand with a small temperature rise. Many materials under development, including metal–organic frameworks2, nanoporous polymers3, and other carbon-based materials4, physisorb only a small amount of hydrogen (typically 1–2 wt%) at room temperature. Metal hydrides were traditionally thought to be unsuitable materials because of their high bond formation enthalpies (for example MgH2 has a ΔHf∼75 kJ mol−1), thus requiring unacceptably high release temperatures5 resulting in low energy efficiency. However, recent theoretical calculations6,7 and metal-catalysed thin-film studies8 have shown that microstructuring of these materials can enhance the kinetics by decreasing diffusion path lengths for hydrogen and decreasing the required thickness of the poorly permeable hydride layer that forms during absorption. Here, we report the synthesis of an air-stable composite material that consists of metallic Mg nanocrystals (NCs) in a gas-barrier polymer matrix that enables both the storage of a high density of hydrogen (up to 6 wt% of Mg, 4 wt% for the composite) and rapid kinetics (loading in <30 min at 200 °C). Moreover, nanostructuring of the Mg provides rapid storage kinetics without using expensive heavy-metal catalysts.
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Acknowledgements
Work at the Molecular Foundry and the National Center for Electron Microscopy was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. J.J.U., K-J.J., H.R.M., and R.B. are supported under the US Department of Energy Hydrogen Storage Program. A.M.R. is supported as part of the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We thank J. R. Long and T. J. Richardson for critical discussions and exchange, and appreciate the support of S. Mao for PCI measurement.
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J.J.U., K-J.J., and H.R.M. conceived and designed the experiments. K-J.J., H.R.M, A.M.R., and R.B. performed the experiments. K-J.J, B.J. and C.K contributed towards TEM, EELS acquisition and analysis. K-J.J., H.R.M., A.M.R., and J.J.U. analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Jeon, KJ., Moon, H., Ruminski, A. et al. Air-stable magnesium nanocomposites provide rapid and high-capacity hydrogen storage without using heavy-metal catalysts. Nature Mater 10, 286–290 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2978
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2978
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