Hydrogen Generation & Storage Made Easy with Nano-Technology

Posted in Fuel Cells | Future Technology | Hydrogen Fuel

Fuels like gasoline, based on hydrocarbon, create

pollution and carbon footprint. Hydrogen has been claimed to be a good
alternative to replace fossil fuel since the 1970s. But hydrogens potential has
not been realized even partially mainly because of storage and commercial
production difficulties. There have been research being done on renewable
energy sources like hydrogen for quite some years. Recently, breakthrough
research has been successful in creating a new method for storing hydrogen.
Difficulties faced in usage of hydrogen
Hydrogen is a cleaner renewable energy source if only the two problems of safe
storage and easy access are overcome. The traditional way of fastening
hydrogen into solids has not been very successful. Too less volume of hydrogen
was absorbed while storing and too convoluted methods like too high heating or
cooling was needed for releasing it which did not make it commercially viable.
New way of storing hydrogen
A team of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab),
Department of Energy (DOE), US have discovered a new material called airstable magnesium nano-composites which can help in storing hydrogen without
complex methodology. This composite material consists of nano-particles of
magnesium metal sprinkled through a matrix of polymethyl methacrylate a
polymer related to Plexiglas.
Advantages of new material
This nano-composite is a pliable material and it is capable of absorbing and
releasing hydrogen at an ordinary temperature without oxidizing the metal. This
capacity has been touted as the major step towards a better design for hydrogen
storage, hydrogen batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. The scientists have been
able to design for the first time successfully composite materials that are nanoscale and which are capable of overcoming the barriers that are thermodynamic
and kinetic in nature.
Observing the new material scientifically
The team observed the material and its behavior via TEAM 0.5 microscope at
National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM). They tracked the behavior of
hydrogen in the new storage material. They further studied the performance of
hydrogen in the nano-composite material at Energy and Environmental
Technologies Division (EETD), at the Berkeley Lab. EETD has been pioneering
research about technologies about renewable energies, their generation and
storage etc including hydrogen.

Role of DOE Nano-scale Science Research Centers (NSRCs)

The NSRCs are a group of five facilities with state-of-art wherewithal to research
in depth about nano-scale materials. The National Nanotechnology Initiative from
DOE has resulted in huge investments for developing the infrastructure of these
facilities. The team has put together and manufactured this new material at
Materials Sciences Division. In words of team member Urban, The successes we
achieve depend critically upon close ties between cutting-edge microscopy at
NCEM, tools and expertise from EETD, and the characterization and materials
know-how from MSD.
The team
Jeff Urban, Deputy Director, Inorganic Nanostructures Facility, Molecular Foundry,
Office of Nano-Science Center DOE, Berkeley Lab, Christian Kisielowski and KiJoon Jeon were the co-authors and Hoi Ri Moon, Anne M. Ruminski, Bin Jiang and
Rizia Bardhan were the rest of the team. DOEs Office of Science supported the
research work.