Energy of Hydrogen

Archive for the ‘Hydrogen storage’ Category

One of the most difficult challenge in the utilization of hydrogen energy is storage. Can enough hydrogen be stored aboard a car to power fuel cells for hundreds of miles without refueling? Hopefully that will change, but for now it is difficult to store a lot of hydrogen in a small volume without cooling it or placing it under very high pressure.

Hydrogen is quite difficult to store or transport with current technology, because a  gram of hydrogen gas occupies about 11 liters of space at atmospheric pressure, so for convenience the gas must be intensely pressurized to several hundred atmospheres and stored in a pressure vessel. These options are not practical for everyday use. Other storage methods such as metal hydrides method which uses an alloy that can absorb and hold large amounts of hydrogen by bonding with hydrogen and forming hydrides, method of carbon nanotubes which uses structures resembles a series of tightly packed straws comprised mostly of carbon atoms (white balls) with columns of zinc ions (blue balls) running down the walls, hydrogen molecules (green balls) adsorbed in carbone nanotubes into the tubes densely, and chemical hybrids method which involves chemical hydrides with water or alcohols. All this methods suffer from insufficient capacity or require low temperatures.

It is possible to use a new type of storage material that has an incredibly large surface area enfolded into a small amount of space. This material utilizes molecules self-assembled into a structure that contains nano-sized pores that can be loaded with hydrogen. Some materials of this type boast 4,500 square meters of surface area per gram, meaning it has the potential to store a lot of hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be released by application of a disrupting electric or magnetic field.