SOLAR TODAY - May 2011 - Innovative Design

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advances | tech breakthrough Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs From left, a scientific team that included Christian Kisielowski, Anne Ruminski, Rizia Bardhan and Jeff Urban has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of nanocomposites for high-capacity hydrogen storage. Team members not shown are Ki-Joon Jeon, Hoi Ri Moon and Bin Jiang. New Technique for Hydrogen Storage Two factors limit widespread adoption of hydrogen as a clean-burning motor fuel: a cheap low-carbon technique for manufacturing it, and a compact, safe way to compress, store and transport it. A team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed a new solid composite material for hydrogen storage, consisting of nanoparticles of magnesium metal sprinkled through a matrix of polymethyl methacrylate, a polymer related to Plexiglas. The pliable nanocomposite rapidly absorbs and releases hydrogen at modest temperatures without oxidizing the metal after cycling. The group claims a major breakthrough in materials design for hydrogen storage, batteries and fuel cells. “This work showcases our ability to design composite nanoscale materials that overcome fundamental thermodynamic and kinetic barriers to realize a materials combination that has been very elusive historically,” says Jeff Urban, deputy director of the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience center at Berkeley Lab (foundry.lbl.gov). Urban, along with coauthors Ki-Joon Jeon and Christian Kisielowski, used the TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful electron microscope, located at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, another DOE facility housed at Berkeley Lab. Observing individual magnesium nanocrystals dispersed throughout the polymer, the researchers were able to track defects — atomic vacancies in an otherwise-ordered crystalline framework — to learn about the behavior of hydrogen within this new class of storage materials. To investigate the uptake and release of hydrogen in their nanocomposite material, the team turned to Berkeley Lab’s Energy and Environmental Technologies Division, whose research is aimed at developing more environmentally friendly technologies for generating and storing energy, including hydrogen storage. This research is reported in a paper titled “Air-stable magnesium nanocomposites provide rapid and high-capacity hydrogen storage without heavy metal catalysts,” appearing in the journal Nature Materials and available at nature.com/nmat. Co-authoring the paper with Urban, Kisielowski and Jeon were Hoi Ri Moon, Anne M. Ruminski, Bin Jiang and Rizia Bardhan. This work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science. — Berkeley Lab 12 May 2011 SOLAR TODAY solartoday.org Copyright © 2011 by the American Solar Energy Society Inc. All rights reserved.
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