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Material Eases Hydrogen Storage
One of the biggest challenges to using hydrogen as a fuel is finding a way to store it. The lighter-than-air gas makes the perfect fuel—it contains three times the energy of liquid hydrocarbons and when it reacts with oxygen to produce energy the only byproduct is water—but it isn’t easy to contain.
MIT Technology Research News
Today’s hydrogen storage materials hold 2 to 4 percent of their weight in hydrogen, considerably short of the 6.5 percent Department of Energy goal for using hydrogen as an automobile fuel.
Researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of South Florida and Arizona State University have discovered a new class of materials, dubbed metal-organic frameworks, that are simple and inexpensive to manufacture and have the potential to reach the 6.5 percent mark.
The materials also take up and give up hydrogen more easily than current hydrogen storage systems, which chemically bind powdered metal hydrides to hydrogen at high temperatures.
The discovery could remove the principal stumbling block to hydrogen-powered cars.
The method could be ready for production use within five years, according to the researchers. The work appeared in the May 16, 2003 issue of Science.
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