External Electric Fields and Hydrogen Storage

Wednesday, February 03 2010

It has been difficult to find materials that can efficiently and safely store and release hydrogen with fast kinetics under ambient temperature and pressure, but an international research team has developed a process using an electric field.

The team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University; Peking University in Beijing; and the Chinese Academy of Science in Shanghai; have identified a new theoretical approach that may make the synthesis of hydrogen fuel storage materials less complicated and improve the thermodynamics and reversibility of the system.

“Although tremendous efforts have been devoted to experimental and theoretical research in the past years, the biggest challenge is that all the existing methods do not meet the Department of Energy targets for hydrogen storage materials. The breakthrough can only be achieved by exploring new mechanisms and new principles for materials design,” said Qiang Sun, Ph.D., research associate professor with the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) team.

“We have made such an attempt, and we have proposed a new principle for the design of hydrogen storage materials which involves materials with low-coordinated, non-metal anions that are highly polarizable in an applied electric field,” he said.