Special Seminar | Hydrogen storage: perspectives and challenges

Special Seminar: Hydrogen storage: perspectives and challenges

Anton Gradišek

Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia & Washington University in Saint Louis, MO

We live in a society that depends on energy supply. For thousands of years, people were relying on burning wood, until in the last two centuries, since the industrial revolution, the focus has shifted to fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. But those have several issues, production is becoming expensive, they pollute the environment, and burning releases carbon dioxide that contributes to anthropogenic climate changes. Alternative energy carriers are therefore required and one of them is hydrogen. Here, we are specifically interested in use of hydrogen as the fuel for motorized vehicles.

As opposed to fossil fuels, hydrogen reacts with oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity and the side product is water vapor. If hydrogen is produced using renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind power, this process is carbon-neutral. However, one of the bottlenecks on the road to hydrogen economy is storage. Hydrogen at normal conditions is gas – which makes it more difficult to use on-board than liquid hydrocarbons.

In my talk, I will present different approaches to hydrogen storage. These include storage in high-pressure cylinders, cryogenic liquid hydrogen, and solid state storage. Hydrogen can be either physisorbed to a porous nanomaterial, absorbed in a metallic crystal or chemically bound with atoms of light elements to form complex hydrides. In my work, I focus on the last two types of systems. I will present some results of studies using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to explore molecular dynamics and other properties of metal and complex hydrides.

FREE

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