Student Invents Material With Highest Known Hydrogen Storage Capacity
A Ph.D. student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has developed a new method for storing large amounts of hydrogen at room temperature using a version of the super-material graphene. Reportedly his material is inexpensive, easy to produce, and can store almost twice the amount of hydrogen than the U.S. Department of Energy’s ultimate target of 7.5% by weight at room temperature.
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One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the widespread introduction of hydrogen-based vehicles is the fact that storing it with current technologies requires huge amounts of effort for little reward. Hydrogen itself is such a low-energy-density substance that you have to find ways to compress gigantic amounts of it into very small spaces to make it usable.
Up to now the available technologies were either putting it in a tank under very high pressure (read: explosive), or cooling it to incredibly low temperatures (like a couple hundred degrees celsius below freezing) and turning it into a liquid and then putting it in a tank (read: waste of energy). You might see how neither of these are really the optimal solution to storing hydrogen.
The holy grail of hydrogen storage would be a material that can collect huge amounts of it in a lightweight and compact form at room temperature—getting around the masses of energy needed to simply store it in the first place.
Well, now a bright student has figured out how to do just that—and then some. Javad Rafiee is a doctoral student in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. To come up with his solution, he used a combination of “mechanical grinding, plasma treatment, and annealing” to maximize graphene’s hydrogen storage capacity. The nanoscopic graphene molecules are arranged in a “chain-link” fence structure providing an extremely high surface area for the hydrogen to cling to. Couple that with graphene’s earth-shatteringly low density and you have the holy grail of hydrogen storage.
Javad recently won a $30,000 student prize for his work, but I’m thinking that’s just the beginning for this whiz kid. I’m sure there are plenty of other hurdles to overcome in this quest, such as how to get the hydrogen in and out of the structure quickly and how to scale it up and commercialize it, but, nonetheless, it’s exciting.
Source: EurekAlert!
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March 4th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Great news!
The Nocera process is making hydrogen easier to make every day!
We are living in the Hydrogen Economy as we speak!
March 4th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Cool! This is the kind of breakthru that could be a complete game changer. Hopefully, there’ll be a fish at the end of this line.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
I have always been excited about hydrogen as a clean fuel but I have a friend who says we can only produce large amounts of Hydrogen by using electricity off the grid that was produced with the dirtiest of fuels, coal, and that the same oil execs who sold us out to the oil cartel now want to control the supply of hydrogen through their established distribution chain of existing gas stations, charging whatever they want and we’ll have to pay. Does that make any sense?
March 5th, 2010 at 7:16 am
No we are not living in a hydrogen economy, and probably never will!
As great an improvement as this is, the hydrogen economy is still a rotten idea, it is several times less efficient than a pure play all electric auto economy. With fast refuel times, its attraction comes with a high cost.
The facts again
Using natural gas to convert into hydrogen by steam reforming is no more than about 60% efficient and it would require the reforming to be done locally at the gas station, other wise piping hydrogen from afar would add far more losses. Once the hydrogen is in the tank, fuel cells will add another loss, typically 50-60% efficient. Net result maybe 25% of the natural gas energy can be used for transport. It would be better to just convert the car to burn the natural gas directly, and so hydrogen is a huge CO2 emitting gas via the natural gas.
If you use nuclear power or other cheap excess grid power, splitting water is also inefficient, maybe 60-70% of the electrical power can be carried by the hydrogen. And the fuel cell is still there. More likely than not, it would be coal that provides the power, so how clean is the hydrogen economy then.
Or just store the electricity directly in a battery for closer to 90% efficiency.
The never ending support for hydrogen (its just a poor energy carrier, not an energy source) shows a great lack of science education.
Still I think its still worth doing the research into hydrogen storage and fuel cells despite the above, perhaps the laws of physics can be turned upside down. Battery technology seems to be going just where we want it to go at current rates of development so hydrogen economy is most unlikely to ever make any sense.
March 5th, 2010 at 7:47 am
Ha ha take that, Bush haters! We have had to listen to a never-ending litany of liberals who hated the ‘hydrogen economy’ from the minute George Bush espoused it.
Guess what, haters. There are tens of thousands of people working on making hydrogen a viable energy source. And no, in the end it will NOT be derived from fossil fuels.
Try to get over it, ok?
March 5th, 2010 at 7:49 am
“…. it’s just a poor energy carrier…” boo hoo, sniff sniff……
yeah, I guess that’s why rockets use it.
March 5th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Jay Tee,
Come on dude. Saying all that just makes you appear unintelligent… which I don’t think is the case. Taking the objective stance, certainly there were quite a few people, including liberals, who were completely soured on the hydrogen economy for purely emotional reasons when Bush championed it at the start of his presidency. However, there are plenty of rational reasons to be opposed to a hydrogen economy at this point too, as John Jakson pointed out. A transportation infrastructure based on liquid fuels, regardless of type, is much less efficient than one based on electricity–that’s a fact. If we could find a way to produce hydrogen cleanly, quickly, cheaply and in our own garages, the hydrogen economy would then be a starter… but until then it makes more sense to go with electricity.
March 5th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Graphene should work nicely. No if only USDOE would implement H2 production on a massive scale like proposed by the pilot procject at COET-FAU:
http://coet.fau.edu/?p=pilot
We would have the new hydrogen economy!
March 5th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Jay Tee
Sure hydrogen is great for rockets, never said it wasn’t.
Also hydrogen and politics got diddly squat to do with each other (unless you connect them through oil companies). I’d forgotten about GWB support for hydrogen, I’m sure a few dems must have supported it too.
In the end only the science and economics matter. At this point I don’t see the efficiency losses in hydrogen and fuel cells ever being fixed. On the other hand while batteries sort of suck right now with soso 100 mile ranges and long charge times, the R/D progress suggests both will be overcome in a decade or so.
In the end, a hydrogen car is just an electric car with an expensive battery replaced by an even more expensive fuel cell and hydrogen store.
March 5th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Bush esposed (?) the virtues of Hydrogen at that time only because he knew (or at least, his handlers knew) that the technology was in such an infant state there was no way it could compete with oil and ICE’s. That’s why he (was told to) champion Hydrogen instead of EV, wind, or Geothermal technology.
March 5th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
For some applications a fuel cell might be better than an electric battery in the future, so its good to continue research in that area. I suppose one needs to look at energy density by volume and weight/mass when comparing electric batteries and hydrogen storage before claiming one is better? I suggest that we strongly consider reevaluating the idea that every vehicle in every region needs to use the same energy source. Right now, most of us use hydrocarbon fuel (petrol) to move vehicles, this is like everyone having their hands in the same pot, the ebb and flow of events around the world impact the price of oil. If we start using different energy sources we will be better off, less effected by these events. It will not be confusing for joe six pack either, just go to the super market if you want to see how easily he can navigate a dizzying array of options. I am Joe six pack. As for hydrogen production, it seems like there needs to be a far more efficient and cheaper way to produce it before it becomes a contender for the masses.
March 6th, 2010 at 1:24 am
Every time anything involving hydrogen comes out, the hydrogen haters have to follow. Sheesh. It’s like talking about global warming: all the religious fanatics jump on the chance to spew their b.s.
Folks, you have to realize that there are some real limitations to your beloved battery vehicles. They will NEVER: read N E V E R be able to replace fossil fuels entirely. Why?
Heavy transport and machinery. That’s why.
I don’t care how energy dense a battery gets, it won’t be able to provide 800+ miles of power to a big rig capable of carrying 44,000 pounds of freight at highway speeds.
With some other kind of fuel? Yep. Hydrogen will probably be it, assuming commercial freight hauling goes with electrics at all. Which it may not.
Now before the rest of you idiots who know nothing about commercial transportation start spouting about trains, let me bash that hope too.
Trains are NOT just-in-time delivery capable and never will be. Trains do NOT haul produce, for instance. Why? It will rot before it arrives. Sure, they carry longer-lived items and frozen foods all the time, but not lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries and so forth.
So get off your hydrogen-hated high horses and try to open your eyes a little. The future is not going to be a “hydrogen economy” or a “battery economy.” It’s going to be a “multi-fueled” economy.
The sooner you realize that you are thinking in terms of petroleum (one fuel) and start thinking in terms of future fuels (many fuels), the better.
March 6th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I accept that this development can store lots of Hydrogen.
But as the article alludes to, just how do you liberated it to do useful things? If it takes a lot
of energy to do that then is this approach even viable?
I think there is much more to this story that has not
been written yet.
March 7th, 2010 at 8:17 am
This is just a refinement of known technology. Aaron is right, it’s going to be a multifuel future, including petroleum. I fly small planes, gasoline is hard to beat for weight/power.
Couple this storage system with the photosynthetic hydrogren production coming out of MIT and we might all be “off grid”.
The real key will be to use less power, I use a TED to monitor my electric use in real time, really helps to see how much power you’re using.
March 7th, 2010 at 11:21 am
The Hydrogen is the same problem asa OIL ! Why ? Beacuse someone will produce it and sell it to you like the BIG OIL do !
THE ELECTRIC POWER is 100% FREE with some SOLAR POWER from solar panels and you are FREE there is nor BIG OIL or BIG HYDROGEN from wich you have to by your miles !!!
March 7th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
BREAKING NEWS
Over on treehugger there is a story about producing Hydrogen directly from water driven by photons or sunshine from the University of East Anglia. The interesting thing about this story is that it claims 60% efficiency which if true is really rather incredible.
If you were to use conventional PVs to convert sunshine into electricity and then use that to split water, the PVs would have to be 100% efficient just to be as efficient as this much simpler system so it turns things upside down if this pans out.
Even when the hydrogen is consumed by a fuel cell, the overall losses there would now be lower than than a PV + battery system. So 0.6*0.5 is now way better than 0.15*0.9. No known conventional PV could match this other than the most expensive cells used in concentrating systems.
Of course the hydrogen farming would now require quite a bit a land but far less than the solar industry. If the hydrogen energy is just put into the grid as electricity from a fuel cell, the farm would still have more than double the efficiency of the 10% to 15% PV industry. But yet the fuel form is more useful to vehicles and would also be useful for other fuel products that are more convenient than hydrogen.
This story if true would be on par with EESTOR actually releasing something.
The only issue I see right now is they use gold, platinum and indium, they need to get onto much cheaper materials to be useful ASAP.