Designing Novel High Capacity Multicomponent Hydrides for Near-Ambient Solid State Hydrogen Stores

There is a desperate need for a compact hydrogen storage solution if products like hydrogen cars and hydrogen fuel cell powered portable electronics such as laptops and mobile phones are to be realised. Without a compact hydrogen storage material for vehicle applications, there is unlikely to be any significant displacement in the use of fossil fuels for transportation. A major drawback to most high capacity solid state hydrogen storage materials is the high decomposition temperature needed to release the hydrogen. Multicomponent hydrides (e.g. mixing a complex hydride with a binary hydride) offers the only solution to maintain high storage capacities (>9wt.%) and tailor the thermodynamics of the system to give 1 bar equilibrium temperature <150oC. This project will design novel multicomponent systems employing material design strategies like dopant destabilisation, dehydrogenation catalysts and nanoporous containment to design and experimentally validate novel multicomponent hydride systems with high storage capacities, able to be cycled at temperatures below 150oC. The delivery of such a system will mark a step change in the performance of solid state hydrogen storage materials and will deliver a viable storage technology for a range of fuel cell applications.