Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Storing Hydrogen with Nanobeads

The New Scientist has an interesting article today about using plastic nanobeads to store hydrogen efficiently.  Hydrogen is a great fuel, but it has energy density issues (i.e. you need a large volume of hydrogen to store enough energy to be useful.)  You can store it as a liquid, but this requires it to be kept extremely cold.  One proposed solution has been to store Hydrogen in hydrides.  However, these materials can burst into flames when exposed to Oxygen in the air, not exactly a desired trait when designing a car for instance.

The work discussed in this article uses nanobeads of ammonia-borate which essentially surround the hydrogen and protect it from exposure to oxygen.  When heated however, they'll release the hydrogen, allowing its use as a fuel.  The beads in this form actually function as a liquid, so it should be easy to adapt existing infrastructure to their use.  Apparently there still remain challenges in recharging the beads with Hydrogen though.

The company making the nanobeads is Cella Energy.

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