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Title: From Fundamental Understanding To Predicting New Nanomaterials For High Capacity Hydrogen/Methane Storage and Carbon Capture

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1171662· OSTI ID:1171662
 [1]
  1. Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)

On-board hydrogen/methane storage in fuel cell-powered vehicles is a major component of the national need to achieve energy independence and protect the environment. The main obstacles in hydrogen storage are slow kinetics, poor reversibility and high dehydrogenation temperatures for the chemical hydrides; and very low desorption temperatures/energies for the physisorption materials (MOF’s, porous carbons). Similarly, the current methane storage technologies are mainly based on physisorption in porous materials but the gravimetric and volumetric storage capacities are below the target values. Finally, carbon capture, a critical component of the mitigation of CO2 emissions from industrial plants, also suffers from similar problems. The solid-absorbers such as MOFs are either not stable against real flue-gas conditions and/or do not have large enough CO2 capture capacity to be practical and cost effective. In this project, we addressed these challenges using a unique combination of computational, synthetic and experimental methods. The main scope of our research was to achieve fundamental understanding of the chemical and structural interactions governing the storage and release of hydrogen/methane and carbon capture in a wide spectrum of candidate materials. We studied the effect of scaffolding and doping of the candidate materials on their storage and dynamics properties. We reviewed current progress, challenges and prospect in closely related fields of hydrogen/methane storage and carbon capture. For example, for physisorption based storage materials, we show that tap-densities or simply pressing MOFs into pellet forms reduce the uptake capacities by half and therefore packing MOFs is one of the most important challenges going forward. For room temperature hydrogen storage application of MOFs, we argue that MOFs are the most promising scaffold materials for Ammonia-Borane (AB) because of their unique interior active metal-centers for AB binding and well defined and ordered pores. Here the main challenge is to find a chemically stable MOF required for regeneration of the AB-spent fuel. Finally, for carbon capture application of MOFs, we investigate the performance of a number of metal–organic frameworks with particular focus on their behavior at the low pressures commonly used in swing adsorption. This comparison clearly shows that it is the process that determines which MOF is optimal rather than there being one best MOF, though MOFs that possess enhanced binding at open metal sites generally perform better than those with high surface area.

Research Organization:
Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
DOE Contract Number:
FG02-08ER46522
OSTI ID:
1171662
Report Number(s):
Final-Report-UPENN-DE-FG02-08ER46522
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (1)

Crystal Chemistry and Dehydrogenation/Rehydrogenation Properties of Perovskite Hydrides RbMgH 3 and RbCaH 3 journal July 2009