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Title: NMR study of hydrogen diffusion in metal hydrides containing paramagnetic impurities

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:6215874

The pulsed NMR of hydrogen nuclei in LaH/sub x/ and YH/sub x/ with and without paramagnetic impurities (Ce, Nd, Gd, Dy, Er) was studied. Measurements of proton T/sub 1/ were carried out in the temperature range from 77K to 800K at a resonance frequency of 400MHz. The data for both pure LaH/sub x/ show unambiguously that the hydrogen diffusion rate increases with increasing hydrogen content. It is concluded that increased occupancy of the octahedral sublattice causes the potential wells at octahedral and tetrahedral sites to become shallower and lowers the energy barrier to motion between the two sublattices. For systems with controlled dilute paramagnetic impurities, an additional spin-lattice relaxation process was found and appears to be essentially due to the dipolar coupling between impurity and proton moments. The study showed that the impurity induced relaxation rate is very sensitive to the magnetic moment and relaxation rate of the impurity ion, as well as depending on the host hydride composition. Serious errors in deduced diffusion and electronic structure parameters may be made unless effects of impurities are recognized and allowed for.

OSTI ID:
6215874
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English