Hydrogen Storage on Nanoporous Carbon Foam for Electrochemical Applications

To be able to mitigate the threat of climate change, we need an alternative to fossil fuels. The use of hydrogen in fuel cells is an ideal candidate because hydrogen can be produced in many different ways and has a high energy density. However, one challenge in using hydrogen as a fuel is its storage. Storing hydrogen as compressed gas typically requires large pressures to meet US Department of Energy (DOE) targets, which leads to large losses during compression. By using solid state storage, we can use lower pressures for storage. Of the different kinds of solid state storage, physisorption on carbon materials has great potential because of its fast kinetics, reversibility, and the cost effectiveness of carbon materials. In this research, we investigate the storage of hydrogen gas through physical adsorption on a sodium ethoxide-derived carbon foam. This carbon foam has all the necessary requirements of a good hydrogen sorbent: very large surface area and a large micropore volume. This material is also easy to synthesize: sodium ethoxide is pyrolyzed in N 2 to make carbon, which is then washed in DI water and vacuum filtered. Unlike many other high surface area carbon materials, this carbon foam does not require a two-step carbonization-activation process, nor does it require a sacrificial template. This means it is more scalable and energy efficient compared to other synthetic carbon materials. [1,2] The hydrogen adsorption capability of this material is tested at both 77K and 298K at elevated pressures (up to 9.5 MPa). Both the excess hydrogen uptake and the total hydrogen uptake are discussed. The values obtained are comparable with benchmark materials such as MOF-5 and IRMOF-20, which have 8 wt% and 10 wt% total uptake at 10 MPa, respectively, [3] and could plausibly meet US DOE targets for light duty vehicle application (5.5 wt% total uptake) at a much lower pressure than conventional compressed gas storage (usually 70 MPa). This work shows the potential of nanoporous carbon materials such as ours to work as a new storage system or as a ‘range extender’ of sorts for existing fuel cell vehicles. [1] Lyth, S. M., Shao, H., Liu, J., Sasaki, K., and Akiba, E., 2014, “Hydrogen Adsorption on Graphene Foam Synthesized by Combustion of Sodium Ethoxide,” Int. J. Hydrogen Energy, 39 (1), pp. 376–380. [2] Choucair, M., and Mauron, P., 2015, “Versatile Preparation of Graphene-Based Nanocomposites and Their Hydrogen Adsorption,” Int. J. Hydrogen Energy, 40 (18), pp. 6158–6164. [3] Ahmed, A., Seth, S., Purewal, J., Wong-Foy, A. G., Veenstra, M., Matzger, A. J., and Siegel, D. J., 2019, “Exceptional Hydrogen Storage Achieved by Screening Nearly Half a Million Metal-Organic Frameworks,” Nat. Commun., 10 (1), pp. 1–9.