As well known most polluting fuels which create are those based on hydrocarbon. Since 1970s the best alternative to replace fossil fuel remained hydrogen.
Unfortunately its potential hasn’t been realized even in small part mainly because of commercial and storage production difficulties.
Researches done on renewable energy sources like hydrogen recently showed up a breakthrough about creating a new storing method. If safe storage and easy access were solved we could say that hydrogen is a cleaner renewable energy source. Traditional way of transforming hydrogen into solids isn’t very successful because too less volume is absorbed while storing and convoluted methods make it not commercially viable.
A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Department of Energy (DOE) have discovered a new material air stable magnesium nanocomposite with an important role in simple storing hydrogen. This composite material consists of “nanoparticles of magnesium metal sprinkled through a matrix of polymethyl methacrylate in fact a polymer related to Plexiglas.”
This nanocomposite is a pliable material capable of absorbing and releasing hydrogen at ordinary temperature without oxidizing the metal. This capacity has been touted as the major step towards a better design for hydrogen storage, hydrogen batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. The scientists have been able to design for the first time successfully composite materials that are nano-scale and which are capable of overcoming the barriers that are thermodynamic and kinetic in nature.
The behaviour of the material was observed via TEAM 0.5 microscopes at National Center for Electron Microscopy. They tracked the hydrogen behaviour in the new storage material. After that they studied the performance of hydrogen in the nanocomposite material at Energy and Environmental Technologies Division.
