Storing Hydrogen In An Easier Way, Spillover Effect Explained

Ever thought how Hydrogen is stored in a storage tank? Perhaps very few think about it. Here is something that a group of scientists will astound you. The group has achieved success in Hydrogen storage and also given a satisfactory for the split over effect experienced during such storage.

Conventionally Hydrogen which is lightest material available with us can be stored in two different ways. One is by lowering its temperature to an ultra low -423oC while it can also be stored by pressurizing the gas. The pressure applied in this case is of the order of 5000-10000 Psi. The storage equipment in both of these case and the techniques employed are quite expensive. Cooling Hydrogen will require highly efficient insulation and storing under pressure will require robust and strong pumps which will usually leads to high consumption of energy during the process.

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Image Credit: HowStuffWorks

The group of scientists who were working on this project has published a better way of Hydrogen in the online issue of Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The paper is titled #-Link-Snipped-#. This research group was led by Sow-Hsin Chen of MIT and Yun Liu from NIST.The new technology talks about spillover effect. It says that Hydrogen owes its mobility inside a storage tank to this phenomenon. The researchers used a storage vessel made up of activated Carbon with platinum incorporated in it. With this the Hydrogen atoms are more attached to the surface of storage tank than with adjacent atom thereby involving application of moderate pressure, a mere 500 Psi.

Using the conventional method was quite tricky. You needed to have exactly the same pressure which will only be as much sufficient to store the gas properly. Even a slight excess of pressure would make it difficult for the gas to come out when you want it to burn. The scientists now wish to find the optimum quantity of Platinum that should be used to achieve a maximum possible Hydrogen storage.

With the advancing technology, researchers can now hope to store and use it inside a car. Can we say that this will revolutionize and bring about a major surge in development of Hydrogen powered cars?

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