Chemistry Seminar with Dr. Mark Allendorf at 4:00pm

Abstract: Metal hydrides are widely used as reducing reagents in a variety of chemical reactions. They are also useful for hydrogen storage and can be economically attractive alternatives to compressed gas and liquid hydrogen. Their thermodynamic and kinetic limitations remain vexing problems, however. Material-based hydrogen storage is a classic Goldilocks problem: thermodynamic stability is a requirement for long-term storage, but a material cannot be so stable that impractically high temperatures are required for hydrogen release. This presentation will describe strategies we developed using functionalized nanoporous hosts to overcome the chemical limitations of both stable and metastable metal hydrides. These hosts include porous carbon, Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs), Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), and reduced graphene oxide. We also achieved the surprising result that a metal hydride within nanoporous carbon can have a higher usable capacity than bulk material. These conclusions motivate additional research, driven by the need for economically viable hydrogen storage for a wide range of use cases and by the potential of hydrogen as an energy vector with gravimetric capacity exceeding that of lithium ion batteries.