High-Density Hydrogen Storage in Space-Filling Polyhedral Sorbents

Increasing the volumetric capacity of hydrogen storage is critical to bringing fuel-cell powered vehicles to market- High-pressure, compressed-hydrogen tanks are large, heavy, and expensive- High-pressure compression is also costly, energy-intensive, potentially hazardous, and is made even more challenging due to the non-idealities of hydrogen gas at elevated pressures- Physical adsorption of hydrogen into the nano-scale pores of high surface area materials provides a potential alternative to high-pressure compressed hydrogen leading to higher-density gas storage at far lower pressures- The challenge is that these porous materials tend to be light and powdery – requiring even larger tanks- Hence there is a real market need to effectively densify these high-performance sorbents without changing their inherent pore structure, surface area, or ability to both store and deliver hydrogen rapidly-