Hydrogen fuel cell EVs: coming soon to a road near you

By Sophie Vorrath on 15 August 2012

A team of engineers from the University of New South Wales has made an exciting discovery that it hopes will help advance the cause of hydrogen fuel as a viable alternative energy source – particularly for use in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

The researchers from UNSW’s Materials Energy Research Laboratory in nanoscale (MERLin) have demonstrated, for the first time, that hydrogen can be released and reabsorbed from a promising storage material, overcoming a major development hurdle.

The team synthesised nanoparticles of a commonly overlooked chemical compound called sodium borohydride and encased them inside nickel shells, with the resulting unique “core-shell” nanostructure demonstrating what they describe as “remarkable” hydrogen storage properties.

“No one has ever tried to synthesise these particles at the nanoscale because they thought it was too difficult, and couldn’t be done. We’re the first to do so, and demonstrate that energy in the form of hydrogen can be stored with sodium borohydride at practical temperatures and pressures,” said Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou from the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW.

“By controlling the size and architecture of these structures we can tune theirproperties and make them reversible – this means they can release and reabsorb hydrogen,” says Dr Aguey-Zinsou, lead author on the paper. “We now have a way to tap into all these borohydride materials, which are particularly exciting for application on vehicles because of their high hydrogen storage capacity.”