Modeling of low temperature adsorption of hydrogen in carbon nanopores

International audienceDuring the last two decades a lot of effort has been devoted to develop a material that could store an applicable amount of hydrogen by physisorption. All these attempts have failed. Therefore, computer simulations have been used to guide the experiment and to determine in advance the potential storage capacity of a particular structure.Usually, to simplify the interaction model and to spare the computation time, the simulations of hydrogen adsorption in nanoporous materials use the superatom representation of H2 molecule with semi-empirical values of interaction model. This approach totally neglects the non-spherical shape of the molecule. However, this information may be crucial for the precise evaluation of the amount stored and the structure of the adsorbed layers, as packing of the spherical and elongated molecules is not the same. Therefore in the present work we compare the structure and storage of H2 in slit-shaped, infinite carbon pores of nanometric width (from 0.6 nm to 2.5 nm), modeled using united atom (UA) and all atom (AA) representation of H2 molecule.We used Grand Canonical Monte Carlo technique to simulate H2 adsorption isotherms at T = 77 K, either within Material Studio software (for AA model) or home-made code (for UA model). We shows that in both models the calculated amount of stored hydrogen is similar. This results confirm the validity of previous UA model-based estimations of storage capacity reported in the literature. Moreover, our simulation shows that UA model slightly overestimates the stored amount in narrowest pores (0.6 – 0.8 nm) and underestimates it in pores of width of 1.0 -1.2 nm. For pores larger than 1.5nm both models give the same results, at least at the adsorption pressure range studied here (1 – 700 bar). In particular, these observations do not depend on pressure.Both models shows that the H2 layer directly in contact with the pore wall is dense, with density largely exceeding the bulk density of liquid hydrogen at 33 K. This results confirm the recent experimental observations of hydrogen densification under confinement in carbon-based nanospaces [1, 2]