Evaluation of Hydrogen Storage in Metal Organic Frameworks by Bridged Hydrogen Spillover

Hydrogen has the potential to be the next energy carrier. The ability to use hydrogen in fuel cell technologies depends largely on the ability to store hydrogen efficiently. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) belong to an interesting set of materials that consists of porous channels and have been shown to carry potential for hydrogen storage when added to metal catalysts. MOFs alone show no potential to store hydrogen, but when added to metal catalyst they can exhibit a spillover effect to increase hydrogen storage capacity. The key critical issues with MOFs are to validate the promises that MOFs can provide with spillover, since spillover intricately linked to more standard H2 storage mechanisms. The current project focuses on the synthesis of Isoreticular Metal Organic Framework-8 (IRMOF-8) added to platinum on Activated Carbon (AC) and bridged together with sucrose to enhance the spillover effect. In order to reach hydrogen storage goals, a method must be proven to have enough capacity for the adsorption/resorption (reversibility) at ambient and 120 bar reasonable pressures. With the tremendous interest in spillover materials for hydrogen storage, NREL and DOE have dedicated resources to synthesize specific materials and to develop, perform, and validate the requisite measurements