A Chemistry Departmental seminar ft: Dr. Mark Allendorf

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 in which nanoporous hosts are used to overcome the chemical limitations of bulk hydrides. In particular, we discovered that metastable hydrides can be thermodynamically stabilized in Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs). Alternatively, some thermally stable hydrides can be destabilized using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) with open metal sites. Finally, we achieved the surprising result that a metal hydride within nanoporous carbon can have a higher useable capacity the bulk material.  Together, these results demonstrate renewed potential for materials-based hydrogen storage applications.