Hydrogen Solubility and Atomic Structure of Graphene Supported Pd Nanoclusters

Palladium pyramids promising for storing hydrogen

30 July 2022

Tiny pyramids of palladium arrayed on a graphene surface are promising for storing hydrogen, which is touted as the fuel of the future.

Hydrogen can be produced from sunlight and it produces only water when combusted, making it an ideal environmentally fuel. But it is challenging to store, needing to be either pressurized or liquefied, which are both energy-intensive processes. This is spurring the search for materials capable of storing hydrogen.

Now, a team led by researchers from the University of Hamburg in Germany has found a strong contender in a regular array of palladium nanoparticles on graphene.

The team found that hydrogen tends to attach to the surfaces of the nanoparticles, making it easy to recover — just heating the material releases hydrogen. This overcomes a common problem of using palladium to store hydrogen, namely the difficulty in extracting stored hydrogen.

Supported content

References

1. ACS Nano 15, 15771−15780 (2021). doi: 10.1021/acsnano.1c01997