Secondment period: 09 March to 08 April, 2019.
The definition and objective of “Hydride4Mobility” project has identified hydrogen storage as a key enabling technology for advancing hydrogen and fuel cell technologies in transportation. Therefore, the project has established goals in different work packages (WP) to illustrate the progress of developing and demonstrating viable hydrogen storage technologies for transportation and stationary applications. The development and characterization of advanced metal hydrides materials for hydrogen storage and compression are of paramount importance for the success of this project. Among these metal hydrides, AB5, AB2 type MH and Mg-based hydrides have attracted much attention for their utilization in hydrogen compression and storage. However, the H2 sorption performance of up-scaled systems comprising these materials is limited by two main challenges: (1) heat transfer (due to low thermal conductivity of MH powder), (2) H2 capacity deterioration during cycling. Carbon-based materials such as graphite or expended natural graphite (ENG) have proved to be very effective to alleviate these two challenges.
Within the WP1 of the project framework, the objective of his secondment at HZG Germany was the experimental characterization of the mixture of metal hydrides and carbon-based materials. More specifically, the analysis of a possible interaction between the carbon and hydrogen or carbon and metal hydrides during the hydrogen sorption cycles. Using a mass spectrometer (MS) coupled with TGA, preliminary results showed that some trace of methane emanated from the nano-composite MgH2-TiH2-C prepared by reactive ball milling. Moreover, the analysis of the XRD patterns did not show evidence of Magnesium carbides formation. However, the evidence of interaction of H with C in the H2 sorption cycling of AB2 and AB5-type hydride was not made due to a difficulty in the preparation of the experimental setup. Nonetheless, this work is set to be continued in the future secondment. He also attended the Hydride4mobility midterm meeting that took place on 14-15 March 2019. In that meeting a comprehensive discussion on the milestones and challenges of the status of the project was taken in detail.
