Industrial production of light metal hydrides for hydrogen storage

Light metal hydrides show a high potential for reversible hydrogen storage applications. In view of the potential future storage of large amounts of hydrogen, an economic tonnage scale production will be required. This viewpoint set introduces production methods and discusses the potential for simplifying processing routes and reducing costs in view of an industrial mass production. For this purpose, sodium alanate, for which cost-competitive large-scale production is already considered feasible, is used as an example for future promising hydrides, like complex hydrides or reactive hydride composites. (c) 2007 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.