Confined LiBH4: Enabling fast hydrogen release at ∼100 °C

LiBH4 has been attracted tremendous research interest as a hydrogen storage material for mobile applications due to its very high gravimetric hydrogen capacity of 18.6 wt%. However, its real use is heavily hindered by the high operational temperature that is required above 350 degrees C to release hydrogen with various recent improvements. This is obviously much higher than the ambient temperature of about 100 degrees C. In this paper, we report the synthesis of LiBH4 confined by SBA-15 template, which achieves fast hydrogen release of LiBH4 at similar to 100 degrees C. The confined LiBH4 system starts to release hydrogen at only 45 degrees C and can release 8.5 wt% hydrogen (on the basis of LiBH4 itself) within 10 min at 105 degrees C, which opens a new window and overcome the most challenging barrier to realize practical hydrogen storage of LiBH4. Copyright (C) 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.