Hydrogen Storage by Nanosprings

We have demonstrated that silica nanosprings can reversibly store 0.85 wt% of hydrogen at 20 bar at room temperature. If they are decorated with Pd nanoparticles, they can reversibly store 3.5 wt% of hydrogen at 66 bar at room temperature. We attribute the hydrogen storage capacity of bare nanosprings to their unique geometry, where one nanospring is comprised of 5-8 nanowires coherently coiled. This morphology produces channels, where at the bottom of the channel a stable energy potential at room temperature in which hydrogen can settle. In the case of Pd decorated nanosprings, we believe that spillover promotes atomic hydrogen to diffuse onto the silica nanosprings. Details of this work can be found in our paper.