Solid-State Materials for Hydrogen Storage

Energy is the very basic requirement for the sustainability of the human race and its development. Immediate action is needed to accelerate the development of technology that uses renewable energy sources such as sunlight, wind, tides, hydrogen, and waste heat management. Hydrogen is used to generate electricity in fuel cells, it has the potential to solve two major issues: the need for clean energy and global warming. Hydrogen is abundant and efficient source of clean energy as earth has a lot of hydrogen in the form of water and hydrocarbons and it exhibits complete combustion yielding only water. But a high risk is involved in hydrogen-based technology due to the lightest known element and highly inflammable nature of hydrogen. Materials need to be developed for appropriate hydrogen production, storage and detection to make economic, efficient and safe hydrogen technologies in order to compete with fossil fuels and for introducing a hydrogen-based economy. Several methods of compressed storage, hydrogen liquefaction, chemical absorption, and physical adsorption have been proposed so far for storing hydrogen. The broad use of hydrogen energy is hampered by concerns about compressed and liquified hydrogen’s safety, cost, and transportation. Due to its superior transit and storage capabilities, solid hydrogen storage materials are viable hydrogen storage technique. There are numerous physical and chemical ways to store hydrogen. Each storage method has benefits and drawbacks of its own. The key difficulties for hydrogen storage materials are hydrogen storage density, dehydrogenation temperature, and dehydrogenation kinetics. In this chapter, we have discussed various methods of the hydrogen storage and current developments in hydrogen storage materials as well. Merits and demerits of different materials and potential solutions given in literature for various challenges in these technologies have been discussed.