Hydrogen Storage in Metal-Organic Frameworks

Conventional storage of large amounts of hydrogen in its molecular form is difficult and expensive because it requires employing either extremely high pressure gas or very low temperature liquid. Because of the importance of hydrogen as a fuel, the DOE has set system targets for hydrogen storage of gravimetric (5.5 wt%) and volumetric (40 g L-1) densities to be achieved by 2015. Given that these are system goals, a practical material will need to have higher capacity when the weight of the tank and associated cooling or regeneration system is considered. The size and weight of these components will vary substantially depending on whether the material operates by a chemisorption or physisorption mechanism. In the latter case, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have recently been identified as promising adsorbents for hydrogen storage, although little data is available for their sorption behavior. This grant was focused on the study of MOFs with these specific objectives. (1) To examine the effects of functionalization, catenation, and variation of the metal oxide and organic linkers on the low-pressure hydrogen adsorption properties of MOFs. (2) To develop a strategy for producing MOFs with high surface area and porosity to reduce the dead space and increase the hydrogen storage capacity per unit volume. (3) To functionalize MOFs by post synthetic functionalization with metals to improve the adsorption enthalpy of hydrogen for the room temperature hydrogen storage. This effort demonstrated the importance of open metal sites to improve the adsorption enthalpy by the systematic study, and this is also the origin of the new strategy, which termed isoreticular functionalization and metalation. However, a large pore volume is still a prerequisite feature. Based on our principle to design highly porous MOFs, guest-free MOFs with ultrahigh porosity have been experimentally synthesized. MOF-210, whose BET surface area is 6240 m2 g-1 (the highest among porous solids), takes up 15 wt% of total H2 uptake at 80 bar and 77 K. More importantly, the total H2 uptake by MOF-210 was 2.7 wt% at 80 bar and 298 K, which is the highest number reported for physisorptive materials.