Two-dimensional material has potential as hydrogen store

One of the long-term stumbling blocks to the so-called hydrogen economy – where hydrogen replaces fossil fuels as the basis for much energy applications, either through combustion or by its use in a fuel cell to generate electricity – is the difficulty in storing the gas. The very lightweight and small size of the H₂ molecule makes it likely to leak from many forms of containment, and it is potentially explosive. Moreover, the very high pressures needed to store useful volumes of hydrogen gives pause to automotive designers, as some drivers may be nervous about driving a vehicle with a high-pressure explosive gas on board.

One solution to this problem which is being investigated intensively springs from hydrogen’s tendency to absorb into solid materials: another artefact of the small size of the molecule, which allows it to tuck into the lattice atomic or molecular structure of its host. The question has generally been, which material? A team of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology, the University of Tsukuba and Kochi University of Technology report in Nature Communications that the answer may be one of the family of two-dimensional materials similar to graphene.