Emanuel Bahn, Leidy A. Hoyos Giraldo, Vitalii Kuznetsov, Irene Calvo-Almazán, Mohamed Zbiri, Michael M. Koza, Thomas C. Hansen, Paul F. Henry, Alain Lapp,Stephanie Pouget, Monica Mesa, Peter Fouquet
[ Carbon ]
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies demands the development of efficient energy storage and energy transformation methods, in particular for mobile applications. In our research, we focus on materials that will help to make an efficient use of hydrogen as energy carrier. For this, we have studied the hydrogen storage capacity and the hydrogen transport properties of diverse porous carbon materials.
In collaboration with researchers from Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, we have now studied the structure as well as the hydrogen sorption and diffusion behaviour of a novel porous carbon, D-96-7, that was derived from aniline based polymers. The aniline offered a source of nitrogen during the formation of the material delivering a highly N-doped carbon. The new material has no micropores, but still a very high specific surface area (i.e., it can store large amounts of hydrogen), due to a dense network of medium sized pores with a high curvature. We believe that it is this high curvature and the deviations from the graphite symmetry that cause the very fast hydrogen diffusion that we observed in neutron time-of-flight measurements.
