Abstract
In this work we investigate the inorganic nanotubes of layered tungsten disulfide, as material for hydrogen storage. These nanotubes may allow hydrogen to be either chemi- or physisorbed inside their crystalline structure (in between the layers), inside hollow core of nanotubes, on the surface or in the open interstitial pore spaces of nanotubes' powder mesh. While exposure to molecular hydrogen was found to have measurable but limited absorption rate - up to 0.13 wt.%, the exposure to hydrogen activated by microwave (MW) plasma resulted in much higher value of adsorbed hydrogen of ∼1 wt.%. These observations could be attributed to more effective interaction of activated vs. molecular hydrogen with nanotubes surface due to the strong chemisorption of activated hydrogen compared to weaker physisorption of molecular hydrogen. We report here the results of such exposures and analyze the absorption and diffusion of hydrogen by different methods: adsorption-desorption curves obtained by pressure-composition-temperature isotherm measurements, and hydrogen depth profiles measured by Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy. We found that 5 min exposure to MW plasma at 400 W and 60 Torr (causing local heating up to ∼100 °C) results in substantial hydrogen retention, though some etching of the substrate material may occur during such treatment.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 9837-9841 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | International Journal of Hydrogen Energy |
Volume | 39 |
Issue number | 18 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 15 Jun 2014 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Isai Feldman for assisting with the XRD analysis. This research is supported by the Israel–Korea Renewable Energy Grant of the Israeli and Korean Ministries of Sciences (NRF-2012K1A3A1A31055231) . The authors are thankful to A. Fruchtman and G. Makrinich (plasma laboratory, HIT) for their assistance in choosing the optimal MW plasma parameters.
Keywords
- Activated hydrogen
- Hydrogen storage
- Inorganic nanotubes
- Microwave plasma
- Tungsten disulfide