Tuesday, November 6, 2007 - 9:40 AM
203d

Hydrogen Storage Properties of the Mg-Ti-H System Prepared by High-Energy-High-Pressure Reactive Milling

Young Joon Choi, Jun Lu, Hong Yong Sohn, and Zhigang Zak Fang. Department of Metallurgical Engineering, University of Utah, 135 South 1460 East Room 412, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0114

For hydrogen storage and fuel cell applications, magnesium-based alloys are among the most promising materials due to their high hydrogen content. In the present work, we investigated the hydrogen release/uptake properties of the Mg-Ti-H system. Samples were made from mixtures of MgH2 and TiH2 in molar ratios of 7 : 1 and 4 : 1 using a DP-HEHPM (Dual Planetary-High Energy High Pressure Mill) under 2000 psi hydrogen pressure. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) showed that a large amount of hydrogen (5.91 and 4.82 wt. %, respectively, for the above two samples) was released between 126 and 313°C while temperature was increased at a heating rate of 5°C/min under an argon flow. The temperature at which hydrogen release starts, 126°C, is much lower than that for MgH2 alone, which is 381°C. By fitting the rate curves at various heating rates, the activation energy of dehydrogenation was obtained to be 71 kJ/mol, which is much smaller than that of as-received MgH2 (153 kJ/mol) or high energy high pressure milled MgH2 (96 kJ/mol). In addition, over short dehydrogenation and rehydrogenation cycles, the hydrogen capacity and the starting hydrogen release temperature remained largely unchanged.