US chemists claim to have developed a polymer which could lead to a new kind of hydrogen fuel tank for fuel cell-powered vehicles.

Frantisek Svec of the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory and colleagues from the University of California formulated the highly porous materials from polyanilin, the Royal Society of Chemistry reports.

Professor Svec then applied hypercrosslinking to manufacture a material with a mesh-like structure which keeps the polymer chains apart, and in so doing leaves a material full of nanometre-sized pores.

This results in a surface mesh material that has a high affinity for hydrogen and which has a surface area up to eight times higher than previous porous polyanilines - thus potentially providing a solution to the problem of hydrogen storage in fuel tanks.

Professor Svec conceded, however, that further development of the polymer will be required before his team's research can be considered a practical solution to the compression and liquefying problems encountered in hydrogen storage.

He said: 'We need polyanilines with a much higher surface area - we need small pores, and a lot of them."

Source:

The holey grail of hydrogen storage, 04/12/07
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2008/01/holey_grail.asp

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