Since the 1960’s, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has been an international leader in understanding how hydrogen (in all its isotopic forms) interacts with materials. In the transportation energy realm, our research is mostly focused on developing optimal solid-state methods of storing hydrogen for fuel-cell light-duty vehicles. A limitation of current fuel cell vehicles using high-pressure gaseous storage of hydrogen has been achieving the desired driving range while meeting volume, weight, safety, cost and performance requirements.  Sandia maintains extensive facilities for the design, synthesis and characterization of hydrogen storage materials and has a team of experts to solve important technical problems in this area of research. The SNL team has been developing hydrogen storage systems that can release hydrogen gas with very little energy input, and also that can rapidly take on hydrogen during re-fueling at a hydrogen filling station.  The major hydrogen storage research activities include:

• fundamental studies of hydrogen interactions with solid-state materials;
• design and synthesis of promising on-board reversible hydrogen storage materials with exothermic hydrogenation and appropriate kinetics and cycling behavior;
• understanding processing-structure-property relationships for improved materials performance through compositional, structural, catalytic, and nanostructure modification;
• developing in situ techniques to characterize hydrogen storage materials and elucidate the role of intermediates, defects and interfaces on hydrogen diffusion and reaction pathways;
• engineering and process development to accelerate the transition of the best hydrogen storage materials to a commercial reality.

The unique SNL capabilities are rooted in interdisciplinary research that enables self-assembled materials, tailored alloys, multicomponent composites, destabilized and nanostructured metal hydrides to be conceived, synthesized, characterized and evaluated for vehicular hydrogen storage. The team’s expertise ranges from solid-state physics, surface chemistry, materials theory, simulation, design, and synthesis to using state-of-the-art instruments to evaluate materials performance under various process parameters and extreme environments. Phase equilibrium codes using a large thermochemical hydride database developed by Sandia are used to predict the plateau hydrogen pressure and concentration of all relevant species at equilibrium. State-of-the-art experimental capabilities available at Sandia and through our technical collaborations include numerous glove-boxes and Schlenk lines, high-pressure stations (>2000 bar H₂ pressure), PCT and Sieverts instruments, in situ X-Ray and neutron diffraction, SEM, STM, TEM, TGA-DSC, STMBMS, FTIR, Raman, NMR and synchrotron-based soft-x-ray emission and absorption spectroscopies.  Multiple cutting-edge studies are carried out through collaborations with other national laboratories, universities and companies.