Nanoconfinement of LiBH4: synergies with doped/decorated graphene

AURELIEN GASNIER; JULIAN JUAN; FABIANA GENNARI

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Advanced Materials and Nano-technology for Energy and Environmental Sustainability; 2018

CONICET-The Royal Society

We focus on reducing the temperature of hydrogen release/uptake in LiBH4 by its nanoconfinement in mesoporous carbonaceous matrix. In particular we want to apply graphene to this area. Our objective is to take advantage of graphene as a platform to be functionalized, both with heteroatoms (N, B) and metallic coordination nanoparticles (Ni, Co). To do so we developed an original approach to incorporate graphene in a resorcinol-formaldehyde matrix by diffusion of the resin precursors through a hydrogel of graphene. We demonstrated this approach was viable, as the pore size can be controlled and the presence of graphene did not alter the hydrogen capacity of LiBH4 (13.8 %wt). Actually the same methodology is applied to hydrogels of N-doped graphene, and a marked diminution of the hydrogen release temperature is observed for a give pore size. We aim to take advantage of this N-doped graphene core to promote the decoration of the matrix with metallic nanoparticles.