Magnesium and Doped Magnesium Nanostructured Materials for Hydrogen Storage

Hydrogen is an attractive fuel for many applications because of its high energy density as molecular hydrogen, as well as the clean exhaust produced when burned with oxygen. One significant challenge to the widespread adoption of hydrogen, for mobile applications in particular, is the inability to efficiently store large amounts of readily accessible hydrogen in small volumes at ambient temperature and pressure. This chapter describes the current research on one particularly interesting candidate for hydrogen storage, nanostructured magnesium. The synthetic methods currently used to control the size and shape of nanostructured magnesium are described, as are the measured kinetics of hydrogen storage, the modeling used to explain the observed kinetics, and theoretical models that can be used to guide experimental efforts.