Nanostructured palladium foams offer exciting potential for applications in diverse fields such as catalyst, fuel cell, and particularly hydrogen storage technologies. We have fabricated palladium nanowire foams using a cross-linking and freeze-drying technique. These foams have a tunable density down to 0.1% of the bulk, and a surface area to volume ratio of up to 1,540,000:1. They exhibit highly attractive characteristics for hydrogen storage, in terms of loading capacity, rate of absorption and heat of absorption. The hydrogen absorption/desorption process is hysteretic in nature, accompanied by substantial lattice expansion/contraction as the foam converts between Pd and PdHx.
@article{arxiv.1710.05906,
title = {Tunable Low Density Palladium Nanowire Foams},
author = {Dustin A. Gilbert and Edward C. Burks and Sergey V. Ushakov and Patricia Abellan and Ilke Arslan and Thomas E. Felter and Alexandra Navrotsky and Kai Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.05906},
year = {2017}
}