Much less attention has been paid to natural gas or methane as a substitute fuel for automobiles, and millions of gas-powered, environmentally-friendly vehicles are traveling on roads around the world, yet they still account for only a small Part of the reason is that such vehicles require bulky and expensive high-pressure tanks to store enough fuel to meet the driver's needs.
A new methane storage material accelerates the adoption of natural gas-driven vehicles.
Now, researchers have developed a new material that can store large amounts of methane at low pressures, and if they can demonstrate how to mass-produce the material, the study may be able to accelerate the development of large-capacity fuel tanks and push gas-driven cars to be more widespread To adopt.
As an alternative to high-pressure tanks, researchers have created a variety of sponge-like, porous crystalline materials that absorb methane at modest pressures and release it when pressure is reduced. One such material is the organic group- Metal atoms (MOF). Among them, the best adsorbent is MOF named HKUST-1, which was founded in Hong Kong in China by researchers in 1999. The study confirms that each cubic centimeter of adsorbent can store 180 It is not bad, but it still falls short of the target volume ratio (v / v) set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOC).
Now DOE's goal is at hand: Researchers led by chemist David Fairen-Jimenez at the University of Cambridge in the UK have proposed an easy way to make HKUST-1 denser and increasing v / v to 259, so that for the first time Close to DOE's goal.
'Everything started with a mistake made by a Ph.D. student in the lab,' said Fairen-Jimenez, who was then experimenting with various formulations that convert HKUST-1 into a sol-gel gel. The particles of HKUST-1 are suspended in an ethanol-based solution and the solution is put into a centrifuge to "drive out" most of the solvent. He then plans to put the container in a microwave oven to dry, but inadvertently, a bottle is dropped Under a vacuum hood and spent a night there, which made the ethanol evaporate slowly, and that was where the key was. The next morning, Tian realized that he was leaving behind a highly dense HKUST-1 material. Some adjustments made the researchers create the best methane storage sorbent to date, and the team reported the result in a recent issue of Nature - Materials.
