Eric Ganz

Member of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute; Member of Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment; Reviewer for NSF, DOE, and Scientific Journals.

There is great interest in finding porous solid materials that can store hydrogen for use in fuel cell vehicles. Ideally, these materials would adsorb large amounts of hydrogen gas reproducibly at room temperature and moderate pressure.
A new class of materials has been developed that shows great promise for use in hydrogen storage. These materials are metal-organic framework (MOF) materials. Remarkably, recent experiments by the Yang group have found that IRMOF-8 with bridged Pt catalysts can reversibly store 4 wt% of hydrogen at room temperature and 100 bar pressure using hydrogen spillover. Spillover works by distributing small metal catalysts in the material to dissociate hydrogen molecules into hydrogen atoms that then spillover and bind onto a large surface area substrate. These promising results suggest that even higher storage capacities might be achieved by higher surface area materials such as MOF-177.
We have used accurate ab initio quantum chemistry calculations together with a simple model to study the hydrogen storage capacity of metal-organic and covalent-organic frameworks by spillover. By counting active storage sites, we predict a saturation spillover storage density for IRMOF-1, IRMOF-8, MOF-177, COF-1, IRMOF-16.

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We are looking for a graduate student with experience in quantum chemsitry calculations to continue this work.