(283a) Overview of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Engineering Research Efforts for On-Board Hydrogen Release From Chemical Hydrides

An overview of Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) research results in support of the DOE Hydrogen Storage Engineering Center of Excellence (HSECoE) will be presented. The purpose of the HSECoE is to design and implement novel engineering strategies for the on-board release of hydrogen from hydrogen storage media (i.e., metal hydrides, chemical hydrides, and sorbents). Los Alamos National Laboratory's research scope within the HSECoE includes fuel gauge sensor development, shelf-life modeling of hydrogen storage media, kinetics analyses and rate model development of chemical hydrides, designing and modeling novel chemical hydride reactors, and impurity identification, scrubbing and mitigation. Recent LANL results to be presented include: fuel gauge sensor development?demonstrated novel fuel gauge sensor with metal hydrides; shelf-life modeling?data collected from DSC and TGA were modeled to accurately predict thermal aging characteristics of candidate chemical hydrides (solid and liquid ammonia borane formulations); kinetics analyses and rate modeling?data collected from kinetics analyses were regressed into rate models that accurately predict reactor performance with liquid ammonia borane formulations; novel chemical hydride reactors?novel reactor schemes have been developed for the startup and transient operation using liquid ammonia borane formulations; impurity identification, scrubbing, and mitigation?ammonia, borazine, and diborane generated from AB have been identified and quantified using TGA-IR-MS, and can be scrubbed using various commercially available adsorbents. Impurity mitigation strategies include additives and accurate temperature control. In addition, the minimum impurity levels of borazine and diborane for the safe and effective operation of a fuel cell will also be presented.