Confined LiBH₄: Enabling fast hydrogen release at ∼100 °c

LiBH₄ has been attracted tremendous research interest as a hydrogen storage material for mobile applications due to its very high gravimetric hydrogen capacity of 18.6 wt%. However, its real use is heavily hindered by the high operational temperature that is required above 350 °C to release hydrogen with various recent improvements. This is obviously much higher than the ambient temperature of about 100 °C. In this paper, we report the synthesis of LiBH₄ confined by SBA-15 template, which achieves fast hydrogen release of LiBH₄ at ∼100 °C. The confined LiBH₄ system starts to release hydrogen at only 45 °C and can release 8.5 wt% hydrogen (on the basis of LiBH₄ itself) within 10 min at 105 °C, which opens a new window and overcome the most challenging barrier to realize practical hydrogen storage of LiBH₄.