"In what could be a breakthrough on the road to a pollution-free hydrogen economy, researchers say they have developed a “crystal sponge” material that can store nearly three times more hydrogen than any other known substance.
Obstacles to mass market vehicles that some day run on hydrogen include storage capacity. Test cars that use hydrogen in fuel cells to create an electric propulsion system now get just 150 miles or so on a tank the same size as those in gasoline cars, which can travel 300 or 400 miles on a tank.
Chemists at UCLA and the University of Michigan claim their material is the first to achieve the kind of storage capacities required to make hydrogen fuel practical. They are publishing their findings in late March in the Journal of the American Chemical Society."
The material was developed by UCLA chemist Omar Yaghi, who described it as just one in a large class of compounds he invented in the early 1990s.
