Molecular hydrogen storage in fullerenes for use on board fuel cell vehicles

Hydrogen gas is a promising potential replacement for fossil fuels on board vehicles. However, it cannot be commercially used until an energetically inexpensive method is found which reduces a reasonable mass of H₂ to sufficiently small volume. Carbon nanomaterials are a strong potential candidate for this storage material because they are cheap, lightweight and abudant and can store H₂ through physisorption interactions, which in principle allow H₂ to be removed from the storage material easily. Unfortunately, C-H₂ physisorption interactions are weak and so must be optimized (is optimized the right word here - the conclusion is that physisorption tself is too weak - hence the heme dopants for example which I would call hindered chemisorption) before the storage method becomes viable. Therefore, the current project analysed carbon fullerenes to understand the factors which govern the interactions and so indicate the most favourable systems for further study.