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nanotimes News in Brief

“Discovering new materials that could help us find a more sustainable energy solution is at the core of the Department of Energy’s mission. Our lab provi- des outstanding experiments to support this mission with great success,” says Kisielowski. “We confirmed the presence of hydrogen in this material through time-dependent spectroscopic investigations with the TEAM 0.5 microscope. This investigation sug- gests that even direct imaging of hydrogen columns in such materials can be attempted using the TEAM microscope.”

“The unique nature of Berkeley Lab encourages cross-division collaborations without any limitations,” said Jeon, now at the University of Ulsan, whose postdoctoral work with Urban led to this publication.

“Here at EETD, we have been working closely with industry to maintain a hydrogen storage facility as well as develop hydrogen storage property testing protocols,” says Samuel Mao, director of the Clean Energy Laboratory at Berkeley Lab and an adjunct engineering faculty member at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. “We very much enjoy this collaboration with Jeff and his team in the Materials Sciences Division, where they developed and synthe- sized this new material, and were then able to use our facility for their hydrogen storage research.”

Adds Urban, “This ambitious science is uniquely well-positioned to be pursued within the strong col- laborative ethos here at Berkeley Lab. The successes we achieve depend critically upon close ties between cutting-edge microscopy at NCEM, tools and experti- se from EETD, and the characterization and materials know-how from MSD.”

11-02/03 :: February / March 2011

This schematic shows high-capacity magnesium nanocry- stals encapsulated in a gas-barrier polymer matrix to create a new and revolutionary hydrogen storage composite material. © Jeff Urban

Ki-Joon Jeon, Hoi Ri Moon, Anne M. Ruminski, Bin Jiang, Christian Kisielowski, Rizia Bardhan & Jeffrey J. Urban: Air-stable magnesium nanocomposites provide rapid and high-capacity hydrogen storage without using heavy-me- tal catalysts, In: Nature Materials AOP, March 13, 2011, DOI:10.1038/nmat2978: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat2978

http://foundry.lbl.gov/ http://ncem.lbl.gov/ http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/