Date of Award

2008

Degree Type

Dissertation

Department

Chemical and Biomedical Engineering

First Advisor

Talu, Orhan

Subject Headings

Nanostructured metals, Hydrogen storage, Nanowires, Hollow tubes, Metals, Hydrogen

Abstract

Searching for new energy sources is highly desirable for the next generations when rapidly changing factors are considered such as population, increasing pollution and exhaustion of fossil fuels. Hence, there is a need for clean, safe and efficient energy carriers or forms of energy that can be transported to the end user. One of these energy carriers is electricity which has been used widely and can be produced from various sources. However, its production from fossil fuels contributes to pollution. On the other hand hydrogen, due to its abundance, light weight, low mass density, high energy density and non-polluting nature attract many researchers' attention to be used as an energy carrier so that the dependence on fossil fuels would be minimized which are responsible for global warming due to harmful emissions to the atmosphere. In addition, hydrogen can be converted to other forms of energy more efficiently through catalytic combustion, electrochemical conversion, etc. However, hydrogen must be handled extremely carefully due to its physico-chemical properties. Its on-board storage is a major challenge because of its high explosiveness and the high cost of the storage process. There are many factors that need to be considered when deciding upon the storage method and the most important ones are safety, gravimetric and volumetric capacities, cost, environmental friendliness, reversibility and release rate. This work is dedicated to study the hydrogen uptake behavior of nanostructured palladium constructed through template-assisted electrochemical deposition process. Hydrogen sorption experiments were conducted using a custom-made volumetric system. Nickel was used as the test metal to tune the electrochemical deposition process before conducting the experiments with palladium. Growth mechanism of the nanostructured metals in various substrates was investigated. Conditions for growing nano-scaled palladium were optimized and the hydrogen sorption experiments were conducted at various temperatures. The pressure

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