Dixon, Arduengo Excel in Hydrogen-powered Vehicle Research

November 9th, 2009 - Filed under: News

(l-r) Drs. David Dixon and Anthony Arduengo

(l-r) Drs. David Dixon and Anthony Arduengo

Two College of Arts and Sciences professors’ efforts in hydrogen research could potentially lead to more affordable hydrogen-powered vehicles on the roadways.

The work of one of those professors, Dr. David Dixon, professor and Robert Ramsay Chair in the department of chemistry, was highlighted recently in a paper published in a leading chemistry journal and co-authored by Dixon, UA graduate student Ted Garner, UA postdoctoral fellow Myrna Matus and four researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The group’s work is part of a larger project within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence to accelerate hydrogen and fuel cell research. Dr. Anthony J. Arduengo, Saxon Professor in the department of chemistry, is the second UA faculty member involved in this overall research effort.

Dixon said one of the challenges in producing affordable hydrogen-powered vehicles is finding ways to store and transport hydrogen safely inside a vehicle. His group’s research has centered on a material called ammonia borane that effectively stores hydrogen and releases it. Dixon said that to be effective, however, the spent fuel generated by the release of the hydrogen needs to be recycled back into the usable fuel, ammonia borane. The paper Dixon’s group co-authored details the first real viable solution of how this is done.

“We have to recycle it to make it an economically viable and environmentally friendly process,” Dixon said. “It’s a whole different way of energy production where you think about recycling the byproduct of your energy source. This differs from what we do today where we release the spent fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere after burning gasoline in our car’s engine.”

Dr. Arduengo said that in the last year his research has focused a different avenue for effectively storing and transporting hydrogen – the use of carbon.

“If we can develop new chemistry for carbon, it allows us to take advantage of what nature has already identified as the best element for carrying energy and for carrying hydrogen,” he said. “There are not so many looking at those systems.”

The Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence is a collaboration among multiple university and industrial partners across the country, Los Alamos and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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