Reported by: Duan Congwen
Translated by: Tian Tian
Edited by: Daniel Penistone
Recently, Professor Hu Lianxi of the School of Materials and his research group made important progress in production methods of nano-sized aluminum hydride (AlH3). The research paper Solid State Synthesis of Nano-sized AlH3 and its Dehydriding Behaviour was published in the journal Green Chemistry (impact factor 8.02). The innovativeness and importance of the research was highly appreciated by reviewers so as to get a priority publication. The research group also published 3 related papers of the research results mentioned above, in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (impact factor 4.49), Dalton Transactions (impact factor 4.20) and Royal Society of Chemistry Advances (RSC Advances, impact factor 3.84) respectively. The first author of all these papers is Duan Congwen, a fourth-year Ph.D. student of the School of Materials. Corresponding author is the supervisor Professor Hu Lianxi. HIT is the first signature unit.
Theoretically, the hydrogen content of AlH3 reaches up to 10.8%. As a high capacity energy storage material, AlH3 has extremely important application prospect in civil and national defense industry. But the traditional liquid phase method used to produce AlH3 materials has a lot of problems, including the expensive price of raw materials, harsh conditions for synthetic technology, high cost of production and low efficiency. Not only is it difficult to put into practical use, it is also hard to produce nano-sized AlH3 materials. The research group of Professor Hu Lianxi developed a new technology to produce nano-sized AlH3 materials by solid state synthesis with mechanical force, which took cheaper metal hydride as raw materials and produced nano-sized AlH3 without adding any organic solvent during the production. It has good dehydriding properties under the condition of 100-200°C. Compared with the traditional liquid phase method, the new method has a prosperous industrial prospect because of its low cost, short process and environmental protection characteristics.
