An on-board hydrogen storage breakthrough?Researchers at the University of Michigan (body, education) University of Michigan - A large cosmopolitan university in the Midwest USA. Over 50000 students are enrolled at the University of Michigan's three campuses. The students come from 50 states and over 100 foreign countries. have taken ordinary rigid plastics, rearranged their crystalline structures into predictable shapes, and created lightweight materials they believe will be suitable for hydrogen fuel storage. Post-doctoral fellow Adrien Cote led the team that figured out how to slow down the reaction process that normally forms randomly cross-linked polymers so the materials could crystallize crys·tal·lize also crys·tal·ize v. crys·tal·lized also crys·tal·ized, crys·tal·liz·ing also crys·tal·iz·ing, crys·tal·liz·es also crys·tal·iz·es v.tr. 1. in an orderly fashion--something that had never been done with rigid plastics. The covalent co·va·lent adj. Of or relating to a chemical bond characterized by one or more pairs of shared electrons. organic frameworks (COFs) reportedly can be made highly porous to increase storage capacity, and consist of hydrogen, boron boron (bōr`ŏn) [New Gr. from borax], chemical element; symbol B; at. no. 5; at. wt. 10.81; m.p. about 2,300°C;; sublimation point about 2,550°C;; sp. gr. 2.3 at 25°C;; valence +3. , carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen molecules that form strong covalent bonds with each other. These bonds make the materials--Cote says it is possible to modify the COFs to tailor the material to different applications or make it perform better--very robust, though lightweight. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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