Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory received $1.6 million in federal grants to investigate using hydrogen instead of petroleum as a primary fuel source.

The federal funding allows scientists at the Ames facility to research new, feasible ways to use and reuse hydrogen fuel cells.

“There are several areas, or themes, within this funding effort related to fuel — one is hydrogen storage materials. This is our area,” said Marek Pruski, a scientist at Ames Lab.

He said the Ames research team is looking for materials that could be used in fuel cells, contain high hydrogen content and could easily give up their hydrogen atoms and be “recharged” at some type of fueling station.

“The cells could produce electricity as long as hydrogen is supplied as a fuel, with water being the only exhaust,” Pruski said.

Victor Lin, associate professor of chemistry, said the team is looking at a process that can generate a series of hydrogen-rich solid materials, that can store, release and store hydrogen multiple times over.

“The goal is to bypass petroleum and find materials that can store, release and store hydrogen again and again,” he said.

The grant money, that will be spread out over three years, is part of the Department of Energy’s $64 million Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, according to an Ames Lab press release. One of the biggest obstacles researchers face is figuring out ways enough hydrogen could be carried onboard by a vehicle.

Hydrogen can be stored as a liquid, but needs very low temperatures to do so, a factor not suitable for automobile production, Pruski said.

“We hope to understand the mechanisms involved in solid-state transformations within materials like metal hydrides,” he said. “Our goal is to synthesize a series of new types of complex metal hydrides with useful behaviors during discharge and recharge stages.”

Lin said the specific material he will be working with is lithium aluminum hydride. His job will be researching the properties of the hydride after it has been shrunk to a nanometer size that, proportionally, is about one-hundredth the size of a virus.

“When you shrink materials to nanometers, they start showing interesting chemical and physical properties. We discovered a new kind of material that could actually transform the metal hydride material or increase its surface area,” he said.

It’s like drilling holes into solid materials until it looks like Swiss cheese, Lin said. Once the material is porous, it has a larger storage capacity and can hold more hydrogen.

Other team members include principle investigator and professor of science and engineering Vitalij Pecharsky, professor of science and engineering Scott Chumbley and Purusottam Jena, a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jena said the team will also look at catalysts that could be added to the hydrides.

“We will be looking at the bonding properties among hydrogen and other light elements like magnesium, aluminum and boron to determine if the addition of different catalysts can be manipulated,” he said. “We expect that the material can merge and that the materials can be used in automobiles. I think we are quite a ways behind in the application of having car on the street — there are a lot of challenges ahead.”