Hydrogen storage is recognized as a key technical hurdle that must be overcome for the realization of hydrogen powered vehicles. Metal hydrides and their doped variants have shown great promise as a storage material and significant advances have been made with this technology. In any practical storage system the rate of H2 uptake will be governed by all processes that affect the rate of mass transport through the bed and into the particles. These coupled processes include heat and mass transfer as well as chemical kinetics and equilibrium. However, with few exceptions, studies of metal hydrides have focused primarily on fundamental properties associated with hydrogen storage capacity and kinetics. A full understanding of the complex interplay of physical processes that occur during the charging and discharging of a practical storage system requires models that integrate the salient phenomena. For example, in the case of sodium alanate, the size of NaAlH4 crystals is on the order of 300nm and the size of polycrystalline particles may be approximately 10 times larger ((approx.) 3,000nm). For the bed volume to be as small as possible, it is necessary to densely pack the hydride particles.
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