Abstract
Abstrate Recently, nanostructured materials have been widely investigated for the application of hydrogen storage because of their ultrahigh specific surface areas which are efficient for physisorption. Spillover effect is employed to enhance the adsorption capacity by deposition or doping with catalysts on the nano-structured materials. Hydrogen molecules are firstly dissociated into hydrogen atoms on the catalyst, and then the split atomic hydrogen is spilled over the surface of nanomaterials. In this study, the spillover effect on the hydrogenation of TiO2 nanotubes was studied by deposition of Co and Ni. The as-prepared TiO2 nanotubes were identified to exhibit H2Ti3O7 structure. The diameter of nanoparticles was approximately 10 nm. The samples were pretreated at 600K in H2. The volumetric and electrochemical methods were applied to measure the hydrogen adsorption capacity. The as-prepared TiO2 nanotubes absorbed only 1.4 at% H. With deposition of Co, the hydrogen adsorption capacity increased to 13 at% which is nine fold increase than that of the as-prepared TiO2 nanotubes. With deposition of Co, the hydrogen adsorption capacity increased to 9.5 at% which is approximately seven fold larger than that of the as-prepared TiO2 nanotubes.