Hydrogen storage in BC3 composite single-walled nanotube: a combined density functional theory and Monte Carlo investigation

Abstract

This paper applies a density functional theory (DFT) and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations (GCMC) to investigate the physisorptions of molecular hydrogen in single-walled BC3 nanotubes and carbon nanotubes. The DFT calculations may provide useful information about the nature of hydrogen adsorption and physisorption energies in selected adsorption sites of these two nanotubes. Furthermore, the GCMC simulations can reproduce their storage capacity by calculating the weight percentage of the adsorbed molecular hydrogen under different conditions. The present results have shown that with both computational methods, the hydrogen storage capacity of BC3 nanotubes is superior to that of carbon nanotubes. The reasons causing different behaviour of hydrogen storage in these two nanotubes are explained by using their contour plots of electron density and charge-density difference.