Abstract

The newly found B40 is the first experimentally observed all-boron fullerene and has potential applications in hydrogen storage. Here we investigate the binding ability and hydrogen storage capacity of Ti-decorated B40 fullerene based on DFT calculations. Our results indicate that Ti shows excellent binding capability to B40 compared with other transition metals. The B40 fullerene coated by 6 Ti atoms (Ti6B40) can store up to 34 H2 molecules, corresponding to a maximum gravimetric density of 8.7 wt%. It takes 0.2-0.4 eV/H2 to add one H2 molecule, which assures reversible storage of H2 molecules under ambient conditions. The evaluated reversible storage capacity is 6.1 wt%. Our results demonstrate that the new Ti-decorated B40 fullerene is a promising hydrogen storage material with high capacity.

Highlights

  • Ti will be stronger than Ni, and the strongest among the chosen metal species

  • The stable binding of Ti on B40 leads to promising applications of the Ti-decorated B40 fullerene

  • The geometric and electronic structure of the substrate is little affected by the addition of H2 molecules, which is important for the realization of reversible hydrogen storage

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Summary

Introduction

The Nmax is calculated to be 5 and 5.5 for Ti@hexagon and Ti@heptagon, which demonstrates that the single Ti-decorated B40 can store up to 5 and 6 H2 molecules when Ti atom binds to hexagon and heptagon, respectively. We use average adsorption energy (Eads) to evaluate the adsorption capability of the Ti-decorated B40 fullerene. With all of the Δ E larger than 0.2 eV/H2, our simulations confirm that the maximum adsorption numbers of H2 molecules can reach 5 for Ti@ hexagon and 6 for Ti@heptagon, respectively.

Results
Conclusion

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