Enhancing the Hydrogen Storage Properties of AxBy Intermetallic Compounds by Partial Substitution: A Short Review

Solid-state hydrogen storage covers a broad range of materials praised for their gravimetric, volumetric and kinetic properties, as well as for the safety they confer compared to gaseous or liquid hydrogen storage methods. Among them, AxBy intermetallics show outstanding performances, notably for stationary storage applications. Elemental substitution, whether on the A or B site of these alloys, allows the effective tailoring of key properties such as gravimetric density, equilibrium pressure, hysteresis and cyclic stability for instance. In this review, we present a brief overview of partial substitution in several AxBy alloys, from the long-established AB5 and AB2-types, to the recently attractive and extensively studied AB and AB3 alloys, including the largely documented solid-solution alloy systems. We not only present classical and pioneering investigations, but also report recent developments for each AxBy category. Special care is brought to the influence of composition engineering on desorption equilibrium pressure and hydrogen storage capacity. A simple overview of the AxBy operating conditions is provided, hence giving a sense of the range of possible applications, whether for low- or high-pressure systems.