Solving embrittlement is a multi-billion-dollar question. Why hydrogen causes steels to become brittle and crack is the great conundrum of engineers and researchers looking to develop large-scale transport and storage solutions for the hydrogen age – an era which Australia hopes to lead by 2030.

Hydrogen traps can be introduced into the material microstructure to immobilize or trap absorbed hydrogen, limiting the amount of hydrogen participating in the embrittling process. This study finds that adding the chemical element molybdenum to steel reinforced with Ti-carbides markedly enhances its ability to trap hydrogen.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45017-4 (open access)

  • Shadywack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    8 months ago

    After the story of the blue LED, it just makes me wonder who will find this solution, and my bet is not with conventional thinking based and/or investor driven corporations. In our current industrial and corporate environment, most likely it’s going to be a smaller organization with more radical thinking and forgiving financial metrics that allows exploration in a true R&D based sense.