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The hydrogen adsorption sites in MOF5 were determined using neutron powder diffraction along with first-principles calculations. The metal-oxide cluster is primarily responsible for the adsorption while the organic linker plays only a secondary role. Equally important, at low temperatures and high-concentration, molecules form unique interlinked high-symmetry nanoclusters with intermolecular distances as small as 3.0 Angstrom and H(2) uptake as high as 11 wt %. These results hold the key to optimizing metal-organic framework (MOF) materials for hydrogen storage applications and also suggest that MOFs can be used as templates to create artificial interlinked hydrogen nanocages with novel properties.
Yildirim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.