Magnesium hydride for hydrogen storage

Magnesium hydride synthesis goes back almost 100 years with the pyrolysis of ethylmagnesium halides (Jolibois, 1912) to give a mixture of magnesium hydride, magnesium halide and ethylene  

However pure magnesium hydride was obtained in 1951 by the pyrolysis of diethylmagnesium at c. 400 K in vacuum  

This tends to produce an off-white finely divided solid that is pyrophoric. Other methods include the treatment of diethylmagnesium with diborane or lithium aluminium hydride  

More recently reacting Mg with hydrogen at 200 bar at 850 K with a catalyst gives magnesium hydride in a larger form which is not pyrophoric  

The commercial production of light metal hydrides is of significant importance for future hydrogen storage application development (Eigen et al., 2007). Since the process temperature must be significantly below the equilibrium pressure and the melting temperature of Mg is 925 K then 

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Magnesium hydride for hydrogen storage 375 designs for different applications. 

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