New, high-strength, hollow, glass microspheres filled with pressurized hydrogen exhibit storage densities which make them attractive for bulk hydrogen storage and transport. The hoop stress at failure of our engineered glass microspheres is about 150,000 psi, permitting a three-fold increase in pressure limit and storage capacity above commercial microspheres, which fail at wall stresses of 50,000 psi. For this project, microsphere material and structure will be optimized for storage capacity and charge/discharge kinetics to improve their commercial practicality. Microsphere production scale up will be performed, directed towards large-scale commercial use. Our analysis relating glass microspheres for hydrogen transport with infrastructure and economics` indicate that pressurized microspheres can be economically competitive with other forms of bulk rail and truck transport such as hydride beds, cryocarbons and pressurized tube transports. For microspheres made from advanced materials and processes, analysis will also be performed to identify the appropriate applications of the microspheres considering property variables, and different hydrogen infrastructure, end use, production and market scenarios. This report presents some of the recent modelling results for large beds of glass microspheres in hydrogen storage applications. It includes plans for experiments to identify the properties relevant to large-bed hydrogen transport and storage applications, of the …

Radiation damage studies were performed on polystyrene and poly(vinyltoluene) samples containing different concentrations of either an antioxidant (A O-2) or a plasticizer (PP-4). In addition, parallel studies were carried out utilizing samples of these polymers prepared in the presence of cross-linking agents such as NPG, HDA, and DVB. The samples were irradiated using a {sup 60} Co source to total doses of 1 and 10 Mrad, at a dose rate of approximately 1 Mrad/h. Transmittance measurements were recorded before and immediately after irradiation, and after oxygen annealing. These experiments showed that none of these agents improved the radiation resistance of polystyrene and poly(vinyltoluene) with regard to their optical properties.

We present the first direct observation of a supersonic ionization front supported by electron thermal transport in a hot solid density plasma produced by 100fsec-laser-pulse irradiation of a transparent fused quartz target.