Electrochemical hydrogen storage performance of as-cast and as-spun RE-Mg-Ni-Co-Al-based alloys applied to Ni/MH battery

Abstract The La-Mg-Ni-Co-Al-based AB 2 -type La 0.8– x Ce 0.2 Y x MgNi 3.4 Co 0.4 Al 0.1 ( x =0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, 0.2) alloys were prepared via melt spinning. The analyses of the X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) proved that the experimental alloys contain the main phase LaMgNi 4 and the second phase LaNi 5 . Increasing Y content and spinning rate lead to grain refinement and obvious change of the phase abundance without changing phase composition. Y substitution for La and melt spinning make the life-span of the alloys improved remarkably, which is attributed to the improvement of anti-oxidation, anti-pulverization and anti-corrosion abilities. In addition, the discharge capacity visibly decreases with increasing the Y content, while it firstly increases and then decreases with increasing spinning rate. The electrochemical kinetics increases to the optimum performance and then reduces with increasing spinning rate. Moreover, all the alloys achieve to the highest discharge capacities just at the initial cycle without activation.