Facile Synthesis of LiH-Stabilized Face-Centered-Cubic YH₃ High-Pressure Phase by Ball Milling Process

A face-centered-cubic (FCC) YH₃ phase is known to be stable only under high pressure (HP) of more than gigapascal order, and it reverts to the hexagonal YH₃ ambient-pressure phase when the pressure is released. We previously found that the FCC YH₃ can be stabilized even at ambient pressure by substituting Y for 10 mol % Li (LiH-stabilized YH₃, LSY). The LSY was synthesized by heat treatment under gigapascal HP, but this process is unfavorable for mass production; that is, only a few tens of milligrams of a sample can be obtained in a single batch. In this study, we overcame this problem by applying a ball milling (BM) process for synthesizing the LSY phase, and the yield by the BM process reached on the order of grams. We confirmed that the structure of the BM sample was the same as that of the HP sample by X-ray diffractometry, Raman spectroscopy, and neutron total scattering pair distribution function analyses. The crystallinity of the BM sample, however, was lower than that of the HP sample. The difference in the crystallinity affects the thermal stability of the LSY. The BM sample with a lower crystallinity released hydrogen at a lower temperature. The BM sample was found to reversibly desorb/absorb hydrogen maintaining its initial FCC structure when the rehydrogenation temperature was at 423 K. However, when the rehydrogenation temperature of BM sample was more than 573 K, the FCC structure changed to the hexagonal ambient pressure phase due to thermal instability of FCC phase for the BM sample.