Mg17Al12-hydride （abbreviated as MAH） was selected as a destabilization agent to improve de/rehydrogenation properties of LiBH4. 58LiBH4＋Mg17Al12-hydride composite was prepared by ball-milling. It is found that the dehydrogenation of ball-milled LiBH4/MAH composite presents a two-step reaction for hydrogen release. The composite starts desorbing hydrogen at about 300 ℃ and yields 9.8%of hydrogen （mass fraction） below 500 ℃. By adding MAH, the dehydrogenation kinetics of LiBH4 is improved and the dehydrogenation temperature of LiBH4 is also lowered by 20 ℃. High rehydriding capacity of 8.3% was obtained for the dehydrogenated composite in the first cycle at 450 ℃. The XRD analysis shows the formation of MgB2 and AlB2 in the dehydrogenation process, which reduces the thermodynamics stability of LiBH4 system and is beneficial to the reversible hydrogen storage behaviors of LiBH4/MAH composite.
Alkali metal hydroxide and hydride composite systems contain both protic （H bonded with O） and hydridic hydrogen. The interaction of these two types of hydrides produces hydrogen. The enthalpy of dehydrogenation increased with the increase of atomic number of alkali metals, i.e., -23 kJ/molnz for LiOH-LiH, 55.34 kJ/moln： for NaOH-NaH and 222 kJ/molH2 for KOH-KH. These thermodynamic calculation results were consistent with our experimental results. H2 was released from LiOH-LiH system during ball milling. The dehydrogenation temperature of NaOH-NaH system was about 150 ℃; whereas KOH and KH did not interact with each other during the heating process. Instead, KH decomposed by itself. In these three systems, NaOH-NaH was the only reversible hydrogen storage system, the enthalpy of dehydrogenation was about 55.65 kJ/molHz, and the corresponding entropy was ca. 101.23 J/（molHz .K）, so the temperature for releasing 1.0 bar H2 was as high as 518 ℃, showing unfavorable thermodynamic properties. The activation energy for hydrogen desorption of NaOH-NaH was found to be 57.87 kJ/mol, showing good kinetic properties.
