Ab initio calculations study of the electronic, optical and thermodynamic properties of NaMgH3, for hydrogen storage Original Research Article

The structural stability, electronic structure, optical and thermodynamic properties of NaMgH3 have been investigated using the density functional theory. Good agreement is obtained for the bulk crystal structure using both the local density approximation (LDA) and the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) for the exchange-correlation energy. It is found from the electronic density of states (DOS) that the valence band is dominated by the hydrogen atoms while the conduction band is dominated by Na and Mg empty states. Also, the DOS reveals that NaMgH3 is a large gap insulator with direct band gap 3.4 eV. We have investigated the optical response of NaMgH3 in partial band to band contributions and the theoretical optical spectrum is presented and discussed in this study. Optical response calculation suggests that the imaginary part of dielectric function spectra is assigned to be the interband transition. The formation energy for NaMgH3 is investigated along different reaction pathways. We compare and discuss our result with the measured and calculated enthalpies of formation found in the literature.