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New Way to Make Hydrogen
zymano writes "Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store. The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water. A new startup is trying a new way to make hydrogen. The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water. Signa has devised a way to mix sodium with silica gel or crystalline silicon to create a powder that essentially strips electrons from the sodium molecules in advance and stores them. When water is introduced, the chemical reaction proceeds calmly. The powder generates hydrogen efficiently. More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat."
Liberate it, perhaps. I think any method of actually making it would come with its own set of problems.
mush of reacted silica gel, sodium, and water??
..you'd have about 10-11 kilos of mush left afterwards.
Say you need one kilo of hydrogen... (Which is about 6 cubic inches in liquifidy form, which is roughly equal to 7.5 gallons of gasolene for the energy you get out of it.. and I go thru around 15 gallons of gass in a week due to my job)
What do you do to recycle or reuse this stuff? How much energy do you have to put into (transporting it, creating/obtaining it, mixing it, etc) it before you can get any out, and how much energy is needed to deal with the waste afterwards?
Because at my current usage a person would have to produce 88 kilos of left overs... per month. Just for me to keep my job with a hydrogen powered car instead of a gasolene powered one I already own.
seems very innefficient for such a efficient proccess.
This does help solve the problem of distrobution however. You can just ship the powder, and at "gas stations" the water is mixed, and you fill up your tank. Or maybe even a fuel system will be made where you just add the powder directly to the applied device(car, lawnmower, whatever) and the process happens inside the machine itself.
Do what I say, cuz I said it.
-Meatwad
FTA: Methanol is flammable
And hydrogen isn't?
Well, this is a pretty nice idea. I see it working in only one way. As a storage for the fuel. NaCl doesn't have any energy. H2O doesn't have any energy (chemical). So no matter what the only energy you get out is going to have been put in in a more efficient form. However, if the powder is dense enough in energy that it could be used as the power source itself, and then just recycle the water.
Ofcourse the original power still come from (mostly) coal to make the electricity to make the split the salt, to break the water, to create the electricity, to power the car, to drive to the house that Jack built. The electrity to electricity conversion is the reason H2 will not be used in cars, unless you can dodge it with a *real* breakthrough, or have the H2 source beat the crap out of batteries it's not going to work. If you could get a pound of Cesium to power the car for a few months that might be worthwhile.
This said, I'll let you savvy people in on the future. The cars of the future are going to be several generation advanced hybrid cars. They will be flexible fuel hybrids that you can directly charge with your house's power. They will also be augmented with solar panels on the roof, which will also be used to charge the batteries. And if by some freak event H2 becomes available it will also have a fuel cell to charge up the batteries. They will work like a normal car, an electric car, and a solar car all in one, with reclaiming breaks and shocks ofcourse. In theory you could do your driving for the day without using a drop of your gas, but it's there if you need it. And if it's not there you could probably do a few miles per hour with just the solar.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
You want to make 10 times the volume of stuff for hydrogen you need, and you end up with 9 times the volume of stuff as *waste*?!
You've got to be fricken' kidding me.
Ok here is a major hint to the world leaders of this planet...
Nuclear power plant, Gulf of Mexico == Hydrogen. Ship it to all the countries that don't want or have nuclear. Become new major energy provider...
This is not rocket science people! Stop making it harder than it is!
Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation. Go check out the state of the art in battery technology.
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e.g.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr29
http://www.sionpower.com/
You'll see them in mobile phones and laptops first. They'll make it into electric vehicles in a few years.
Generating electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity is, well, stupid.
Deleted
make cities better designed for walking and cycling
You know, in discussions like this someone will usually mention that cities should "be designed for X". This strikes me as a slightly silly argument:
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
its not something that does damage as in sets us back. people really overblow this problem. It means growth will slow down. And guess what, those rising oil prices are the greatest incentive towards making cars more "green".
Think about all the people who choose to buy fuel efficient cars. Every person I know who buys them does so because it saves them a great deal of money on gas. Oil prices get up to 70 or 80 dollars a barrel(which isn't hard to imagine with production not increasing by much and China beginning to consume oil on the level of the US) and you will see very few people who are willing to spend 100 dollars to drive a hummer 100 miles. It just gets too damn expensive.
Money works both ways. Making it drives what companies will produce and saving it drives what consumers demand(in large part). So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.
The problem is that batteries, even Lithium-Ion batteries, are extremely heavy by comparison. A Lithium cell produces about 3V potential difference. In order to produce enough juice to run something like an electric car, you need a lot of them wired in series. And then, in order to have decent battery life, you end up needing even more of them wired in parallel. By the time you've got a viable option for running an electric car, you're talking 300-500kg depending on the size of the car. When cars themselves often weigh less than 1500kg, that's a significant increase in weight.
There's also the cost. A Prius is a great alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
Others have wondered the same thing you just asked. And then they've looked at the price tag, and the increased weight, and decided that they need an alternative that can be as cheap and easy to refill as gasoline. Personally, I think the solution lies not in fuel cells, but in implementing a renewable-energy way to generate hydrogen.
Consider... I was at Canadian Tire yesterday. There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction. Set it up with a rain barrel and something in which to store the hydrogen, and you've got a renewable source of hydrogen for less than $1500 outlay. Sure, there are more efficient ways to store the energy being generated, but it's also freely renewable (no $10,000 expenditure every 8 years). All that's missing is a car that burns hydrogen.
And for times of drought, or during the winter, all it needs is a source of water, such as city water or a well. (You *could* use some of the wind power to melt snow, but that, like a rain barrel, wouldn't be all that useful on a scale larger than one or two cars)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb