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Hydrogen Fuel Balls from a Gas Pump?
navalynt writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Energy has filed a patent for hydrogen fuel balls. From the article 'The proposed glass microspheres would each be a few millionths of a metre (microns) wide with a hollow center containing specks of palladium. The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter.' They are supposedly safe and small enough to be pumped into a fuel tank in the same manner as gasoline."
How do you know that that is why the government filed for the patent? It could instead be a defensive measure; the DOE doesn't want a private organization to build off of its research and then file their own patent, preventing a wider field from employing the technology. The DOE can file a patent to prevent this sort of abuse, and then decline to charge any licensing fee for companies or individuals that want to employ the technology. Doing it this way avoids future court battles over who gets to profit from the results of government research. It's all in how the patent is used. I imagine that there is some official government policy on how these things are done; I doubt that this is the first time that a government body has taken out a patent on new technology.
True, but every car on the road today in the U.S. (or at least the great, great majority of them) have a fairly substantial mass of palladium already: in the catalytic converter. I'm not sure exactly how much palladium a car would need in order to hold a full charge of hydrogen, but I think if you started recycling the stuff that's in catalytic converters, you'd have a good start towards the amount you'd need to start using it as a hydrogen carrier, at least to start out.
Also, from an environmental standpoint, the fact that it's valuable and rare is probably better than if it were currently cheap, since it keeps it from be being implemented as a throwaway, and creating shortages and problems later on. At least this way, we'll implement the full reclamation cycle from the beginning.
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why bother, when any meaningful contributions will succumb so soon to entropy?
:) Nonetheless, I take part. Both in life and Wikipedia.
Heh. That's a pretty reasonable question to ask about life itself
Cheers.
What happens if you inhale these little suckers? You know it will happen. How do they break down over time and how do they break down in a catastrophic accident? Spill cleanup? Do I just vacumn them?
Lots of promise but all the negatives are curiously missing. This sounds more fantasy than real, the old "patent the idea" and then try to make it work.
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