Diamonds Are a Fuel Cell's Best Friend

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Davis have used nanocrystals made of diamond-like cubic zirconia to develop cooler fuel cells. Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C. This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C. Obviously, this could lead to a widespread use of fuel cells, which could become a realistic alternative power source for vehicles. The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear."

Comments

great

[Anonymous Coward]

Now my girlfriend will be begging for a new car in stead of a ring, thnx alot..

Re:great

[Selfbain]

And a divorce when she discovers they're cubic zirconias.

Re:great

[ttapper04]

First post on slashdot... girlfriend.... Who are you trying to fool?

Re:great

[cayenne8]

"Why don't you give her a cubic zirconia ring instead of a diamond. The thread title says it's the same as diamond."

We'll know that is true as soon as DeBeers tries to corner the market in CZ, or even fuel cells.

:-)

Re:great

[spun]

The surprise proposal was invented by De Beers. They polled woman and found out that most women, when asked by their partners, would say they would rather that two months salary went to a down payment on a house. So De Beers marketing department convinced men that talking about marriage and discussing the proposal was unromantic, and they should simply surprise their intended with a flashy, expensive ring.

Re:great

[spun]

Please. Don't try me. Do you think that at the turn of the century, when this campaign was launched and about 10% of people owned their own homes, that women really wanted men to waste two months salary on a ring?

Women told De Beers marketing they don't. Based on that, De Beers developed a campaign to promote surprise proposals and the 'two months salary' rule. That is a matter of historical record. Whether women of the day really wanted a flashy ring or not is something you and I will never know.

But sure, try to paint me as a naive fool. Set up a strawman involving a complete tangent and knock it down. Go nuts. You come across as a petulant whiny bitch, as usual.

Re:great

[kamapuaa]

The two months rule wasn't developed until the 70's. At the turn of the century, most American's didn't buy diamond rings to celebrate their marriage - this didn't pick up until Hollywood was paid to glamorize it in the 30s and 40s. No I idea where you got the 10% owned house statistic, that's obvious BS.

Perhaps you're thinking about diamond's company researcher from the 1970's:

Women are in unanimous agreement that they want to be surprised with gifts.... They want, of course, to be surprised for the thrill of it. However, a deeper, more important reason lies behind this desire.... "freedom from guilt." Some of the women pointed out that if their husbands enlisted their help in purchasing a gift (like diamond jewelry), their practical nature would come to the fore and they would be compelled to object to the purchase. -Daniel Yankelovich, Inc. (working for) N.W. Ayer (working for) De Beers

And the observation that people give gifts that are fancier than what people would choose to get themselves is hardly limited to De Beers or engagement rings. What do you think the Christmas shopping season is all about?

Anyway there's no reason to make such angry arguments, when your arguments are based on pulling made-up statistics out of your ass. If you're actually interested in the history of diamond marketing (I suspect you're just interested in being a jerk) there's an interesting (if dated) take in The Atlantic Monthly.

Uh-oh

[Etrias]

Look to DeBeers to rush in and kill this technology. God forbid we have a car that has a CZ solution when only a real diamond can cool forever.

Re:Uh-oh

[SatanicPuppy]

It's the other way around actually...CZs are thermal insulators, so they reduce the rate of heat transfer...That's probably one of the key reasons they're being used in this application.

Diamonds, on the other hand, are extremely efficient thermal conductors, so they are quite efficient at heat transfer, making them terribly unsuitable to this sort of application where heat is already the major problem.

So CZ is cheaper, easier to obtain, and (for once) actually has the chemical advantage over the diamond. Cool indeed.

Re:Uh-oh

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

Look to DeBeers to rush in and kill this technology. God forbid we have a car that has a CZ solution when only a real diamond can cool forever.

What does a Chicago football team have anything to do with diamonds?

Re:Uh-oh

[Dr Caleb]

I searched for images of 'Cubic Zirconia hardness cleavage' and it wasn't what I expected.

Wonderful.

[jshriverWVU]

Now when people break into my car they wont be after my stereo, but my fuel tank. :)

Re:Wonderful.

[Tumbleweed]

I think, with current gas prices vs. price of cubic zirconia, you're fuel is in greater danger now than with fuel cells made using this technology.

Just make sure you don't leave an ink jet cartridge in your car in plain view of passers by.

Your fuel cell is going to be pissed...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when she finds out you duped her with a cubic zirconia. You better hope theres no free hydrogen around when she finds out.

Re:Your fuel cell is going to be pissed...

[SatanicPuppy]

No, no they're not. CZ is almost twice as heavy by volume. CZ has a substantially different refractive index...Set C and CZ next to each other and examine, and the difference should be clear to even a half-trained eye. CZ doesn't conduct heat well and C does very well. And finally, C will scratch CZ, but CZ will not scratch C.

They may have been hard to tell apart 200 years ago (doubtful), but there is no way a competent gemologist could make that mistake today.

Cooler...

[ajs]

I guess the most significant problem with fuel cells was that they just weren't cool enough... this should improve their "oooh" factor. ;-)

Re:Cooler...

[Radon360]

Not that I disagree with you that Hydrogen is probably a bad choice for vehicle fuel, there's a few things that are worth pointing out:

1. "A BOMB" Presumably you meant _A_ (as in singular) bomb, and not an atom bomb. Anything highly flammable can be confined and made to explode. Obviously, hydrogen is no different...but a pressurized tank is really no more likely to explode than a gasoline tank. As the hydrogen is released from a compromised vessel, it will burn vigorously, if it has been ignited, just like natural gas, propane and even gasoline. The one nice thing about hydrogen is that it is lighter than air, so if it does leak, it goes up into the sky and dissipates, unlike gasoline vapors, which hug the ground and will occasionally find an ignition source to flash back to the point of the leak.

2-5. Agreed

6. We move natural gas around in pipelines, the same could be done with hydrogen gas. However, it's that expense thing that comes into play. Since the cheapest way to produce hydrogen gas is from steam reformation from natural gas, it would be more economically advantageous to produce hydrogen at least regionally, if not on a smaller scale instead of transporting hydrogen long distances in pipelines.

7. Pretty much the same thing that happens to large propane tanks. If they catch fire, they can BLEVE (boiling liquied expanding vapor explosion). However, if the tanks are placed underground, the point of ignition for the leak would be enough of a distance away from the tank that this would not be a problem. Remember, hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, too.

8. Right now it is, anyway. Might be okay for city buses, perhaps.

9. Agreed

10. One rather well founded piece of speculation is that it will become a module of a system like many components currently in cars that is simply replaced or swapped out. Even master auto technicians don't crack open the case on a computerized engine control module to fix a faulty component on a board, they simply swap out the whole box, potentially sending the faulty unit back to the manufacturer. Why couldn't a similar principle apply here?

Also add 11 to your list that hydrogen is usually just an additional (and perhaps unnecessary) step in energy conversion, not an energy source in and of itself. Everything is solar powered, it's just a matter of how many steps of conversion happen between the point where the solar radiation reached earth and where someone puts it to practical use.

Okay, I've done the Slashdot thing. Countered some of your arguments, although I agree with your stance on the use of hydrogen in privately owned passenger cars. Heck, I even worked in a car analogy (sort of..). Ten reasons on electric cars or ethanol hybrids? Probably can't come up with ten, but the best is "the technology/infrastructure is just not quite there yet"...just the same as it is with hydrogen.

Re:Cooler...

[nmos]

Not that I disagree with your point but:

1 - If you drive a liquid H2 car, you're driving A BOMB! One that can never be turned off, unplugged, get in a bad crash, or run out of fuel or it will explode!

Sure but that's pretty much true of any energy storage system. It's not like gasoline, or for that matter modern batteries are all that safe either. Also any tank capable of storing compressed H2 is going to be inherrently pretty strong.

- what happens if the great big H2 tanks at the filling station are involved in an earthquake, terrorist attack, or extended power outage?

The gas escapes and dispurses? We already have tanks and pipelines with propane and natural gas all over the place and those are far more dangerous than H2 which at least has the advantage of being lighter than air.

- it's FUCKING expensive!!!
It looks to me like generating H2 via electrolysis of water is in the same general ballpark effenciency wise as charging/discharging batteries (both somewhere in the 50% range).

- Solid (metal infused) H2 tanks take approximately 6-8 hours to refill with enough H2 to drive 150 miles. This is MUCH worse than electric only cars. (In fact, using Toshiba's new battery technology, we could refuel electric cars in 90 seconds, to 90% charge.
- we don't have ANYTHING resembling an industry for transportation, storage, or pumping of H2.

It's not like we have the infrstructure in place to charge an electric car anywhere near that quickly either in most places. That's a LOT of power.

- it's too damned big of a system. Cars would have to be the size of hybrid SUVs and loose either 2 seats or the trunk to run on H2 safely.

Same problem with batteries.

- will you trust a grease monkey to fix an H2 powered engine? (no offense to my many talented automotive engineering friends) Do you have any idea what it might take to fix an engine like this? can it even be repaired at the component level safely?

H2 engines are pretty much the same as gasoline engines so I'm not sure why you think they would be more dangerous to work on. Working with an electrical system capable of delivering thousands of watts for an extended period of time doesn't sound exactly safe either.

Re:Cooler...

[dbrutus]

1. Hydrogen's less dangerous than the gasoline we already use
2. Recharge times don't matter if you have a standard tank form and run your system like propane tank exchanges.
3. The price is rapidly dropping from $6 gge when GWB came in office to around $4 today and dropping fast. It's projected to drop under $3 gge in 2010 at which point you're within the realm of commercial practicality. 2010 is not that far off.
4. H2 is created by lots of different creation pathways. Some are very clean while others are fairly dirty. You can change your microbe mix in a water treatment plant to optimize for hydrogen production, for instance, and use the hydrogen to help power the plant.
5. Actually, we do have such an industry, it would just need to be scaled up to handle a mass changeover. But a thin infrastructure with local production of hydrogen in government pumps on interstates would allow people to travel across the country with a hydrogen car and would be buildable for well under $100M. That would let people start creating demand for more pumps and then the market could take over.
6. Since you can make hydrogen from just about anything, I think that centralized production is likely to be much less important in a hydrogen world than it is in a petrochem world.
7. What happens to the H2 tanks is exactly what happens to the gasoline tanks today. Explosions happen. Leaking hydrogen is less of a hazard than leaking gasoline not least of which because hydrogen is very light and will tend to float up pretty quickly, dispersing to harmeless concentrations very fast.
8. Huge tanks are just nonsense. There are companies that have built normal sized tanks that can hold enough hydrogen to go 300 miles. Right now it's a question of getting the price down to the point where it's practical.
9. Fine, name one practical alternative. The key bit about hydrogen is that it serves wonderfully as a middleware energy storage mechanism. Everything else either won't scale, won't work, or is likely not dropping in price fast enough to make it in time.
10. H2 doesn't power the engines in fuel cell cars, electricity does. Batteries aren't getting better fast enough to have electric cars. hydrogen fuel cells get the juice to the electromotors (which I do trust a grease monkey to maintain) and are likely going to start showing up in vehicles in the next 5 years (GM says 2011 which means they're already gearing up car designs today).

Yeah, you thought up 10 reasons why it won't work. They just have the disadvantage of being bogus, every one.

CZ = C * 1.4

[SatanicPuppy]

As apparently no one bothered to read even the summary, let me be the first to say there is NO DIAMOND in this solution, real or artificial...It's cubic zirconium, which is a sparkly gem that is often used to simulate diamond, but has neither diamond's chemical makeup, nor its hardness.

Re:CZ = C * 1.4

[hardburn]

And not bathed in blood of slave labor. Never forget that advantage.

When

[Anonymous Coward]

The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear." They are going to be installed in the new flying cars that they're coming out with.

Sensationalism rears its ugly head again...

[tOaOMiB]

Nowhere in TFA were diamonds mentioned. As numerous posts have already pointed out, cubic zirconia is not diamond-like, it's a cheap diamond substitute. The properties of diamonds have nothing to do with the technology in this article. So why was that added to the summary of an article that doesn't mention it?!?

fuel cell temperature

[secPM_MS]

While we want fuel cells for transportation purposes to run at low temperatures, it is not obvious that this is appropriate for fixed-point fuel cells. Low temperature fuel cells can handle hydrogen, but I am unaware of them being able to handle hydrocarbon fuels at reasonable loadings. Typically you need temperatures of a few hundred degrees C to enable the molecular reforming for handling of hydrocarbons. This is reasonable for fixed point systems which can be kept at temperature. The higher temperature also allows the use of lower cost catalysts.

Re:fuel cell temperature

[msmikkol]

The press release, which is phenomenally uninformative, fails to mention that the researches are most probably talking about solid oxide fuel cells. SOFCs use yttria stabilized zirconia as their electrolyte, and it conducts oxygen ions only at a high temperature, 800 to 1000 C. That kind of temperature sets severe limits on fuel cell materials, and therefore researcher strive to drive down the operating temperature of SOFCs. Few hundred degrees down and the range of suitable materials grows much larger.

At the moment, the most common fuel cell type in vehicle applications is the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell, which operates usually at ca. 80 C. The scientists are trying to develop PEMFCs that would operate at an elevated temperature, ca. 140 to 160 C. There are three main reasons: Higher carbon monoxide tolerance of the Pt catalyst, easier water management (no liquid water) and easier heat management.

Carbon monoxide is present at least in trace amounts in most fuel feed made by reforming hydrocarbons. Elevating the operating temperature to 160 C increases the CO tolerance from some ppm to few per cent. Conventional PEMFCs need liquid water to remain operational, but excess water obstructs reactant transfer and decreases performance. If liquid water is present in the cell, good water management is both paramount to high performance and pretty tricky.

An average fuel cell power source in a passenger car will probably have an electric power of 30-70 kW, and produce the same amount of power in heat. If the fuel cell stack operates at 80 C and you are driving in, say Death Valley, ambient temperature 45 C, you'd need a radiator size of a refridgerator to expulse that amount of heat. Operating the fuel cell stack at 160 C would alleviate that problem in a notable way.

zirconia's been used this way before

[smellsofbikes]

1. Diamond? WTF is diamond doing in the title? Cubic zirconia's nothing like diamond unless you believe the ads of people trying to sell you rings with CZ's in them. (And if you've played with gemstones, you might be able to spot those with your bare eyes: they have a 10% different index of refraction of light.

2. Zirconia has been used for a fuel cell 'catalyst' for a while. Here's a reference to a two-year-old paper about a related fuel cell system.

3. I say 'catalyst' in the above, because zirconia's only sort of a catalyst. While the zirconia remains more or less zirconia, it's not just offering a surface for reaction chemistry: it's actually exchanging oxygen with the reactants during the reaction.

4. Still, it's interesting and weird that the electrical potential is being transferred by protons, rather than electrons (as per TFA.) I'm not familiar with that, just with holes and electrons, so that bears more reading.

Fuel cells can now become wide spread

[MobyDisk]

Obviously, this could lead to a widespread use of fuel cells, which could become a realistic alternative power source for vehicles. That's not in the article anywhere. Perhaps, since it is so obvious, someone can explain to me how addressing one of the many complications with using fuel cells?

Slashdot is a meta-news meta-blog site so article summaries are like a game of telephone. A scientist publishes a paper, it is boiled-down for a journalist, the journalist distills that into an article, a blogger summarizes the article, and the article is summarized to Slashdot. Net result: "I found a way to fabricate ziconium oxide at 15nm" becomes "Fuel cells can now become widespread, thanks to diamonds!"

Re:realistic alternative power source for vehicles

[RexRhino]

1. No one is saying hydrogen is a fuel. The idea is that you manufacture hydrogen using non-CO2 emmiting technology (nuclear, solar, wind, "clean coal" if that isn't just pure hype), and the hydrogen is essentially a "battery" (for lack of a better term) that isn't totally destructive to the enviornment like current batteries.

2. Unless you plan you coat your fuel tank with powdered aluminum and iron oxide, and then connect that to some sort of static electricity igniter, you aren't going to have a hindenburg style disaster. I mean, geez, you know that cars are full of highly flamable liquids, right now, right? It is kind of like last century when some people chose to stick with gas lighting in their homes because they thought electricity might be a fire hazard.

Re:Cubic Zircona != Diamond

[Bender_]

CZO (Actually Zirconium-Yttrium-Oxide) is only similar in appearance to diamond. In all other respects it is completely different.

The most important difference is that diamond does burn in oxygen while CZO is an excellent oxygen conductor (yes, a crystal that conducts ions by a hole transport mechanism). This is also the effect that is used in fuel cells. There is really no relation to diamonds. Pure popular BS-science.

It's a Roland the Plogger story. A bogus one.

[Animats]

First, it's a Roland the Plogger story, so it's probably wrong.

Second, it's another one of those "we made some minor advance in materials science on a laboratory scale and this will change the world Real Soon Now" stories. It's too early to be making claims like that. All they have is a new material that might be good for something. Maybe.

Third, it's one of those surface chemistry/crystal chemistry as "nanotechnology" stories. "Nanotechnology" has turned into a buzzword for getting funding for surface chemistry work.

Don't hold your breath

[orzetto]

Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C.

... and this is contradictory how exactly? Just because it's hot does not mean it is inefficient. Indeed, high-temperature FCs have the highest efficiencies, ranging up to 70% with combined cycles.

This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C.

They already do. Have been for decades. See PEM fuel cells. The point is that there are bunches of possible FC designs around, TFA probably meant the SOFCs, the only ones to reach 1000 degrees.

The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear.

As a fuel-cell researcher (yes I have a damn PhD in the field) I am very skeptical of anything surfacing on news releases and containing the "patent" word—It just makes my bullshit detector go crazy.

This technology is still very experimental, there is no working prototype, and if I had a penny for every new fuel-cell design that appeared any year I would have Bill Gates cleaning my toilet with his tongue. Besides, the article is quite badly written: it confuses high-temperature SOFC, assumed when the high temperature range is given, with low-temperature FCs that need platinum, which SOFCs do not need at all. It's like confusing an internal-combustion engine with a steam engine.

I am not saying it is complete vaporware, but it certainly seems overblown. People find new ways to design FCs and their components all the time.

Re:realistic alternative power source for vehicles

[jwo7777777]

..And of course, the lovely thought of driving around in my car with a nice tank of hydrogen fueling me, knowing that I'm just a wreck away from a hindenburg style disaster. "Most deaths were not caused directly by the fire but were from jumping from the burning ship. Those passengers who rode the ship on its descent to the ground survived. Some deaths of crew members occurred because they wanted to save people on board the ship."

reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg

"The Nature of Hydrogen:

        * Hydrogen is less flammable than gasoline. ...
        * Hydrogen disperses quickly. ...
        * Hydrogen is non-toxic. ...
        * Hydrogen combustion produces only water. ...
        * Hydrogen can be stored safely. Tanks currently in use ... have survived intact ... including being shot with six rounds from a .357 magnum, detonating a stick of dynamite next to them, and subjecting them to fire at 1500 degrees F."

reference http://www.hydrogennow.org/Facts/Safety-1.htm

Both websites refer to the causes of the Hindenburg disaster, pinning the blame on the blimp material for the largest part of the fault.

The Hindenburg really wasn't a hydrogen disaster, it was an airship disaster that happened to also involve hydrogen.

Re:realistic alternative power source for vehicles

[matt_kizerian]

As someone who works in the fuel cell industry (an who works with hydrogen on a daily basis), I can unequivocally say I'd rather use hydrogen than gasoline as a fuel.

Your scenario of the fuel tank "blowing" presumably refers to a mechanical rupture. Either fuel would quickly escape from the tank and potentially form an explosive mixture with air. Because gasoline vapor is more dense than air, the explosive air/gasoline mixture tends to hug the ground and stay near the source of the vapor (i.e. the liquid gasoline remaining in the tank or on the ground). A spark would ignite the explosive mixture and create heat which would quickly vaporize (and ignite) the rest of the gasoline.

Hydrogen is the least dense of all elements, so a potentially explosive mixture rises away from the source (ruptured tank). Also, hydrogen disperses exceptionally rapidly in air (almost 600% more quickly than gasoline vapor), which allows an explosive mixture to quickly disperse and dilute below the lower explosive limit of 4% in air.

Finally, the energy density of hydrogen is much less than that of gasoline. That's a great advantage from a safety standpoint. Fuel cells are extremely efficient (much more so than combustion engines); that's how they are able to overcome this energy-density "deficiency" with respect to hydrocarbon fuels.