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

[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.

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.

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.

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?!?

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.

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: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.

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.

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:Uh-oh

[Dr Caleb]

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