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A New Way To Make Water, And Fuel Cells
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably know that it is easy to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. After all, this chemical reaction is known for more than two centuries. But now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have discovered a new way to make water. As states the UIUC report, 'not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.' But be warned: don't read the technical paper itself. It could win an obfuscated contest — if such a contest existed for scientific papers." Yet another advance in fuel cell technology; we discussed a different one just the other day.
Making water from alcohol! Alchemists have been trying to transmute one element into another for hundreds of years! This is really big. If we can transmute carbon into oxygen, or hydrogen it solves the global warming problem entirely.
The planet has been saved!
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Shouldn't it be the other way around?
An obfuscated contest or a contest for obfuscation? The fomer would be difficult to figure out, while the latter would reward entries that are difficult to figure out.
No one in the state calls it UIUC, except for University of Illinois at Chicago students and alumni who get upset when you call it U of I. Every one else just calls it Illinois. It confuses everyone else when its referred to as UIUC.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Oh, no, it's Roland!
The Snake-Oil X-Man!
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
How valid is their conclusion? Is there an expert here on Slashdot that can offer some insight, because this does sound like a huge discovery.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The reaction rate of oxidizing hydrogen or even many alcohols isn't a problem with the catalysts in current use, the porblem is that the catalysts are based on platinum, rhodium etc.. which are extremely expensive. The catalyst in this case is based on Iridium which is also very expensive, if not more so than Platinum. Lcohols are not an unusual starting material for making water and giving off large amounts of energy in an oxidation reaction. Methanol for example, in contact with Platinum in air will oxidize to formaldehyde and water releasing enough heat to eventually cause the platinum to glow red. This is in fact used to great effect in certain fire-starting mechanisms.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Er... Water is pretty much the side product of almost any reaction. For example, you may have heard that ethanol burns relatively cleanly. Translation: Ethanol -> Carbon dioxide + Water
This has almost never not been known.
I mean where does one H2 go?
That's a discovery!
What did they think happens when alcohol burns?
Or when alcohol is metabolized for that matter...
Upon inspection of the molecules it was discovered that they in fact had created Di-Hydrogen Oxide and not water which has caused quite a few deaths of late.
All these chemicals are just storage media for energy released by the fuel cells. Where is all that alcohol supposed to come from, Russia's motherlode of vodka wells?
Making the alcohol consumes the very energy released by the fuel cells along with water. If the alcohol is fermented vegetation, that bacterial process consumes some of the energy to process the higher-energy sugars and carbohydrates in the vegetation. The vegetation is the key, because it converts the actual source of energy, sunlight, into those sugars. But by the time the alcohol hits the fuel cell, already over 95% of the sun's energy is lost in other processes before the final 50-80% max efficiency is applied to the usable 5%.
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make install -not war
It's easy enough to release the hydrogen from hydrocarbons and burn it (to get water), leaving carbon behind-- that's essentially a description of pyrolisis. Or, if you like, it's a description of how to make charcoal.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This recommendation to not read the article is suspicious and harmful. I am tired of journalists who interpret scientific research in sensationalist, non-scientific ways and I am tired of the readers who trust the editorial versions of these journalists verbatim without taking 15 minutes to at least read the conclusions of the original investigators (i.e. researchers).
Too many times have the press totally misrepresented scientific findings and the slashdot crowd is guilty of following the popular science shepherds. Go, read the damn paper yourself.
Many moons ago when I was at college, we were doing this several nights a week.
why?, is too difficult to you, so no one should read it?. btw most comp sci papers are really obfuscated and with no content.
Wine into water - that's the work of a beast!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I guess these "Scientists" have never heard of a molotov cocktail. Or an ethanol powered car or rocket. Or anything.
CH3CH2OH(l) + 3O2(g) -> 2CO2(g) + 3H20(g)
What would be unlikely is if they didn't produce water from alcohol. What a stupid summary. TIS, right? (This Is Slashdot).
... inside internal combustion engine? By this I mean energy conversion efficiency, and cost/durability.
Let's just concentrate on developing more efficient ways of turning salt water into fresh water.
This might not seem like such an important thing to do, but it is. There are nations in the world (even modern nations) that suffer from a constant shortage of water. They could benefit from an easily renewable source of fresh water and would pay dearly for better technology to achieve this.
There's no money to be made in turning alcohol into water.
It all makes sense now!
That "heart" power the jungle boy and his monkey had was alcohol all along!
Okay, I can understand water into wine, but the other way around?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Hate to be pedantic (okay, that's a lie) but the tag on the article is a misquotation.
I'm predicting this wine into water dude won't be remembered after 2000 minutes, let alone 2000 years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
First off, thank you to James E. Kloeppel, the author of the press release, for giving credit to the grad student and identifying him as the lead author. Second, I have no idea where water is formally known as dihydrogen monoxide. Hopefully, that was a joke. When I go to see the queen, I will be sure to address it by the proper name. Go Illini! It sounds like the entire press release could be summed up in one sentence. They developed a new iridium catalyst that helps electrochemically reduce oxygen in fuel cells.
'nuff said....
Fuel cells are about 70% total efficiency or more. Internal combustion engines are about 20-30%. Bigger co generation plants can get to 50%. At this point fuel cells that can compare to the robustness of normal engines are expensive. The rest are more or less at the research prototype level.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
6 months ago I couldn't even spell hydogenation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is about "generating power in a fuel cell".
Poor Zachariah Heiden made some comment that included the partial sentence "unconventional metal hydrides can be used for a chemical process called oxygen reduction, which is an essential part of the process of making water", and all the context got thrown away.
The actual paper seems to be "Homogeneous Catalytic Reduction of Dioxygen Using Transfer
Hydrogenation Catalysts".
How does this compare to just burning alcohol inside internal combustion engine?
Well, for one thing, you're not going to want an internal combustion engine inside your laptop.