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Buckyballs Can Store Concentrated Hydrogen
Pickens brings news that researchers from Rice University have discovered that it's possible to store hydrogen inside buckyballs. Hydrogen can be an excellent power source, but it is notoriously difficult to store. The buckyballs can contain up to 8% of their weight in hydrogen, and they are strong enough to hold it at a density that rivals the center of Jupiter.
"Using a computer model, Yakobson's research team has tracked the strength of each atomic bond in a buckyball and simulated what happened to the bonds as more hydrogen atoms were packed inside. Yakobson said the model promises to be particularly useful because it is scalable, that is it can calculate exactly how much hydrogen a buckyball of any given size can hold, and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo."
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo."
Well, if these are being burst open, then it means that these have to be built AND loaded each time, and then disposed. So now, we are going to either break apart water (cool, but inefficient), or strip H from fossil fuel (efficient, but bad news for the CO2). Then we are going to build bucky balls, store the hydrogen in it (at 8% volume), sell you the buck ball, your car will magically break the balls (most likely pressure or heat), this will power either an ICE (very low efficiency) or a fuel cell/electric motor (high efficiency, but high cost due to fuel cell).
Of course, we could just take the electricity and charge a battery and then run an electic motor, all at more than double (or even triple) the efficiency and probably half to one third the costs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Considering Fullerine is C-60 and therefore weighs 720p (ha! protons) and hydrogen atoms weigh exactly 2, this means that they can hold ~30 hydrogen atoms in it?
Oddly, I think the issue would be balancing the containment energy of the buckyball versus the energy burning the hydrogen released. There *might* be a sweet spot in the number of hydrogen stable inside versus the tickle required to make the ball release them, for this to make sense.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
All this rush to store hydrogen, why not find a way to extract it WITHOUT creating CO2. Currently all commercial processes for extracting hydrogen use fossil fuels to do so.
Maybe solar and/or wind will be used, but the efficiency is still low.
...but each burst buckyball is 60 carbon atoms floating around in your fuel. Aren't you right back to "hydrocarbons" if you burn this fuel, and won't the carbon poison fuel cell membranes? It's a cool trick _iff_ you can strip the carbon out efficiently before the hydrogen is used.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So all we really need is a really big buckyball, and we've solved the hydrogen storage problem.
Of course, we still need to figure out how to get the soft gooey hydrogen inside the chocolatey pocket of the buckyball, especially at "center of jupiter" pressures. Maybe the folks at Cadbury might reveal their secret. We'll also need to figure out how to get the hydrogen out once we're ready to use it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
An alternative to carbon-fuel which requires storing that alternative in carbon?
Once you crack those buckeyballs open to get the H out, the C has to go somewhere, right?
What am I missing, here?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Otherwise known as gasoline.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo.
That's what she said!
Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Hydrogen Filled Buckyball.
Caution: Hydrogen Filled Buckyball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use Hydrogen Filled Buckyball on concrete.
Discontinue use of Hydrogen Filled Buckyball if any of the following occurs: Itching, Vertigo, Dizziness, Tingling in extremities, Loss of balance or coordination, Slurred speech, Temporary Blindness, Profuse sweating, Heart Palpitations.
If Hydrogen Filled Buckyball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, Hydrogen Filled Buckyball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration... Failure to do so relieves the makers of Hydrogen Filled Buckyball, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.
If Hydrogen Filled Buckyball should become soiled, wipe gently with a soft cloth moistened with sulfuric acid.
Ingredients of Hydrogen Filled Buckyball include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt Hydrogen Filled Buckyball.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball comes with a lifetime guarantee.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Cool -- So instead of about 10 LBS empty, the fuel tank in my truck would weigh 400 LBS.
Glad to see we are making progress.
In the nuclear fuels field, we deal with really exotic temperatures and pressures in materials whose bulk properties might be only two or less orders of magnitude from standard temperature and pressure. Did you know that there are people sitting around, calculating the pressure of an individual helium atom in a crystal lattice? The pressures that arise put planetary cores to shame.
And next week the announcement of the Hindenberg II...
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Could densely packed hydrogen be encouraged to fuse somehow? Perhaps with some sort of "laser"?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Call me when they can get the hydrogen out again...
"Professor, that's amazing! The buckyballs will bind the hydrogen so well that it won't leak out of the container?"
"That's correct. We're very pleased with these results."
"And to release the hydrogen to be able to use it, you just crack open the buckyballs, right?"
"I beg your pardon? No, no, it's bound extremely tightly to the carbon matrix. That's what we've developed, a way to bind hydrogen."
"But to actually use the hydrogen, professor, you have to get it back out. How do you get it out of the buckyballs?"
"Ah, well, that's something that we'll address in year 4 of the grant."
"Which is...?"
"2011."
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Just do the numbers. Methane (CH4) has 12 weight units of C plus 4 of H.
Makes 25 per cent H.
This buckyball thing may be cool for other things, but as a storage...
Hydrogen is soluble in aluminum. Its solubility varies directly with temperature and the square root of pressure. During the cooling and solidification of molten aluminum, dissolved hydrogen in excess of the extremely low solid solubility may precipitate in molecular form, resulting in the formation of primary and/or secondary voids.
Moisture in the atmosphere dissociates at the molten metal surface, offering a concentration of atomic hydrogen capable of diffusing into the melt. The barrier oxide of aluminum resists hydrogen solution by this mechanism, but disturbances of the melt surface that break the oxide barrier result in rapid hydrogen dissolution.
Two types or forms of hydrogen porosity may occur in aluminum. Inter-dendritic porosity, which is encountered when hydrogen contents are sufficiently high that hydrogen rejected at the solidification front results in solution pressures above atmospheric. Secondary (micron-size) porosity occurs when dissolved hydrogen contents are low, and void formation is characteristically subcritical.
The disposition of hydrogen in a solidified structure depends on the dissolved hydrogen level and the conditions under which solidification occurs. Because the presence of hydrogen porosity is a result of diffusion-controlled nucleation and growth, decreasing the hydrogen concentration and increasing the rate of solidification act to suppress void formation and growth.
Source: http://www.key-to-metals.com/Article83.htm
Let's RTFA a bit: "'Based on our calculations, it appears that some buckyballs are capable of holding volumes of hydrogen so dense as to be almost metallic,' said lead researcher Boris Yakobson"..." If a feasible way to produce hydrogen-filled buckyballs is developed, Yakobson said, it might be possible to store them as a powder."
What a difference one word can make in a summary. News flash, "Miss Universe can have sex with Slashdot users! According to simulations conducted with fold-out pictures in Randy's basement..um...research center"
The simulation work is pretty cool, the headline and summary can and does mislead the reader.
P226
While I haven't run the math, I think if you compress the hydrogen in Jupiter's core down to briefcase size you will find that it will keep going and form a nice little singularity....very easy to fit in a briefcase....shortly before it EATS the briefcase and then you...
Back of envelope math:
One earth mass will form a singularity at around 10 CC (or so I've heard)
Jupiter's core is about 10 earth masses (or so I've heard)
Ergo one Jupiter core will form a singularity at about 100 CC.
A small briefcase will hold 100 CC plus a little extra.
Only one questions remains...how will we get the core of Jupiter to LOOK like the report I was supposed to read last night?
There's me over here in "The Old World" looking at the article thinking "Buckyballs? What are they then? Some brand of American breakfast cereal or cured meat product being a spherical version of beef jerky? How can processed foodstuffs be used as containers for hydrogen? And why when there's perfectly good pressurised cannisters available?"
A brief explanation of a word allows me to quickly decide if an article is going to be of interest to me or not - in this case, it's all that high-brow hoity-toity chemistry nonsense where there's absolutely bugger all chance of talking about Linux, music, computer games or laughing at the Vista users.
So basically I'm off to better threads.
Thanks for listening and "Toodle Pip" from Blighty!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
My question is how to you stick the nozzle in from the gas pump. And when will it work in my Hummer? Will they start installing Electron Microscopes at Chevron?
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I don't see anywhere in the article where they mention how many gigapascals that is, but I see varying references that depending on how deep you mean, they could mean anywhere from 140 to 300 GPa. At that pressure, this might make a suitable container for the room temperature superconducting silicon mentioned earlier this week on slashdot. So, we have a compound that can compress to a room temperature superconductor. We have a container to keep it compressed in. Now we just need to figure out how to stuff it all in there!
Everyone assumes that these will be used for fuel cells, but why not use them for fusion?
I know one technique has been laser fusion. Target several lasers at one point and they reinforce each other. Then drop in a tiny sphere of fusion fuel surrounded by glass of plastic and the lasers cause the sphere to exploded both outward and in which increases the pressure enough to cause fusion.
This concept has to be more efficient with a VERY high pressure fuel. So we give our packed buckyballs a charge and electromagnetically shoot them into the center of the lasers and POOF you have fusion..
Just a thought, any comments?
One thing is that theoretics will blow singularities out the window. One theory holds that Jupiter's core is a solid mass of crystallized carbon. Yep, you can guess what that is, Diamond. Another theory, with a more stable foundation, is that hydrogen at that pressure and temperature, becomes metallic. Essentially within your little buckyball, you would have a sphere of hydrogen metal. If your buckyball can handle > 100GPa,(over one million atmospheres) then the hydrogen atoms will undergo a phase change and become metallic.
If this is practical and it's energy potential can be tapped, we'll have at our fingertips, an unlimited power source that won't kill you with radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
ummm....I hope you are suggesting that we could pull it from Jupiter's core rather than treating the H2 we compress as an energy SOURCE.
Even pulling it from the core doesn't really help us. What would we use to oxidse it once we have burned ALL the Oxygen?
Can you go into more detail on what you are suggesting?
...If your buckyball can handle > 100GPa,(over one million atmospheres)... If your buckyball can handle > 100GPa,(over one million atmospheres), then you should just be able to inject a few under a piston, release the pressure and use the released pressure to drive your engine.There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The cost of splitting hydrogen from water, then recombining it in a fuel cell is huge. It operates at approximately 35% efficiency. Lithium-ion batteries have a round trip efficiency of over 90%, are cheaper, and can be recharged in minutes.
Hydrogen has been passed by as a technology, and nobody seems to realize it yet, because it has enough capital behind it which is pushing for it's adoption so the investments made can be paid off.
Hydrogen is more of a battery than a fuel and it is ALWAYS by DEFINITION going to have negative ER/EI. Why? Because the energy required to pull hydrogen out of water or methane or petroleum is going to be greater than the energy you get from burning the hydrogen. What the "hydrogen economy" seeks to do is to protect the sunken cost of the suburbs, and the sunken costs of the automotive infrastructure, both of which are joined at the hip and are completely unsustainable. It's a fools errand and will fail. There is also the not inconsiderable energy that goes into making the bucky balls, etc.
Face it: gigs up. Game over. Prepare to slowly powerdown.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Okay, no one in a modded-up post on this story understands the concept. Buckyballs look like soot. You have a tank filled with this soot in your car. Then you flow very high pressure hydrogen gas over them for awhile (this has been done for years with carbon nanotubes, which offer more storage but because they only confine in 2 dimensions, unlike the balls, they don't provide the capillary forces necessary to make this easy). Hydrogen then adsorbs (notice ADsorbs, not ABsorbs) onto the inner surfaces of the Buckyballs. Capillary forces, like those that cause liquid to be drawn into a straw, allow the hydrogens to live essentially as liquids inside the balls, meaning that when you remove the high pressure hydrogen flow, the hydrogren in the buckyballs doesn't all immediately fly out. Hydrogen leaks out of the balls slowly, becoming a gas and maintaining a roughly constant pressure in the tank, and you then siphon off the hydrogen that you want to power your car. You can control the leakage rate by changing the temperature.
You then reuse the Buckyballs by flowing hydrogen gas over them when they're empty. They're 100% reusable storage, not tiny gas tanks. Someone mod this up so that the dozens of "oh nos, Buckyballs hurt teh environments" posts go away.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
... something similar... Presumably a Buckytube wouldn't be able to handle as much pressure, but could it handle enough to compress silane into superconductivity? Sealed off at each end with, I guess you'd call it a Buckydome?
Good idea, but without a solid method to encapsulate and remove the hydrogen, in a rapid cost effective manner, this is just a scientific curiosity.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
A fact about something we can never physically see? Sure...
Hmm, I wonder how much weight the bucky balls add to the whole solution. If it does not add too much weight, maybe it could be a solution for future airships. Would have to do some research here.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yes this is not practical today. This will likely require an atom or two of something else that can mimic a carbon bond in certain conditions and not under other. Open the trap doors, compress the hydrogen, close the trap doors. Now the hydrogen is trapped in the buckyball powder. It would make a nice release mechanism as well.
Currently this is science fiction.
And of course no one will look for such a method because this is just a "scientific curiosity".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A classmate of mine in a chemistry class was discussing with the instructor some potential practical applications for fullerenes, and the only example I can remember was that of hydrogen storage for automobile fuel. I also remember him referring to Popular Science Magazine for that example.
This scene occurred in late July of 1992.
I never saw the actual article, but maybe someone here can confirm this. I would assume it to have been published sometime within 1 year before that date.
This is not my sig
Wake up world. Hydrogen isn't a source of energy any more than capacitors are. It's a way to store energy.
-- QED
I thought BuckyBalls were those fake testicles that rednecks hang from the back of their over-sized mud-covered trucks...
The first law of thermodynamics is: you do not talk about thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics is: you DO NOT talk about thermodynamics.
So, you have a system that can store hydrogen in carbon balls at high pressures. (the cold fusion folks manage to get 6000 pascals or so inside a metal lattice chemically.) What I want to know is how long can you store it. Hydrogen leaks through anything. the atoms fit BETWEEN the molecular bonds in most metals, plastics, even wax. That's the reason that space rockets are refueled constantly. (boil off of something that boils at 4 Kelvin is really something too!) The tanks leak!
What is the half life of the hydrogen storage in this system?
So, if the buckyball left the factory last month, how much H2 content will it still have? Once it decays down to atmospheric temperature, it does me no practical good.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Not at all, But the media tends to put a spin on "scientific breakthrough's" that lead the average reader to be let down when they realize it will be many years before we see this type of technology materialize, if ever.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I still prefer to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Also, radiation won't kill you if you just make sure it is absorbed in something that isn't alive. Like 3-4 meters of boron and uranium spiked concrete.
Well, this seems to be purely theoretical work about whether buckyballs *could* contain dense hydrogen, not how to achieve it. However, I can think of two very interesting possibilities, energy-wise, if it could be achieved.
1) Superconductivity: Metallic hydrogen is a superconductor. Not sure how that would work conducting current through the shells, though. While just being a superconductor doesn't give you energy, it makes it easier to transmit energy.
2) Fusion is all about the combination of the density of your targets and energy of your collisions. This is some impressive hydrogen density being discussed.
That was either the start of something bad or the end of something stupid.
Actually, more than half as good as gasoline is pretty damn good. If anyone managed to do energy storage more efficiently than hydrocarbons it would really be impressive...
Hydrogen can be a useful element for storing power, but it is not a power source, except (shortsightedly) when looking only at the device in front of you at the moment.
Sure, the only true power sources are the Sun, the Earth's core, and radioactive decay, but I'm not being hair-splitting. Even petroleum or gasoline can be considered "power sources", because they've already been "charged" (by the Sun and the Earth's gravity). There are no standing deposits of hydrogen around on the Earth already charged and waiting. The only way to get power from hydrogen here is to charge it up with an actual power source, and use the hydrogen as transport, like when electrolyzing water. Or to purify charged hydrogen from other charged energy-bearing materials, like from ethanol, gasoline or the like. Producing hydrogen with enough energy in it to use to power devices requires putting energy in, and is a net reduction in the total energy available before producing the charged hydrogen.
As transport, hydrogen has many efficiencies, so it's well worth exploring as a storage material. Handling it can be energy inefficient, so converting it to other materials (especially room-temperature/pressure liquids) can be a net gain, though that expends energy, too.
--
make install -not war
That's not even a little true. Gasoline is a complex cocktail of hydrocarbons, which may not include an octane isomers in appreciable amounts. The octane rating of gasoline does not actually mean the amount of octane contained by it.
And can you see the Earth's molten core?
Anything with that high of an energy density could release it is suddenly?
"A small briefcase will hold 100 CC plus a little extra."
A small briefcase indeed, considering 100CC is about 1x2x3 inches.
Actually, I was thinking that since hydrogen becomes super-conductive at high pressures at room temperature this would be one way to achieve a room temp super conductor. Or possibly apply this with the salene (SiH4?) compound from the other day and have higher temperature super conductors.
~X~
~X~
This still seems like a lot more trouble than the existing solution of dropping an aluminum/gallium alloy in water and presto, hydrogen on demand (with aluminum oxide as waste which can be restored to aluminum). No high pressures required, the only production required is the aluminum/gallium alloy. The gallium is completely reusable and the aluminum can be recovered from the aluminum oxide and at commercial production levels would be around the price of gas now. It would get cheaper with time as the processes are streamlined.
The only problematic issue is recovery of the aluminum from aluminum oxide which requires a good deal of electricity (it requires electrolysis). That said, if this step could be done with a green energy source (say wind, solar, geothermal, whatever) then it would be a completely clean source of energy.
However, a lot of that "wasted" excess energy could be harvested from the sun, which produces energy that is currently wasted in heating up dirt. NPR's "Talk of the Nation" has had two interesting segments which introduce the idea of building a vast solar array in the Nevada desert to power ALL of the electricity needs of the United States of America:
-February 1, 2008 A Bright Future for Solar Energy?
- March 14, 2008 The Potential of Solar Power
You can listen to both segments for free at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88239836
The United States Congress has been holding hearings on the feasibility of these projects.
PBS's "NOVA" science program also has a program "Saved by the Sun" discussing current projects underway, such as those in Germany and the United States, to tap into solar power. You can watch the whole show online for free at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/program.html
What kind of temperature is needed to maintain containment?
I don't claim to know enough about this, but can it be used in relation to the high-pressure super conductors linked recently? If the buckyballs can hold silicon-hydrogen at high-pressures and the temperature requirements for containment in this case are not as difficult to maintain as our best efforts at temperature based super-conductors... well, you see where I'm going with this.
Pshaw, you can almost solo molten core these days with tier 3 gear.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
When hydrogen gains a metallic property, then the fullerene become a ready fuel cell itself. The metallic property will create the needed catalyst (while it lasts as a metal) in order for the fuel-cell process to react and produce energy.
First off, the type of loading described in the parent isn't what's going on here. We don't have gas trapped in pores in crystaline C60 in between buckyballs, we actually have H2 stuck inside a buckyball cage. Which you can only get in there during synthesis. This isn't gas adsorption. And right now, we only know how to stick 1 H2 inside a buckyball cage during synthesis. Not the insane pressures they talk about in the article. Those are probably a *long* way off. Second, the kinetics for loading H2 in C60 are very slow. It takes hours to load at room temperature, and even then it only loads to 1 H2 per C60 (see FitzGerald et al, Phys. Rev. B, 2002), which, in terms of loading by weight, is . . . low. 1 C is ~6x as massive as an H2. So, 1 C60 is ~360x as massive as an H2. So, you have a loading of . . . 1/360th by weight. Nowhere near the DOE standard of ~10% by weight that is the goal right now.
Pyrene is a hydrogen transfer catalyst that can contain 0.99% hydrogen if hydrogenated to 4,5-dihydropyrene. I did the same H2 content calculation for C60 and found that the current state of the art, one H2 in one fullerene or C60@H2, is 0.28% hydrogen. To be better than pyrene, you need to put in eight hydrogen atoms as four H2 molecules, or C60@4H2. To give that 8% storage capacity you need not less than 62 hydrogens, or C60@31H2. That's slightly more than one hydrogen per one carbon, which is a lot. (Gasoline is 16% hydrogen, btw.)
The major problem with this "discovery" (it's just a calculation, I'd say) is that you'll need to design a chemical synthesis that forces metallic hydrogen into a buckyball, without inducing hydrogenolysis (spontaneous production of hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon). Then you should be able to design molecular "hatch" that you can open and close while being under this enormous hydrogen pressure. A small obstacle to this being that I suspect nearly any heteroatom you'd need for the hatch would be immediately torn off by hydrogenolysis. My guesstimate would in fact be that the fullerenes themselves would be hydrogenolyzed on contact with metallic hydrogen. As you can see, it's the physicists and their phyucher flying cars again. It's interesting but no real problem has been solved.
And also, the problem of producing the hydrogen is still unsolved, no matter the hype. The problem that we want a reducing agent (H2), which unavoidably requires energy to produce. The major options are fossil and nuclear; the world runs out of arable land area if we try to produce it by agriculture. Actually the situation can be summarized like this:
1. Invent technologies to transport or spend existing hydrogen (fuel cells, hydrogen storage, etc.)
2. ???
3. Hydrogen economy!
Superconductivity: Metallic hydrogen is a superconductor. Not sure how that would work conducting current through the shells, though.
Aren't buckyballs small enough to allow quantum tunneling from one ball's hydrogen core to an adjacent ball's core? If so, and if quantum tunneling doesn't break superconductivity properties, Bob's yer uncle.
(BTW, anyone who comes up with some good ball jokes here gets an e-cookie.)
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Pedantically speaking oil isn't an energy source either, it's just a storage medium for solar energy.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
We have, already, an unlimited source of energy in the Sun. The real problem is how to transport and condense that energy into useful-to-us forms..
..don't panic
You are onto something there. "Pelletized" Hydrogen or Deuterium in a high pressure, semi metallic or metallic state, do you think that there might be a energy bonus there?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Great, you can now store 8% by weight of H in buckyballs. How do you get it out? Oops!
I wonder if the silane mentioned in yesterdays article could be kept in those buckyballs at extreme pressure? That might prove to be interesting.
I'm not sure you want to compress just the core, which is *estimated* to be between 10 to 45 times as massive as Earth not just about 10x, instead of the whole planet which is estimated about 318 times as massive.
/. archived!
Me, personally, I'd like to have a point point singularity encased in a graviton isolation sphere suspended on a chain to wear around my neck.
Not to mention your back of the envelope math sucks, because I'm pretty sure Euclidean geometry breaks down when dealing with singularities and volume:mass relations are nonlinear. Not to mention that I'm not entirely sure that the mass:volume relation of 1:1 is a valid assumption. It would be my guesstimate that with more mass the volume would decrease and a 10x massive object would shrink logarithmically.
What would be interesting is to compress Hydrogen to it's liquid-metal state, like the core of Jupiter and place it inside a Buckyball.
I see potential for this Hydrogen-Buckyball in creating a new energy storage system. You could create long string-like buckyballs filled with Hydrogen, and line them up in a plane and encase them in a thin plate with oxygen or fluorine or some other electron hungry element and bang you've got a Hydrogen Ion battery. So now don't any of you greedy Corporate B!@#$$#S try and patent it, because it's now public domain and the prior art is
Or perhaps you could accelerate the Hydrogen Buckyballs to near light speed and slam them into each other at a steady rates to make a pulsed fusion reactor that could be used a a clean source of energy or even as engines for interstellar travel.
...an unlimited source of energy in the Sun. I understand why you would say this, but you think too small for my tastes. The Sun doesn't contain enough energy in total for some of my more grandiose schemes.a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Surplus Tardis Chameleon Circuit...
Why bother
...hey, I've found this stuff called methane that can store up to 30% of its weight in hydrogen!
Considering gasoline as octane is a good approximation for many purposes, one of which is hydrogen fraction.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
But you know what they say, it's never about the size... it's all about the mass and how you use it.
S.
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Those are problems but I think the biggest problem is just turning the energy into useful forms. Photovoltaic, wind, ethanol, these are all still niche power sources.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Volcanoes.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
they had this on the last season of andromeda
seefra 2 was an artificial sun with hyrogen stored in carbon arms
So for any given mass, we can calculate the threshold radius (the Schwarzschild radius), and conversely for any given radius, we can find the threshold mass, which is the same thing stated differently anyway. At the Schwarzschild radius, the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light; that's why an early concept/name for what we now call "black holes" was "frozen stars": the image of the star would be "frozen" into the even horizon as it existed at the moment of last escape.
So, the Schwarzschild radius for:
Earth = 9mm (true radius is ~6350km; your 10cc figure is about 3x larger than the volume of a spherical shell with r=9mm)
Sun = ~3km (a bit less; true radius is ~695,000km)
white dwarf = ~2.5km (for an individual with ~.8 solar masses; true radius is something like ~10,000km, so somewhat larger than Earth)
neutron star ~= 6km (for an individual with ~2 solar masses; note that they are compressed nearly this small with their radii of 8~10km, so they're almost black holes! This is known as the "Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit" for neutron stars.) Jupiter's core is about 10 earth masses Depending on how one defines Jupiter's "core", you could simply pick a corresponding mass. Ergo one Jupiter core will form a singularity at about [10x the Earth-mass singularity volume]. Not quite:
Rs = 2*G*m/c^2
and let's say 2*G/c^2 = k, so we can write it more simply as:
Rs = m*k
So the Schwartzschild radius increases linearly with mass, but you were talking about the volume:
(4/3)*Pi*Rs^3 = 10cc for Earth (it's actually about 3cc, but we'll use your numbers)
Volume goes as the cube of the Schwarzschild radius (which fixes the mass), so equivalently the mass (which fixes the Schwarzschild radius) goes as the cube root of volume.
If you can get the pressure high enough on the hydrogen trapped in a long carbon nano tube with end caps, then you have a high temperature super conductor. dan@tekgnu.com
At least, not under conditions vaguely like Earth's surface. Hydrogen can be a good (or even very good) tool for storing and transporting energy from one place to another on the Earth's surface, but until someone discovers a hydrogen mine on the surface of the Earth, and someone else discovers a separate oxygen mine on the surface of the Earth, then neither is an energy source.
To produce hydrogen in significant quantities on Earth, you need to chemically reduce water. You can do that directly (with electrolysis) or indirectly (for example, by electrolysing molten rubidium chloride to produce rubidium, then reducing water with the rubidium. It's the same reaction at the atomic level, but likely to be thermodynamically less efficient than the direct route.)
It dismays me that even a forum like SlashDot, which claims to have a technically competent audience, allows such sloppy writing to persist. It might not be "kewel", but chemistry and thermodynamics are important, dammit! If it weren't for understanding thermodynamics, neither the engine in your car, nor the engine in the bus I use would work. And without the chemistry, we wouldn't have the materials to build either.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
How about the CO2 ? It's only 8% hidrogen ... the rest is carbon. Kind of difficult to burn it without burning the C.
No, no, no...haven't you read "The Algebraist"? We'll end up with a super-secret network of hidden wormholes.