Slashdot Mirror
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."
as much hydrogen as the centre Jupiter,
So what you're saying is that you don't understand the difference between density and volume.
No prob. The issue here is finding an (energy-)efficient / easy way to make the buckyballs store and release hydrogen. But once the hydrogen is released, I can't imagine it would be hard to separate 2-atom hydrogen molecules from 60-atom buckyball molecules. Or find a way to do so.
Some hints: at room temperature, buckyball molecules may behave as solid or liquid-like material, or be dissolved in other liquids, while hydrogen is a thin gas. And buckyball molecules come in different sizes (number of C-atoms).
Summarized: the carbon here should be regarded as a carrier, not part of the fuel.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. The buckyballs DO contain carbon, but that fact alone does not make them dangerous to the environment. Carbon as fuel is bad because it gives off CO2 as a byproduct of burning. In this case the carbon is just the container, the hydrogen is the fuel. Unless of course I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.
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
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)
Wake up world. Hydrogen isn't a source of energy any more than capacitors are. It's a way to store energy.
-- QED
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!