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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."
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.
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