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A New Way To Produce Hydrogen
Iddo Genuth writes "Scientists at Pennsylvania State University and Virginia Commonwealth University are producing hydrogen by exposing clusters of aluminum atoms to water. Rather than relying on the electronic properties of the aluminum, this new process depends on the geometric distribution of atoms within the clusters. It requires the presence of 'Lewis acids' and 'Lewis bases' in those atoms (water can act as either). Unlike most hydrogen production processes, this method can be used at room temperature and doesn't require the application of heat or electricity to work. The researchers experimented with a variety of different aluminum cluster patterns, discovering three that result in hydrogen production."
Interesting scientifically but hardly practical for energy systems. Aluminium requires huge amounts of energy to produce, to the point where is is essentially "frozen electricity". Given that their end result is aluminium oxide, aren't they just recovering some of the energy that into refining?
The problem is the aluminum can't be used over and over again, a problem which the scientists are working to solve.
Still not economically viable, but hopefully continued research in hydrogen will replace the hype about plant based ethanol, which is not really a solution (because we need to eat corn, etc).
Qxe4
IANAC but the article sounds like it's another way of oxidising Aluminium. I can see this being very impractical for a few reasons. Main one it's incredibly hard to store aluminium in a way where it won't oxidise, especially as this would work would need it to be powdered and without that layer of oxidised aluminium on the top, it's incredibly reactive and dangerous.
You're then left with a large pile of Oxidised aluminium which I don't believe has any use apart from the production of 'pure' aluminium (which requires lots of electricity). Ultimately I can't see this offering much benefit over existing methods of hydrogen production
Gaius Baltar is a Java programmer.
Methane we produce the same old way.
Pass the baked beans, luv!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
.. pull my finger.
Smells like someone's grant is about to run out. Solution: the press-release, stir things up a little, generate some news and attention, it's a common way to generate hype, interest, etc. As has been pointed out, they won't solve the fact that the aluminum in the process is not merely catalytic, but used up by the process. Little thing called oxidation. If only they had a bit MORE MONEY to solve the problem... for the next 30 years or so, put their kids through college, yada, yada ;P
If you ever found a way to separate water into its constituent molecules at room temperature, no energy input needed, no chemical input needed, etc., you'd have just solved the world's energy problems for all time.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Yes, three times the energy density of gasoline by mass but only one third the energy density by volume (and that's for liquid hydrogen).
Yes, fuel cells can be three times as efficient as burning gasoline, but it takes 2.5 times as much energy to make a hydrogen fuel cell than you'll ever get out of it over its lifetime. Where's that energy coming from? Milking invisible pink unicorns?
Ford has dropped development of hydrogen cars in favour of going straight to all electric.
Hydrogen is over before it even begun. It's less efficient than electric by any measure, and if you're betting on a big breakthrough (this isn't it) then the smart money is on capacitors (powered by wind, wave, solar, geothermal), not some magic leap forward in hydrogen production or fuel cell construction. At this point, it really is an academic proposition.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
One step closer to the goal!
[Citation Needed]. If you are thinking of the waste that appears when melting any metal, which is called "dross" in the industry, there are ways to handle it
On the contrary, ethanol as a fuel is not only a solution, it's a mature technology. My first 100% ethanol-burning car was a Brazilian 1983 Chevette, which I bought used in 1985. The last time gasoline was sold in Brazil without at least 10% of ethanol was in 1976
Hydrogen as a fuel is, at this moment, wishfull thinking. The stage of hydrogen research today is less advanced than ethanol as a fuel was in Brazil in 1974. And there's much more to research. Any gasoline engine will run, with reduced performance, on ethanol. Tuning a car to run on ethanol is a relatively simple task.
And, much more important, the delivery system is there. Any service station that sells gasoline or diesel has all it needs to sell ethanol. Trucks and pipelines are the same. To convert a whole country to ethanol, as was done in Brazil in the late 1970s, is simple.
Now try doing that with hydrogen. Build a new fleet of tanker trucks, a whole new network of pipelines covering the whole country. Develop and build the tanks to hold the fuel in each car. Do the safety checks. Develop, test, and certify the systems that will guarantee a car will still be safe, even after crashing.
To build a hydrogen-based society is not just finding some magical way to produce hydrogen.
You mean a quarter of the costs. For the same amount, the energy usage will actually go up (extreme inefficiency in China) as will the pollution (extremely dirty coal with little to no scrubbers). The real irony would be that moving to hydrogen is suppose to clean up the air, but schemes like this would actually increase it significantly.
Yes, I know that you meant to be funny, yet, somebody will be thinking of the same thing. Oddly enough as a child, I use to generate hydrogen doing this "NEW" way. We got it from a 50's book on how to create a floating balloon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To use water and aluminium as energy storage. We already have a pretty good global aluminium infrastructure.
If water could be combined with aluminium to produce hydrogen on demand, then you refuel by replacement of the aluminium oxide waste with fresh aluminium and refilling the water tank.
Then you still need a better method to convert aluminium oxide to aluminium - but here's the great thing about this research. Better ways to convert in one direction usually lead to better ways to go the other way too (eg, microdots convert electricity to light better, but also the other way round too).
All methods by which man-made hydrogen is produced today use more "usable" energy than results in the hydrogen. What we need to do is use hard to use energy like solar, geotherm, or something else.
*all* energy production comes from the conversion of hard to use energy into an easier to use form. Solar power is an inefficient means by which light is converted to electricity. Plants convert light very efficiently and produce sugar. We then use yeast to break that down into alcohol. Unfortunately that also produces CO2 as well.
I would bet that large floating sterling engines could use the temperature differential of the sea to produce electricity. That's one idea, anyway.
Of course this effects still depends on the electronic properties of aluminum. Atoms of the same element in different cluster positions often have markedly different electronic environments and properties - this has been extensively studied for many small cluster systems. And if the relative orientation of suitably partially charged atoms is right, interesting effects can be observed.
And the other comments are right, too: This is absolutely not an energy-effective way to produce hydrogen.
On resonant frequency of matter itself, he discovered that he could break the bonds of a molecule by electromagnetically propogating the inverse energy of the bonds itself. This works into the equation of an efficient mode to bring hydrogen and oxygen from its bonding into water, allowing it to be combusted in its elemental form. Raymond was the man to use this same idea to destroy virus; he's also the first man on this planet to see a virus under a microsoft, which he invented the Scanning Electron Microscope to accomplish in that regard.
Don't trust the crapflood on Slashdot you see here. I don't know what got into people but it stinks. This technology has been used already to run combustion engines in overunity implementations known as Water Electrolysis or another called Joe cell. Water Electrolysis utilized stainless steal alloy 316L (that alloy specifically prevents degradation of ferrite into the water) to break water electrochemically into 2H and O at anywhere from 4ampere to 20ampere on 12volts. Joe Cell was the opposite in that regard, "negatively charging" a cyclinder of water at 500 milliampere of 12volts for a couple days and then allowing the vacuum of an intake manifold to a combustion engine break the bond of water while in its unstable "negatively charged" state Effectively Joe Cell is nothing more than a homebrew electrolytic capacitor that uses water as electrolyte, and there are many more implementations throughout the better half of the primitive countries where people found that replacing the original cathodes and electrodes in a deep-cycle car battery with a stainless steel (again, 316L is the cleanest and most durable).
Whenever I post this information on my /. account I either get flamed by a pretend science nerd that has never achieved this goal but insists on throwing mere theory of Thermodynamics Law up into the air, and others just mod me down. Slashdot is become a cess-pool in that regard.
I haven't been to cunting in ages!
Seriously, why? I am assuming that you do not commute more than 100 km each day, and are not off-roading. So why do you need 500 km? A 100 would do nicely for 95% of the world.
A super cap can take the power as fast as you deliver it. Personally, I suspect that new highend power stations would be develop for this, so that if doing a 100km/charge, then a fill up would likely take under a minute.
What is FAR more important is that car companies MUST come up with a STANDARD HIGH-END plug AND way to plug in? IOW, the smart thing is for the industry to figure a plug that is used by all the cars, and preferably allows for automatic hook-up (car IDs self, open cap, robotic arm moves power cable in and recharges). That is why Musk really should hook up with several other small car companies and set the standard NOW. Keep in mind that a HIGH-END plug is very different than the house plug. Ideally I would put it on the back of the car, along with a trailer hitch. That would allow a person to pull a trailer with power to move across the country.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
he discovered that he could break the bonds of a molecule by electromagnetically propogating the inverse energy of the bonds itself
Wiki: Rife's claims could not be independently replicated, and active scientific interest in the devices had dissipated by the 1950s.
he's also the first man on this planet to see a virus under a microscope
Wiki: These 'small turquoise bodies' are now known to have been the cells of the bacterium Salmonella typhi. The limitations of light microscopes are such that even the best resolution of a conventional microscope (at roughly 200 nanometers) is inadequate to visualize most viruses.
he invented the Scanning Electron Microscope to accomplish in that regard.
Wiki: The first SEM image was obtained by Max Knoll. (About Rife: The observations were made though a specially designed optical microscope, only five of which were ever constructed.)
Don't trust the crapflood on Slashdot you see here.
Pot, meet kettle. Can't bother with the rest of your post.
what?
No, seriously, WHAT?
ivan
Like to brew? Want to talk about it? Brattlebrew: groups.yahoo.com/group/brattlebrew
people have been doing this for years how is this news? we done that in school 25 years ago? old science wtf?
Ethanol can be obtained from a myriad sources, not only corn and sugarcane. It can be obtained from algae for example. Not cheap yet but hydrogen fuel cells aren't cheap either.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
...just open his fuel scoops and fly close to the sun.
Jerry Woodall, from Purdue, gave a talk at SNS's FiRe conference in San Diego about this process http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html. As many others have said, essentially, aluminum is a not-bad way to store electricity which can later be used to crack water. I agree with what others have said, that fuel cells are not a particularly good solution for transportation, but if we're ever going to do fuel cells, this aluminum dodge is the best trick i've seen for carting around the means to produce hydrogen.
The problem with electric cars is in the claim that you only need to commute 40 miles a day for a charge. That may be true, but in America, people also use their cars for the occasional family errands and during those days it is rather reasonable to drive much more than that in a day. Having a car limited by design to 40 miles is just not enough.
Tesla is a ponzi scam. Musk is just basically announced a new car and taking deposits on to fund the production of another car that he already has deposits on. His CFO quit when this decision was taken.
This is my sig.
Like china we have to think in BIOGAS, there is a lot of shit to convert to energy.
This is not an article about making Hydrogen cheaply or efficiently, it's an article about an unusual chemical reaction, one of whose byproducts is Hydrogen.
You cant get something for nothing. For each Hydrogen atom let off, you have to spend an atom of Aluminum. Aluminum weighs 27 times as much as Hydrogen, so for every kilogram of Aluminum you burn up you get at most 38 grams of Hydrogen. Aluminum costs almost a dollar a kilo. That makes the Hydrogen cost at least $27 a Kilo. The market price for Hydrogen is around $2 a Kilo, so this process costs about 13 times too much.
OK, this is cool, you can now fuel your fuel cells with Aluminum and water.
Imagine stopping in at the fueling station and trading in your Aluminum Oxide for a fresh supply of Aluminum and filling up with water. The Aluminum Oxide gets shipped off to a recovery plant that relies on solar, wind, geothermal, or other non-carbon fuels. No more dependence on Foreign Oil.
Some slight problems:
1) The world's supply of aluminum may not be enough to roll this out worldwide.
2) Electric or plug-in-hybrid cars achieve the same goals without needing a new fuel infrastructure
3) insert additional problems here
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's just so entertaining to watch people find "free energy" in some form or another, by consuming some commonly available thing to produce energy, all the while completely ignoring the energy required to make the consumable.
Someone once described to me a process by which you use electrolysis to create hydrogen from water, and then burn that to create electricity, the surplus of which you can then use to create more hydrogen. (and you can even improve your yield by using the pure oxygen you are getting as a byproduct when creating the hydrogen!) And water is the free fuel! *SMACK*
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Another Slashdot Advertisement?
I think there should be a statement at the end of all articles like this that says whether or not someone at Slashdot was paid to run the story.
We don't have an energy crisis, it's a power crisis.
As others have said, the question is energy transport as well as generation. It is very unlikely that a single solution will do the job. These debates about looking for a single replacement for gasoline are puerile. The real point is that gasoline has never been a single solution to all transportation needs. That we continue to treat it this way is just a testament to the effectiveness of the oil industries PR flacks (starting back with Standard Oil).
Surely there will be niches for several variations of hydrogen, ethanol and electric transport as well as CNG and the others? In particular, most driving is local. The tradeoffs for powering local traffic are very different than the tradeoffs for long distance transport.
Insulting chemists for having discovered new ways to do chemistry is really pretty silly. Folks who don't understand the difference between the technique described and electrolysis might want to demonstrate a bit of humility when posting.
Come on. You can generate hydrogen by dumping aluminium foil in either sodium hydroxide (cheap plumbing cleaner) or in water containing minute amounts of HgCl2 acting as a catalyst. This is elementary and was known for decades. Those guys just found out that if they use insanely fine aluminium powder they don't need sodium hydroxide or mercuric chloride anymore. But this gets us nowhere, as we still need the aluminium, and making this insanely fine powder isn't free (both financially and energetically). The immediate practical value of this work in the field of energy storage is near zero. The only thing going for it is that the authors know how to generate interest.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Bob the Builder, that's who!
Can we fix it?
Yes we can!
Hydrogen production was reported earlier from cutting aluminum underwater: Uehara, K., Takeshita, H., and Kotaka, H. (2002). Hydrogen gas generation in the wet cutting of aluminum and its alloys. Journal of Materials Processing Technology, 127:174-177. While it certainly is not an efficient way to generate hydrogen in mass quantities, if you already need to cut aluminum for some other purpose (e.g., construction or repair, especially underwater) you can recover some hydrogen as a small side benefit. The same reaction may also lead to a useful sensing mechanism in the future.
This has the potential to be big but of course the valid questions are not mentioned, such as what are the inputs to get this hydrogen and does it scale. Still sounds rather Cold Fusiony...
Put some lye and aluminum foil in a big bowl of water. Once the aluminum is consumed and you have witnessed a whole bunch of hydrogen come off, don't put any more lye into the water, but do put some more aluminum foil into it. Watch it get consumed too as it produces more hydrogen. Repeat until you see how silly TFA is.
Seastead this.
This is an interesting trick, but it not a useful tech at this time. Although I will say this is the first time EVER where I thought a H2 energy culture was even remotely possible. This is still very wasteful, though. (See comments on Al refining...) As for ethanol, I still don't understand why we don't use hemp instead of corn.
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
Read and weep.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/siry-departed-tesla-on-deposit-fraud-fears/
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/tesla-roadster/2251-refunds-roadster-deposit.html
This is my sig.
He's right. As an approach to volume production of hydrogen, this sucks, because the aluminum is consumed in the reaction. Remember, hydrogen and oxygen are uphill energetically from water; you're going to have to put something in to get hydrogen out. One would like that "something" to be the minimum amount of heat or electricity required to dissociate the water molecules, rather than an expensive material you have to replace.
The Slashdot story links to a blog, which links to a press release, which links to a dead link that was supposed to explain the actual chemistry. Lame.
he's also the first man on this planet to see a virus under a microsoft
What an apt typo.
Yes indeed, producing hidrogen using good ol' technology using water electrolysis is too old and too easy to be effective.
Can't imagine why. You can split water easily using a source of electricity (e.g. nuclear), ship the hydrogen to where ever, and burn it using local oxygen from the air (fuel cell, internal combustion engine, whatever), and the emissions are limited to water vapor. Essentially, it's a neat way of storing energy -- the hard part is shipping the hydrogen (Do you do it at high pressure? At cryogenic temperature?)
At the rate we're going, marijuana will be legalized before they get around to hemp, but the bio-fuel dream is always going to be a non-starter: there just isn't enough energy available to the biosphere to think that we can hijack enough of it to run a significant chunk of our industry. Seriously, the estimates I've seen are something like 6 terrawatts in the biosphere, and more than twice that is used by industry: Drew Endby and Jim Thomas, Long Now talk (mp3)
that the vast vast majority of road trips are STILL less than 100 miles. More importantly, if able to charge in a minute and their are power stations around it DOES NOT MATTER.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How energy efficient is the dis/charge cycle using this new process? And how dense an energy storage medium could such a battery be, say, compared to Li-Ion batteries (or to gasoline, the champ)?
If dis/charge is at all close to 90%+, and storing about 400Mj (the way a 16 gallon gas tank does at 20% internal combustion efficiency), in anything close to approximately 40 pounds for gas, then it's a replacement. Since the electricity powers lighter motors (electric instead of gas), and conserves nearly all the regenerative braking power, its capacity needs to be only less than 400Mj to compete, maybe 350Mj, or even less if we don't get the full range (about 600 miles in a gas hybrid), maybe 175Mj.
Since an (single use) aluminum battery can be up to about 4.75Mj:Kg, (gasoline * 20% = 9.33Mj:Kg), the aluminum is probably twice as heavy for gasoline's energy. But if we can accept half the range, it might be OK, if this tech lets it recharge efficiently.
Better battery tech is very exciting. Energy storage is probably the worst link in all the alternative energy systems we're now looking at. Even if it's not good for cars, if the material costs less than lead-acid batteries (like under $36:Kj), it's a major advantage for home/building power. Even if just storing power during non-peak times for local discharge during peak times.
--
make install -not war
They finally found a way to produce the most common element in the universe
(sarcasm mode=OFF)
I wonder if Bauxite (aluminum ore) would be viable by just puting it in solution to generate electricity instead of processing it into aluminum first?
Please call us when you do. In the meantime, I'll see if I can market my magic catalyst which allows you go get hydrogen from water using sodium atoms...at room temperature!!
Yeah, Im on the energy source
The cosmic force
With prodigy
Kicking astrology
My intellects the power
With high-end plugged super capacity electrical power
Blows your mind drastically, fantastically
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Blows your mind drastically, fanta..
We spin back rewind. high-end plugged super capacity electrical power
Blows your mind drastically, fantasically
Unless they've figured out away to avoid conservation of matter (which really would be big news), it's a bit misleading to say they're PRODUCING hydrogen.