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Piezo Crystals Harness Sound To Generate Hydrogen
MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport."
But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
"If we dont play it at full volume we wont be able to save the enviroment!" ;-)
If not, can this be made cheap?
Also, how much can this be scaled up?
It sounds (no pun intended) like this material would have to absorb energy from the sound wave. I wonder how well it would work as an acoustic barrier bordering a highway. It'd be refilled by rain, powered by noise, and it might just block the sound better than those lovely concrete walls we have now.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Can be used as noise insulation. There might be some drawback to building walls serving as giant water tanks, but the upside is that living next to the freeway might actually have some benefits.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The next time you see someone screaming at their car on the side of the road, they might just be fueling up ;)
Give me the option to have -1 given emphasis and leave me to post as much as I fuckin' like down here, you google-dick-sucking fucktards.
Um, not to be one of those self-absorbed, uninformed heavily biassed assholes, but I believe the first 'G' in google in you google-dick-sucking fucktards should be capitalized.
you Google-dick-sucking fucktards.
There, FTFY. Have a nice day.
I could be wrong, but I thought sound waves moving through air carried a surprisingly small amount of energy. When it comes with tangible vibrations, waves so strong they pulsed through the ground and other solids to reach you, the net effect might create significant amounts of energy, but just loud noises probably wouldn't give you much in the energy department, especially at 18% yield.
If these can be manufactured cheaply enough, I imagine boards of this being made and marketed by Gib for any place where you want soundproofing or a room with 'dead' acoustics.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Maxwell's demon anyone?
Compared to normal electrolysis of water?
"If this bus goes below 150 dB, we're dead".
I suppose it'd be called "Volume", and the next one "Volume 2".
So this was the best Slashdot could come up with for this weeks Green Energy Hype of the Week? Guess it was a slow week because this one is lamer than most.
Ok, ASSuming they can figure out a way to separate the H and O before they just combine again. ASSume this tech actually works outside the lab and can be scaled up. ASSume it performs as advertised when scaled up. 18% conversion efficiency on sound waves? Sound doesn't carry a lot of energy to begin with and they will harvest 18% of it before losses in compressing the H. Oh wow, if we ran this stuff down a mile of busy highway we MIGHT generate enough energy to push one crappy green gocart/car down that highway every day.
And that is the problem with most alternative energy schemes, they depend on ignorant people who don't know how the world works. There are LOTS of ways to extract energy from nature. The problem is that there aren't many that can compete with the existing sources because they are just so darned good, which was why we standardized on them in the first place. And if we actually do find a new good source, once scaled up it is a veritable certainty that we will discover that it too isn't a free lunch and that it also has a downside somewhere. And the second certainty is that the Greenies will be working to ban it because if it actually works it won't be alternative anymore. Kinda like music, when that great alternative/undergound band signs a contract and releases a hit most of their original fans declare them 'sellouts' and glom onto the newest unheard of band.
Democrat delenda est
...is there anything it can't do?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
....another genuinely cool technology that we'll never see in widespread use.
My question is this "If you're producing Hydrogen... aren't you also producing Oxygen at the very same time?" So here you are creating a combustible gas mixture in a stiochiometrically perfect balance to go BOOM-POW!!! The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them. You need to pump this straight into a combustion chamber or fuel cell, because it's ready, willing, and able to off the instant it's created. It cannot be transported anywhere.
This is such a beautiful idea.
Beautiful beautiful idea.
I will never think of something like this.
I do not care whether it is possible to generate energy efficiently or not - this is a really really cool tech.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
While this of course wouldn't be effective as a primary generative source, it could be very useful as a secondary income/efficiency improvement. Some current examples similar situations are 1 - Sugar Beet Processors: They use the dried leftovers from the plants to power the plant for processing sugar beets, somewhere in Hawaii they used to generate all of the electricity for the community from the excess power at the sugar beet plant. 2 - Dairy farm Power: Some larger dairies these days actually use the methane generated off of the cow manure to generate power for the milking operation. The way I would see this specific technology being used is in industrial applications. Where you have large loud equipment, such as electrical turbines, car shreaders, metal presses, or anything else loud you would surround it with walls of the crystals and water, this would generate the company some hydrogen which it could either sell or run through a fuel cell and pump back into its operation. And as a nice side effect it would decrease the sound given off by the equipment making for a better working environment. Of course this only works if the crystals can be mass produced very cheaply.
Women with their "silent-but-deadlies" won't get as good gas mileage as men.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
The air to water transition is a huge impedance change. so most sound will be reflected not transmitted into the water. Second Since they are talking about 18% of the absorbed energy being converted and not 18% of the incident energy, even once it gets into the water most of the incident energy is probably reflected or absorbed in the water itself.
Unless they have already taken these into account it seems like the conversion rate of air acoustic energy to hydrogen energy must be in the fraction of a percent. Even so free is free, and some forms of vibration like car vibrations might be coupled in without going through the air.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As anyone who has been on the Hoover dam tour can attest the generator room is noisy as hell and because of locality to the grid would seemingly be an ideal place. But compared to the whole, how much power could a fuel cell really produce out of it? Is it really worth it?