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Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel Using Sunlight
intellitech writes "Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, a University of Kentucky-University of Louisville team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken (abstract). Because pure hydrogen gas is not found in free abundance on Earth, it must be manufactured by unlocking it from other compounds. Thus, hydrogen is not considered an energy source, but rather an 'energy carrier.' Currently, it takes a large amount of electricity to generate hydrogen by water splitting. As a consequence, most of the hydrogen manufactured today is derived from non-renewable sources such as coal and natural gas. The team says the GaN-Sb alloy has the potential to convert solar energy into an economical, carbon-free source for hydrogen."
Is this a superior alternative to the work that Dan Nocera's been doing at MIT with catalysts to make electrolysis take less energy?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hopefully it won't be used to remake dihydrogen monoxide later. That stuff is lethal.
Is there a cheap way to contain hydrogen yet?
Do you care about your fellow man who was born with less privilege than you? Then work hard to make stories like this into a reality so that every poor family can have the access to cheap energy to heat their homes and to power the car in their driveway.
That's a better story than lowering the standard of living for everyone. I'd rather use technology to raise everyone up, even if it is only to the modest levels that you and I take for granted.
"But will never be made commercially available because it would result in a breakdown of the energy cartel's strangle-hold on the world's economy."
You know, I think I speak for many people when I say this, but if you don't have anything nice to say, then shut the fuck up.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I would love to see a round up of all the great world saving ideas that have been invented/discovered and posted about on slashdot over the years. It seems like every year someone else comes up with a method to generate hydrogen for free or to cure cancer with OTC meds or to revolutionize batteries so we can finally have pocket blowdryers, etc. How many of these are going anywhere years later?
could it be?
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
So, is this any better than just electrolyzing water using current from a solar cell?
"Novel Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel from Sunlight"
"University of Louisville and University of Kentucky researchers are currently working toward producing the alloy and testing its ability to convert solar energy to hydrogen"
"The researchers say their findings are a triumph for computational sciences, one that could potentially have profound implications for the future of solar energy."
"The GaN-Sb alloy is the first simple, easy-to-produce material to be considered a candidate for PEC water splitting." so eh, can it do it or not? I don't care if they consider something as a candidate. so repost when they can make and test it, so far all they've done is computed that it could do it(and whoever wrote the article should have placed even more emphasis on that and he should've skipped the lecture about how hydrogen is considered an energy carrier and how current cheap methods involve co2, that stuff is not news, info about why they can't make the material overnight in a foundry would have been interesting though)..
oh and if you read the article see the related stories next to it, same type could stories.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I know we're supposed to love all technological solutions for our energy problems, but I'm just not convinced anymore.
When I look at how badly most things are managed, at the ignorance and greed that rule the world, I'm quite convinced that properly implementing what we already know could solve more problems than inventing further methods and discovering new things. In everything from energy policy to urban planning to human health we could achieve an almost paradisaical state if we just chose to do those things correctly that we already know how to do correctly and assisted the entire human race in doing the same.
I'm not advocating cultural imperialism here, I'm just there's plenty of universal ground on which to share with any persons or cultures easily implemented, universally agreeable methods.
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Is that a real question? Of course you pick the car. It provides mobile shade in which to search for more water.
We've used solar power to split water into hydrogen for decades, what matters is cost. How does this compare with standard solar splitting based on surface area? Do you need a crystalline structure to work? Given that raw silicon is more common and more used I expect it's much cheaper. The article talks about semiconductors so it probably needs a crystal structure (drives up cost), so even with better efficiency (single step vs multi step splitting) it's still probably more costly.
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Easy answer really. Drink your water and pee on your car.
Wow, the way you wrangled that old wisdom about being nice into a wording that is anything but is almost artful
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Gallium nitride (GaN) is used to make blue LED chips, typically vacuum deposited on top of sapphire wafers. While it is a very good semiconductor, it is an order of magnitude more expensive than silicon wafers. Unless there is a huge breakthrough in mass manufacturing cheap GaN wafers, it will be much cheaper to use silicon solar cells to generate electricity and electrolyze water with it.
Does the paper talk about the efficiency of this solution vs Photovoltaic panels and electrolysis? If the hydrogen and oxygen would be split over a large area (say a roof or larger), how would the gasses be collected? It sounds like an interesting result, but not so practical in application...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Of course the efficiency of the photocatalyst in using electromagnetic radiation to perform electrolysis is only 1/2 of the problem.
The other problem is how to prevent corrosion of the catalytic surface that allows the catalyst to work long enough so that it can be used in a practical system. The DOE is basically funding research in this area and their goal for a practical material is 10,000 hours (a little over a year). Right now the best stuff is only about 5% of this goal. As a comparison, the platinum catalyst in a typical car's catalytic converter can last 5-10 years.
I think many folks are hopeful that computational exploration can help to determine how and why certain configurations degrade and suggest improvements that will allow better designs that have reasonably efficiency and resist corrosion, but today that is still hopeful thinking...
People deciding to be calm and logical and sacrificing for the good of humanity as a whole? (The opposite of the ignorance and greed and fear we see all around us.) Or some guy in a lab coat eventually inventing a quick technical fix?
Personally I think cold fusion (or a similarly improbable technological breakthrough like the sunlight->metal->hydrogen described in this article based solely on computer simulation) is by far the more likely of the two possibilities, so I find joy in reading stories like this one, and continue to hope that someday, one of them will come to fruition.
Yea, you got it, but look - if I have to pay another $0.1 per litre for this to work, then get lost. I like my standing in the world, and I don't want everybody else to enjoy anything even close to it.
So stick your solar utopian dream into your next bowl and puff away. If we wanted to help the world, why would we behave like we do?
Big Oily Brother protects our superiority.
i know this was intended as a joke...but did you know that it is not out of the ordinary to sweat out almost all of what you drink in the desert due to the lack of humidity 'wetting' your skin? There has been times where I've drank 9L of water and only taken one piss all day.
It's likely I have the roof space on my house to generate all of the hydrogen I'd need for all of my vehicles.
I'll just pick on this one point. This is in fact very unlikely, and very very unlucky for a large majority of people.
You claim the oil companies will kill this but you totally misunderstand them. They will be more than happy to refine hydrogen on a massive scale and bring it to stations just like today for the many, many people who cannot or will not put all this equipment together. They don't care if it's cheap because they will still make some profit on it.
Hydrogen cars are the future exactly because the well-funded oil companies want to see the next ethnology to win use some kind of fueling infrastructure. Which is fine by me, since I like range and you can really only get that from a system that's much quicker to refuel than just electricity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2 weeks ago this same source reported on research at the PNWNL that uses a Nickel catalyst for a 1000x improvement over the platinum catalyst process now used, for example, on the ISS.
If I'm stuck in the desert with a bottle of water, then my car isn't there!
It uses gallium, which also makes great solar cells, more efficient than anything else. But the cost of gallium solar cells is so high that they're only used on spacecraft. They're about 3x more efficient than silicon solar cells, and 300x more expensive.
In the free market, the customer-base with the most money usually rule. Technological developments are usually targeted and priced for the wealthy, simply because there aren't much money in poor people.
Only after saturating the upper- and middle-class markets, there might be leftover-scrapes for the lower-class, either by lowering the price closer to manufacturing costs, or simply through resale of used devices. At that point though, the upper- and middle-classes are on the next cool thing, while the lower-class is left with 5-years-old technology.
The reality is sad.
Um... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080219133226.htm "ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2008) — Purdue University engineers have developed a new aluminum-rich alloy that produces hydrogen by splitting water and is economically competitive with conventional fuels for transportation and power generation. "We now have an economically viable process for producing hydrogen on-demand for vehicles, electrical generating stations and other applications," said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process. The new alloy contains 95 percent aluminum and 5 percent of an alloy that is made of the metals gallium, indium and tin. Because the new alloy contains significantly less of the more expensive gallium than previous forms of the alloy, hydrogen can be produced less expensively, he said."
There is no music - home taping killed it.
Hang on a moment, until we figure out a way to create hydrogen out of nothing (e.g. like the God mentioned in Genesis 1) then there's simply no such thing as a renewable resource!
Even easier - the output of a hydrogen fuel cell is pure water. Rather than risk foulling the catalyst, put the water in the car, and drink it after driving closer to civilization.
Golly, I wonder if cheap, ubiquitous access to hydrogen might have any negative side effects?
How hard is it to then separate the hydrogen and oxygen gasses that are produced?
Just make your hydrogen to use in the chemical plants this way instead of reforming natural gas. Ammonia, ammonium sulphide etc etc comes from hydrocarbons now and it's nice to have an alternative way of getting it for when oil and natural gas get to be rare and expensive things.
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Easy answer really. Drink your water and pee on your car.
No, you start by drinking the water, then drink your pee, and then fashion a suspension bridge out of the car.
-Bear.
Or, you could take the door off the car, keep the water and go searching for more water on foot. And if it get hot, just roll the window down on the car door you are carrying.
The alloy the article you link to describes splits water molecules without needing sunlight, and uses aluminum to bind the oxygen so the hydrogen is available as fuel. The alloy is not a catalyst, the aluminum in it reacts with the oxigen. The two technologies are not the same just because they happen to involve gallium.
This is Energy Nuttery, second only to Space Nuttery in the amount of wishful thinking, delusion and total insanity. We *KNOW* we're headed for a total collapse of the cheap and high density energy source known as oil. Instead of facing the reality that we're going to have to very seriously rethink our social model, we prefer to tweak old cars into one-of-a-kind electric drag racers and publish daily nonsense about how our energy situation is solved with delusions.
"Hey! No worries! We'll all have electric race cars powered from our solar roof hydrogen generator! PARTY ON!"
No, I don't want to pay for the energy of a bunch of lazy freeloaders, you goddamn pinko!
While working on a netbook with access to the internet in a carbon fiber fly by wire airliner that can fly from one end to the planet to the other without refueling controlled by an auto-pilot that knows exactly where it is and can check the weather ahead of it constantly with no human intervention both from its own sensors and external ones...
The future is here it just that the goalpost has been moved. What you got is old hat, what you haven't got yet is new, until you get it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... At least, not compared to petrol. The major point is that, should the tank rupture, the light hydrogen safely escapes upwards. Even explosions tend to safely float up.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I don't see anyone else mentioning this... but isn't hydrogen explosive?
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
Drink your water and pee on your car. ...eh, on long trips, I already do that :-/
Currently, it takes a large amount of electricity to generate hydrogen by water splitting. As a consequence, most of the hydrogen manufactured today is derived from non-renewable sources such as coal and natural gas.
You either do not understand English or the entrenched energy lobby. We have scads of electrical power going to waste at night because plants can only be dialed down so far. We could be using that energy to make hydrogen. We are not doing so. Your "As a consequence" idea is pure bullshit. We are making hydrogen from natural gas because it is profitable, not because we don't have energy simply going to waste that could be used to produce it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Is that a real question? Of course you pick the car. It provides mobile shade in which to search for more water.
Nonsense. Drink the water. Pee in the car.
Is it as inefficient as algae or corn ethanol? I smell a ground floor penny stock opportunity not far behind.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We don't really want freeways full of cars spewing out water vapor, do we?
Water vapor is a MUCH worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Yes, really. Look it up. And that's just looking at it from a global climate-style standpoint. On a much more local level, what do you think it does to the weather to have thousands and thousands of power plants giving off water vapor like crazy?
Not to mention, what does a freeway full of water-vapor-spewing cars look like in Minneapolis in January? All of that water condenses almost immediately, falls to the pavement and... instant ice sheet.
Very much like biodiesel (Look! I can run my car off the waste leavings from Sonic! Isn't that awesome?! Now we just need a fried food restaurant dedicated to each car, or thereabouts, and we'll have fixed the energy crisis!), fuel cell vehicles just won't scale in a reasonable manner. A few of them won't hurt anything, and look very green. Millions of them are FAR more problematic. The same could be said for internal combustion gasoline engines, naturally.
Batteries are the best way to go, but that solution is also far from perfect. Compressed air vehicles are fine for low-speed inner-city driving, but I still think the idea of a high-pressure tank going down the highway at 100 kph+ is frightening.
It's much easier if you combine two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen atom. One downside is that the resulting molecule can be quite lethal in large quantities.
Seriously, if this works decently in salt water, than this is very useful. OTH, if this requires fresh water, then hmmm.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
At least the Hydrogen will go aloft.
I don't know why oil loving, knee-jerk anti-green people can't understand this. fossil fuels are not an energy source either, it can store more energy than hydrogen, but it is still storage, we just happen to have a bunch of stored solar energy that the dinosaurs left us. Get it through your skull, oil is a dead end street.
Not that i buy into the whole carbon footprint nonsense, but this is NOT neutral. you have to make the stuff, transport it, install it, and dispose of it eventually. that all factors in to the *total* cost of ownership. ( or footprint, if you are into that stuff )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, cost means everything, because in the end whether to further develop ideas like this one and actually deploy them are economic decisions, whether we like that or not.
One thing to keep in mind is that once you have a way to produce hydrogen at very low prices the cost of using it in vehicles is still high. It takes a buttload of energy to transport and compress it enough before it's useful. All the talk of on-board hydrogen storage for vehicles talks about 5,000 psi tanks, and compression hydrogen from 15 psi to 5,000 psi isn't cheap. This is a hurdle hydrogen will always have to deal with, thanks to its very low energy/weight ratio -- you have to pack a lot of it into a tank before you can get a reasonable driving range.
If batteries continue their price drop, that will make it ever harder for hydrogen to compete, as the marginal cost of transporting electricity is essentially zero.
There may still be a future for hydrogen in stationary applications, but for vehicular use it's swimming against a stream that's getting faster.
I laugh in the face of danger! AH HA HA HA HA HA!
Well a serious answer would be to drink it really.
Why?
Because the waste exhaust of a hydrogen car is mainly water. So it would be possible to create an enclosed system to power that car with no exhaust at all. Instead you'll just need to let it sit in the sun to recharge.
why do you cower behind a chosen electronic based pseudonym, feeb?
Because I'm afraid of you, clearly.
This doesn't have much of a practical application. Available solar power is still the limit in the process and you'll never produce enough hydrogen this way to have a significant contribution to this countries energy needs. This technology just improves the conversion efficiency if hydrogen is your intended final product. You're still better off converting the sunlight to straight electricity using standard grade solar-electric cells instead of converting it to hydrogen which is far less efficient to convert back into mechanical energy.
Or more pointed... You're driving through the freakin desert! Who the hell brings a single bottle of water? I don't drive down I5 to Portland without at least a liter or two of pottable water in the back of the car, just in case.
Man, I knew we tended to be a "glass is half empty" crowd, but this kinda brings new meaning to that phrase as well.
Even better: pour your water into the sand, pee into the empty container, and drink that.
Regards,
- Bear
Now, obviously it's way too early to tell if this or any of the other advances in photosynthetic catalysts (e.g. the work done at MIT) merit any Nobel Prize, but it got me to wondering. . .
Has anyone gotten both a scientific (physics or chemistry) Nobel Prize, *and* the Nobel Peace Prize for the same discovery?
It seems to me that any major advance in producing hydrogen (or hydrocarbons) cheaply and abundantly from sunlight and water, might merit both prizes - seems like a major advancement in energy could also be a major advancement for peace.
Should beer be involved in this somewhere?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Solar power is not used to make hydrogen. Yes this can be done but industrial hydrogen comes from hydrocarbons, not hydrolysis.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Silicon gets used because it's well-understood. However, it's actually a pretty terrible absorber (indirect gap, smallish absorption coefficient), so you need a lot of it (drives up cost). Also, making crystalline materials is not the cost-driving thing you seem to think it is. It's often simply a matter of heating up the substrate during deposition (in the case of a thin film). Sometimes (metals, layered chalcogenides, for example) it's actually pretty difficult to make an amorphous material.
What idiot moderated PP insightful? It's completely clueless! What the fuck is "standard solar splitting based on surface area" ... is this supposed to refer to electrolysis? The article -- hell, even the abstract -- talks about a gallium-nitride semiconductor doped with antimony. Where the hell is "raw silicon" coming from? Nobody said a damned thing about that. And what on earth could possibly be meant by "single step vs multi step splitting"? One thing I'm quite certain of: the clueless poster did NOT intend it to refer to the steps in the global reaction. PP is just babbling to draw attention to himself and sound knowledgeable; should have been marked as a troll.
Novel Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel from Sunlight.
I feel a SCO lawsuit coming on.
Fuck off and die dickless Kristopetit.
on a large scale is this more efficient than the sulfur iodine cycle with heat provided by a nuclear reactor? Even if it isn't, it would still be of some use as in decentralized hydrogen production centers
If you want to state that a compressed cylinder of hydrogen is as safe as a non-compressed fuel tank filled with regular gasoline, go ahead.
It is absolutely safer. If the tank is ruptured (and that is a BIG if given how strong such a tank would be), the hydrogen would dissipate extremely rapidly and there would be no lingering danger of fire or explosion as with gasoline, nor any environmental damage.
For so many reasons, we should be exploring battery technology and using pure electric cars. Less moving parts, it could be lighter, etc.
It COULD be lighter - without the batteries!!! Hence, hydrogen. Ability to fill up in a minute as with gas? Hydrogen. Range of 300 miles without 1000 lbs + of storage? Also hydrogen.
The weight of the average car engine is about 600 lbs (via google). Between electric motor and battery you can only get close to that if your range sucks.
Electric cars as you say absolutely make more sense as the future of where vehicles are headed. Batteries to store electricity? They are a dead end. And if you were worried about a tank of hydrogen you should think twice about what happens to a giant set of car batteries if they get into an accident bad enough to rupture a hydrogen tank...
You stated categorically that a hydrogen tank was more dangerous than a gas tank. Well I will happily state that any accent that can release hydrogen would be WAY worse in a car full of batteries.
Why not just create a simple robotic system that exchanges batteries like propane tanks and let the facility worry about recharging them?
While a good idea in theory do you have any idea how many cars visit a gas station on an average day? You'd have to have a Target sized building to house the available spares, not to mention the HUGE amount of power that would have to run to such stations. As a result they would be very limited in location.
You also have no idea just how much space and weight we are talking about exchanging here. The Volt has done a great job in shrinking down weight to a mere 350 lbs. But look at the size of that thing!! How is even a robot going to realistically pull that out of your car and put in a new one? And remember that's the size that gives you a 30-50 mile range, which is why I mentioned 1000 lb battery packs earlier... you can't go on a road trip and expect to change out battery packs like that every 40 miles!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Keeping both gasses mixed would make a dandy bomb, but H2 is sufficiently more mobile that I suspect that separating it from O2 with a membrane would be fairly easy.
The ideal for this would be to keep both gasses handy and use them to operate a fuel cell at night. In practice, the energy to compress and store H2 in reasonable sized containers presents engineering difficulties.
A method to cheaply turn sunlight into an energy rich chemical (H2, CH4, CH3OH) expecially if the process could be ramped up and down at will would make alternative energy much more practical.
Of the 3 ethanol is a liquid at normal temp and pressure, and can be used with minimal conversion in gasoline engines.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
This is like asking "You're stuck in the desert at a gas station, gas/petrol is $10/gal and water is $10/gal. You only have $10 on you, which do you buy?" Neither you nor the cashier can figure out how to make change for a purchase less than $10? You can't pour half the water into the car's reservoir while drinking the other half? Technically, if the designers of the vehicle planned for that product to be used in a low or zero water environment, it would capture and reuse the fuel cell's output, so you shouldn't have to ever make this choice. However, most of the world is not desert, thus few designs would incorporate this as it would just add cost. Why waste the money on that design in places where water literally falls out of the sky? At most it could save weight which will be much less concern when cars can reliably utilize a renewable energy source.
It would be nice if someone published a DIY tutorial. Like where to buy the stuff from and how to dope the GaN with Sb in your garage . I am sure many others are interested in this.