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New Catalyst Is Better At Splitting Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen (phys.org)
schwit1 shared an article from Phys.org:
Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen to produce clean energy can be simplified with a single catalyst developed by scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston. The electrolytic film produced at Rice and tested at Houston is a three-layer structure of nickel, graphene and a compound of iron, manganese and phosphorus. The foamy nickel gives the film a large surface, the conductive graphene protects the nickel from degrading and the metal phosphide carries out the reaction... Rice chemist Kenton Whitmire and Houston electrical and computer engineer Jiming Bao and their labs developed the film to overcome barriers that usually make a catalyst good for producing either oxygen or hydrogen, but not both simultaneously... Whitmire said the material is scalable and should find use in industries that produce hydrogen and oxygen or by solar- and wind-powered facilities that can use electrocatalysis to store off-peak energy.
In a comment on the original submission, Slashdot reader Martin S. opines, "If we can crack H20 and C02 we could make fuel to run existing vehicles with existing infrastructure and that fuel could be carbon neutral by using off peak renewable energy from wind farms and solar."
In a comment on the original submission, Slashdot reader Martin S. opines, "If we can crack H20 and C02 we could make fuel to run existing vehicles with existing infrastructure and that fuel could be carbon neutral by using off peak renewable energy from wind farms and solar."
Which is a 3-layer microstructure I'm going to guess isn't economical to produce.
So, who cares then?
For passenger vehicles. And they always will be
After all, we'll always have enough water, right?
#DeleteFacebook
Fuel cells are always just a decade away.
hilarious and original
Which is that?
Do current combustion motors run on hydrogen? Not really.
Are current cars able to contain hydrogen? Not really.
Are current tankers able to transport hydrogen gas? Not really, they're made for a liquid.
Are current gas stations able to dispense hydrogen? Nope, a station's storage, machinery and dispenser nozzle sure as hell aren't made for a gas.
So I'm not seeing much reuse potential here. Now the end-game would look kinda similar to a gasoline infrastructure on the surface, except for the part where you have to replace all the simple tanks and pumps with far trickier pressure vessels and regulators.
Rice chemist Kenton Whitmire and Houston electrical and computer engineer Jiming Bao and their labs developed the film to overcome barriers that usually make a catalyst good for producing either oxygen or hydrogen, but not both simultaneously. "Regular metals sometimes oxidize during catalysis," Whitmire said. "Normally, a hydrogen evolution reaction is done in acid and an oxygen evolution reaction is done in base. We have one material that is stable whether it's in an acidic or basic solution."
So, they have a catalyzer which is good for both oxygen and hydrogen production, but not both simultaneous at the same time?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Shut up and make me a battery with 4x the energy density and specific energy of current lithium ion technology.
1000 Wh/kg is that so hard?
Get it done. I am serious.
so you just fill your tank with water, turn on an electric water pump and this H20 cracker gadet and soon you have both hydrogen and oxygen to feed an internal combustion engine and the exhaust is just hot humid air with a little steam and some water droplets dripping out of your tail pipe = clean engery
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The second law of thermodynamics does not work that way!
laws change, new tech breaks those barriers on occasion
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Except it requires external power.
Electrolysis is a battery. You use "spare" power from wind or solar (typically) to electrolyze water into H2 and O (or, more accurately, 2H2 and O2). Since these are ions, they migrate toward the positive and negative electrodes and you capture them in tanks above. This stores the energy from wind or solar (or whatever) that would've otherwise been wasted. But, it takes time. To build up enough H2 to use as fuel for a car can take a while. To cut the time down, you scale the process up. More water. Bigger electrodes. More power from more wind/solar sources.
Once you have H2 and O2 in tanks, you can move them around as a fluid and combust them if desired. (Don't combust them in bulk. We call that a "disaster", and it tends to make the evening news.) This is where you would pump the H2 into cars as a fuel.
But a car carrying around the solar/wind generator to power this process and then immediately burn that fuel would be silly. Just take the direct output of the solar/wind generator and store it in batteries instead, then use an electric drivetrain. That cuts a lot of time and several layers of power losses out of the process. Or have the heavy equipment to do the electrolysis process at a "gas station" and fill up your H2 tanks there.
And a large oil company buys the patents, the lab and pays off everyone working there never speak of it again, in 5, 4, 3 ,2 ,1!
For every coal Trump gave and a few states took, They ceded 1000 to 10,000 clean energy obs to China depending how much time we are talking about.
Being stupid does keep you poor.
Night? Any time solar is available is, like, time to use power? I for one don't sleep that much when the sun is up...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Making Hydrogen isn't hard at all. The problem is safely bottling it up, transporting it to a useful location, filling a vehicle tank with it, making that tank safe for standard DOT highway compliant vehicles, and then converting the stored chemical power into electricity without needing a half kilo of platinum per vehicle.
Dumbing down of slashdot: The comment
laws change, new tech breaks those barriers on occasion
You're fucking retarded if you think new tech is going to break some barrier that changes the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
fuel cells STORE energy...dumbass
Cycles and circles. Unless you collect the oxygen instead for industrial use, but then you would have just burnt it with something else somewhere else - and it would replace industrial oxygen created by cooling and distilling the air.....
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Sounds like the kind of thing oil companies kill people for, or buy the patent and bury.
But I doubt this will happen. The technology for electric vehicles is moving apace, will soon become less expensive than the high-level engineering required to produce an internal combustion drivetrain, and it is much more convenient and cheaper to run. The writing is on the wall for the internal combustion engine.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Plug Power rec'd backing for several hundred millions from Amazon and Walmart for fuel cells for warehouse forklifts. More specialized use cases like a forklift may offer better potential near term since vehicles operate around a central location. Later the storage , transport costs which appear high for suburban homes may not need for personal use. Instead focus on fleet vehicles where economies of scale more practical. Modest technological advances like catalysts will help but a ways off for wide spread deployments. Japan seems to be only place with optimism that fuel cells might be a solution and investing in R&D. Japan needs especially as nuclear was a literal disaster and could be again due to seismic volatility of landscape. Still some danger in fuel cells but overall lower and not long term.
Editorial slant is part of most news these days. RT is among the most artful at incorporating slant seamlessly with factual reporting. IMO. When you read RT or any other media, ask yourself 1) "What is the editorial slant?" and 2) "What is the motivation for that slant?"
Yet another stupid idea that places cars in direct competition with the human food chain. Remember what happened when Ethanol was advocated for saving the environment? Food prices sky rocketed as cars began consuming the same food as humans. Poor people starved to death in the thousands. On top of it, Ethanol was a highly inefficiency gas doomed to failure.
So yeah, please don't develop technologies that have cars consuming anything that human beings rely on. It won't be a pretty sight.
just add baking soda to the water, easy peasy
You used to be a geek site. You don't "produce" energy by splitting water into H2 and O2. You may "store" or subsequently "transport" it this way (which is a cool thing to do). But you don't "produce" it.
O tempora, o mores. And oh, my lawn and that.
A lot of people comment about off-peaking. Electricity-hydrogen-electricity are very wastefull. There is better alternatives. Batteries are the most referenced but probably wrong if the prices of batteries doesn't chage on two orders of magnitude.
It's about cycling and power. A battery, well managed, has a good cycling... like 2000-5000 cycles of lifetime.
The total cost per kwh per cycle is enough low to enter the market, if not now, very soon (one only order of magnitude). We are close to a price where storage (10-1 cents per kwh cycled) is competitive.
BUT, nobody wants to amortize the battery in a century. In a day cycle basis, you can amortize the battery in 3650 cycles=10 years so it sounds reasonable. But this work only for DAILY cycling basis.
If you want to storage summer surplus to make it work on winter, we are talking about 1 cycle per year!. Using a battery in that model would be incredible expensive or the amortization would be incredible long.
Hydrogen could be proposed for season load shifting. On a daily basis, batteries seems the right choice. But hydrogen decouples power and storage. You only need a half or even less of night power to fill the batteries from summer energy. But there is the bad roundtrip of hydrogen. Cheaper storage but very bad ratio of roundtrip efficiency. It depends of renewable cost.
In my opinion there is another competitor hear. Flow batteries. Flow batteries has worse ratio in volumen and power than chemical batteries, so probably not the best option for electrir cars where the media has proposed, but flow batteries has good roundtrip efficiency, and decouples power and storage too. This could make that the power needed could be as low as with hydrogen while we would need huge tanks for the storaging. But tanks are cheap, so probably a lot cheaper than chemical batteries per kwh. If the cost could reach 10 cents per kwh, then it could meet the seasonal storaging.
So, where we could use hydrogen. Mostly on industry. Even for synthetic fuel it could be better to transform hydrogen into hydrocarbons. But that would be very inefficient so limited where there is really a need.
C20 and H2 I know, and even C2... Oh, wait, maybe it means H2O (H-two-oh) and CO2 (C-oh-two)?
There already are mechanisms to create diesel-like fuel with solar panels, water and CO2 from air. Perhaps this new catalyst can be used to improve the efficiency of those. See e.g. http://soletair.fi/
"If we can crack H20 and C02 [...]"
I don't know what H twenty and C zero two is... Maybe he means H2O and CO2?
Am I only one thinking 'running out of water' is a possible outcome?
There are three big problems with electrolysis of water for hydrogen. One, catalyst durability. Two, availability of sufficiently clean feed stock. Three, low efficiency of the process, both overall (see point two) and at the actual point of electrolysis.
These researchers claim to have solved problem one and addressed problem three, though I did skim the article and I don't recall seeing any specific percentage improvements mentioned... nope, I read it again, there's nothing like that in there. I'll wait for some functional testing before I get all excited about efficiency improvements. The argument is often made that efficiency doesn't matter because you're using power that would otherwise go to waste, but that's a dumb argument. Higher efficiency means a smaller catalyst, a lower footprint, and a lower cost, which means greater proliferation.
The issue isn't that it's hard, the issue is that it's inefficient and thus expensive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It still (and always will) takes more energy to split water into H2 and O2 than is released putting it back together. It is an efficient way to store energy, but it doesn't make energy, it uses it. This is a battery, not a power source.
All you globalist that like to complain and say we need clean energy, I want to point out something very important.
Water can NEVER be used as a fuel source. When that becomes the norm, then Earth begins to become like mars. Water belongs to all of us and it completely recycles except in a few circumstances, and using it as fuel is one of those circumstances.
And if we could find us a Maxwell's Demon or two, we wouldn't even need to do that...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I assume the laws of Australia trump those of physics, just like the do math https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Enough with these nay-sayers already! They don't seem to have even basic reading comprehension skills and even less knowledge of the materials sciences that goes into developing new catalysts.
Finding a way to close the fuel cycle for fuel cells is the key to creating a usable power source for transportation and for storing energy while also controlling the "carbon dioxide (CO2) cycle" that releases too much excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And the Trump comments are just morons being moronic. A pure waste of bandwidth and the time it takes to wade through all the worthless BS that the comments sections of any given article on /. seems to degenerate into.
At what point does all the BS just drown out any meaningful discussion of the topic with the sheer numbers of plainly stupid comments?
Just call me frustrated with the lack of real moderation on this site.
PlaynBass
I've never been a fan of cracking water to separate the H and O and then burning it. Sure, it's clean, but the cool thing about water is it doesn't go away. Wanna really see the environment get f---ed, start permanently removing water from Earth so we can have clean smelling tail pipes but the whole planet turns into a desert. Now, if we can find ways to add water to the planet from outside such as mining asteroids and comets, great. Break that stuff down and burn!
"Jiming Bao and their labs developed the film to overcome barriers that usually make a catalyst good for producing either oxygen or hydrogen, but not both simultaneously... "
I only took ~6 years of college chemistry so I might be missing something but please explain to me how you would split water into either hydrogen or oxygen but not both? Brain hurt. Much stupid.
-Charlie
You could try petitioning Congress to repeal the laws of thermodynamics; I'm sure they'd give it a try but inevitably the attempt would fail when they couldn't agree on a replacement.