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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."
"is a three-layer structure of nickel, graphene and a compound of iron, manganese and phosphorus"
that requires graphene.... aka unobtainium for at least the next couple decades
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Graphene comes from clean coal, and President Trump is making it easier for coal miners to be employed again. So expect graphene production to be huge.
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.
laws change, new tech breaks those barriers on occasion
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
As far as I understand the graphene is only there to protect the nickel from oxidation, so it's possible that it will be replaced with something cheaper.
> ...graphene.... aka unobtainium for at least the next couple decades
Looks like graphene is easily obtainable. I spent less than two minutes finding this supplier of graphene and graphene accessories:
www.sigmaaldrich.com/materials-science/material-science-products.html?TablePage=112007852
Their parent company appears to be a division of the Merck Group, so I would expect that the storefront is totally legit.
Basically, there is no such thing as a "perfect" catalyst. All catalysts eventually undergo some sort of degradation process as a side reaction and fail. So the trick is usually not finding a catalyst that can promote a particular chemical reaction (the reaction mechanisms for most of these things have been known for decades), but a combination of catalyst+stabilizer+reaction conditions that provide decent yields at reasonable costs.
In this particular case, electrolysis of water takes place as two half reactions: a hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and an oxygen evolution reaction (OER). While the reactions must take place simultaneously, they are nonetheless fundamentally different reactions that take place at the cathode and anode, respectively. The HER is relatively facile, but the OER is much more thermodynamically unfavorable. Different catalysts are used at the cathode and anode to promote these two half reactions, but the problem usually resides with the OER. To get good OER catalysis using cost-effective materials, you usually need to perform the reaction under alkaline conditions. But under alkaline conditions the HER takes a major hit, both uncatalyzed and using common catalysts, such as platinum. A nice review here,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
So there you go, that's the basic problem that this group is trying to solve. Haven't looked at the article carefully, but looks promising.
Food prices sky rocketed
I seriously, don't think you understand the sheer amount of corn that is grown in the US. To think that the small amount of ethanol that we produce actually affects the price of corn (and everything that relies on it) is seriously laughable. Business people are always looking for scapegoats to jack up the prices dude. That's like US economics 101. War in Iraq? Hell, raise the price of gasoline. Flood in Japan? Raise the price of Kraft cheese singles. Brexit? Might as well add $3 for everything made of cotton.
Poor people starved to death in the thousands
They got you hook, line, and sinker. The US alone has millions starving and the rationale for that is really complicated. However, people have pointed to the hungry in the US as proof for all kinds of things. Lack of religion in the the US, illegal immigration, terrorist, etc. So no one is surprised that someone decided to put the whole ethanol thing on the backs of the hungry as well.
Ethanol was a highly inefficiency gas
You'll get no argument from me here. Ethanol runs best in cars that are specifically made to run on that fuel. There's flex fuel cars that change the stroke of the engine to compensate for a higher mix of ethanol. They're alright, but an engine specifically made for the fuel would be better.
Don't get me wrong.
The ethanol industry aren't the most honest folks either. Someone decided that corn was the only supply of fuel when there's plenty of research that could have gone into producing fuel from Kudzu, a weed that no one really wants. That's just farmers wanting to make more and more money and in reality, whoever subsidizes their farm, is making an even bigger cut. These farmers usually just put into crap contracts that ensure they'll never become solvent in 100 years. Any new industry they try to expand into, the person with the funds eventually figures out how to get their cut before the farmer. So yeah, the ethanol folks aren't exactly hands clean either. But don't go buying that made up crap that ethanol is increasing your food prices. That's just bull they're using to charge you more for less food. Climate change thus far has had a way bigger impact than ethanol will ever have on the price of food. Even then, that plays only second to sheer greed and opportunity to jack up prices on unsuspecting dolts.
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.
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