Aluminum Alloy + Water = Hydrogen Power

[Whitney]

http://www.greengeek.ca/2007/05/20/new- ... on-demand/

Jerry Woodall, an engineer from Purdue University, has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water on contact. This process eliminates the need to transport or store hydrogen gas, 2 things that have been major obstacles to achieving the much anticipated hydrogen economy.

[McQ]

Very interesting. As long as people keep doing good, solid, basic research, we'll get there some day. I love the creativity that is shown here. Good article.

[curiosityandthecat]

I'm getting a vision of the future...

"Hey, you, with that water bottle. Give it to me. I need gas for my trip to Atlantic City."

[AlP]

I'm trying to figure this one out... You start out with water and the alloy. That releases the hydrogen (the oxygen reacts with the alloy to form an oxide). You use the hydrogen for combustion which gives you energy in the form of heat and also waste water (because the hydrogen combines with oxygen during the combustion reaction). So if you start out with water and end up with water + energy then that energy came from somewhere. If this works, it would have to be chemical energy from the alloy right? That explains why the article says the alloy gets used up and needs to be replaced. So in a sense, the alloy is the fuel, which leads me to wonder how energy dense it is compared to hydrocarbon based fuels. I also wonder how efficiently the alloy could be mass produced in terms of energy used versus chemical energy that can be released with the alloy as free hydrogen. For this to actually be good for the environment, you would have to be able to recycle the "used" alloy back into "fresh" alloy, which means reversing the oxidation, which will in turn require the input of energy. That energy has to some from somewhere and the reversal of the oxidation will not be 100% efficient. So really this is just a potentially convenient way of transporting chemical energy rather than a new energy source.

[LARA]

AIP

Cool.  Thanks for puzzling that out quick so I didn't have to ponder it.  This is cool, but as you pointed out, ultimately dependent on how fast it uses our supply of aluminum.  Which sucks since aluminum is really handy for so many other things.  It's cheaper than platinum though, which is what used to be used as the catalyst for electrolysis.

Here's some info on how bauxite (hydrated aluminum oxide) is turned into ore.  http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/327aluminum.html.  Requires energy of course.

My favorite electrolysis research projects are the ones that couple solar energy to biological hydrogen production.  Or we could add methane to our hydrogen economy.  If we start refitting vehicles to use natural gas right now, like T.  Boone Pickens is pushing, we can later use either methane hydrates (but this is still a fossil fuel, so global warming...shit!) or get some methane digesters going and put the bacteria to work producing fuel for our cars.  But who knows how big a scale this could go to, because we are ultimately limited by our supply of available biomass.  The other one is Fischer-Tropsch synthesis where syngas can be created from burning biomass, but I don't know how much energy you get from burning and creating syngas as compared to biomethane and efficiencies and all that.

[AlP]

Haha well I hope they could reverse the oxidation of the allow using renewable energy. If they start mining ore for this then we're just exploiting another finite natural resource. Go science!