From the University of Southern California a parallel for Alfred Nobel’s design of a stable substrate for dynamite (which at the time used unstable nitro-glycerin). This solves the collision problem for automobile mounted fuel cells.
Breakthrough in hydrogen fuel cells
USC chemists develop way to safely store, extract hydrogen
A team of USC scientists has developed a robust, efficient method of using hydrogen as a fuel source.
Hydrogen makes a great fuel because of it can easily be converted to electricity in a fuel cell and because it is carbon free. The downside of hydrogen is that, because it is a gas, it can only be stored in high pressure or cryogenic tanks.
In a vehicle with a tank full of hydrogen, “if you got into a wreck, you’d have a problem,” said Travis Williams, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College.
A possible solution is to store hydrogen in a safe chemical form. Earlier this year, Williams and his team figured out a way to release hydrogen from an innocuous chemical material — a nitrogen-boron complex, ammonia borane — that can be stored as a stable solid.
Now the team has developed a catalyst system that releases enough hydrogen from its storage in ammonia borane to make it usable as a fuel source. Moreover, the system is air-stable and re-usable, unlike other systems for hydrogen storage on boron and metal hydrides.
The research was published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“Ours is the first game in town for reusable, air stabile ammonia borane dehydrogenation,” Williams said, adding that the USC Stevens Institute is in the process of patenting the system.
The system is sufficiently lightweight and efficient to have potential fuel applications ranging from motor-driven cycles to small aircraft, he said.
The research was funded by the Hydrocarbon Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
There are large, sun-drenched, chunks of Australia that we don’t use because they are still radioactive from the bomb tests. We can set up enormous solar power plants there. (We’ll get Aborigines to do the actual work on site because they don’t mind radioactivity.) Use that electricity to desalinate sea-water and then crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. Sell the hydrogen as fuel, and sell the oxygen to hospitals nursing Aborigines dying from radiation.
Everyone wins!
I store my hydrogen in liquid form.
Its called Petrol, gasoline for the benefit of my American friends.
Using a small electric charge, I convert it to a low temperature plasma, resulting in small amount of plant food being created.
Its awesome. I agree, the future is Hydrogen, bound to a complex chain of Carbon atoms.
Using hydrogen in a fuel cell or combustion engine will put more water in the atmosphere. It was said some time ago that hydrogen gas was a planet cooling gas. Fuel cells systems leak hydrogen more than you think. Put those two together and we could precipitate the next ice age faster than nature will.
Just in case you haven’t noticed, petrol is getting more expensive everyday and we haven’t seen peak oil yet. Once H production from nukes out prices petro, you may want to avoid petro lineups and breeze through the H pumps. When we see peak oil… that is.
Mind you, if we wreck the world economy in the meantime, oil demand will disappear (nobody has money). Oil prices tank and welcome to a new, improved world depression. Forget hydrogen then. All bets are off, then! GK
Let me get this straight. Burning gasoline in our cars releases a greenhouse gas, CO2, which is causing global warming. That’s bad, so the solution is to use hydrogen cells that will emit a greenhouse gas, water vapor, which will cause global warming. And that is somehow better????
Someone needs to explain to me what I am missing.
I guess I have to question the energy density.
A bunsen burner doesn’t explode because it has a constant limited flow. You can take a test tube and add water and metallic calcium and get a nice steady flame when you light it.
Actually a series of continuous explosions, that visually manifest as a flame because the H2 is produced at a more or less steady rate.
Hydrogen gas is very explosive. It’s one reason it is virtually never burnt as a fuel. That includes in fuel cells.
The hydrogen in a fuel cell is combined with oxygen in a non-explosive way. It is not exploded in the same way as petrol in a cylinder at all. It’s much more like a battery in fact. A couple of people commenting above about the difficulty with O-rings and catalytic converters have clearly failed to understand this. You should really look up what a fuel cell actually is first before entering this discussion.
(As for the person suggesting burning H2 will cause sea level rise – I have to assume you are a troll. Where to you think the H2 comes from in the first place, if not the sea?)
If the storage issues are resolved then H2 has a huge future. For example wind power is currently useless much of the time because the electricity arrives at the wrong time and in the wrong places. If windmills are used to make H2 then those issues go away: the electricity grid can be reliable sources, and unreliable alternative sources can be used when they appear to generate fuel.
Big “if” there about storage being solved, but any resolution of that will leave H2 well placed. We have the fuel cell technology ready to go and the engines that will drive them.
Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and San Mateo County Transit District (California) Fuel Cell Transit Buses: Evaluation Results
3 fuel-cell buses: $10.6 Million (compared to 5 diesel buses)
24 inches taller, 6,800 lbs heavier than diesel version bus from Gillig.
Result: 38 fewer passengers capacity (all standees)
3 new facilities: bus wash, maintenance and hydrogen dispensing station.
Cost $4.4 Million
Hydrogen losses (compressed hydrogen):
If the station utilization is not high enough to overcome the liquid hydrogen storage tank boil-off rate, the tank will vent this hydrogen. The size of the station caused the loss of approximately 50% of the hydrogen fuel during this demonstration. Air Products reports that if the station throughput had been greater, the hydrogen losses would have been significantly reduced.
CUTE reported losses of 5% to 10% at best without the boil-off problem. Petroleum products generally have losses closer to 1% to 2%.
Fuel economy: 12% lower than diesel on an energy equivalent basis (not counting boil-off)
Maintenance costs: $3.55/mi vs $0.54/mi for diesel (does not include ca. $540,000 in warranty parts only for fuel cell buses)
15 fuel cell row replacements during project duration (17 mos.) = 42% (blockage/contamination issues – repairable)
Hydrogen purity requirements are very high, difficult to achieve (CUTE)
Propulsion costs: $2.37/mi vs. $0.20/mi for diesel
Roadcall: problem that required towing, replacement or otherwise causes significant delay in service.
Meant Time Between Roadcalls (MBRC): 898 mi total/918 mi propulsion vs. 8,189 mi total/10,838 mi propulsion for diesel
Range (distance between fill-ups): 140 mi. vs. 400 mi. for diesel
Summary
Challenges
The main challenges for this fuel cell bus demonstration at VTA were extremely high capital and operating costs, a need for standardized hydrogen building codes, hydrogen fuel cost, and reliability of the fuel cell buses.
Operating Costs
$6.46/mi vs. $1.06/mi for diesel
Fuel Economy
12% lower than diesel (not counting 50% hydrogen losses due primarily to venting) (CUTE: 5% to 10% losses)
Reliability (Diesel)
12 hrs/day, 7 days/wk, 4,000 mi/mo., 85% up time, 8,000 mi. between roadcalls
Reliability (Fuel Cell)
8 hrs/day, 5 days/wk, 800 mi/mo., 58% up time, 900 mi. between roadcalls
Safety (?)
Fuel Capacity per bus (CUTE): 250 kg compressed hydrogen gas
Amount estimated to blow up 50 m tall reactor building at Fukushima: on the order of 500kg uncompressed hydrogen gas
mr.artday:
hydrogen embrittlement is a condition that exists when certain steel alloys (those containing manganese and aluminum as i remember) are allowed to retain free hydrogen in their structure. when this condition exists if a strain is imposed on the metal part the hydrogen migrates to the nearest stress concentration point (usually a sharp internal corner) and makes the metal brittle. if the strain exceeds the tensile strength of the metal in that area a brittle failure will occour. (the damn thing breaks with a clear sweet “plink”.)
hydrogen embrittlement can be avoided by stress relieving the part when it is completed, changing the design to avoid sharp internal corners or changing the alloy used for manufacture.
there is a condition called “nitrogen embrittlement” which i believe is about the same but that came along after i took metalurgy so i don’t know about it.
C
Hydrogen production is energy demanding and costly. It is very dangerous to handle and there is no foolproof way to fill your hydrogen fuel tank in the car. There may not have yet been an acident but it will happen to some young woman with kids in the car guaranteed.
Gasoline is also 2+ times as energy efficient as hydrogen so you are able to drive much further on a tank full.
It does not matter about the CO2 so why use H2.
Phil: At 10% leakage, then we destroy the ozone. I think 10% is low number, BTW. We have 10-20% losses in N2, and Hydrogen is harder to keep.
Replacing all auto fuel, and assuming a 10% leakage at surface, H2 will cause global COOLING, by tripling stratospheric moisture, plus destroy the ozone by hydroxyl chemistry.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12405.html
Personally, I like CodeTech’s hydrogen storage of C8H18. “Hydrogen loaded nano-rods” is cool too.
@Philip Bradley says:
August 30, 2011 at 6:26 pm
CNG is compressed methane. LNG is liquid methane. LPG is liquid propane.
LPG is used in some Australian cars – CNG and LNG aren’t. Only about 650,000 Australia cars (~5%) use LPG.
There’s still the basic limitation of hydrogen’s lower specific energy (energy per mass) compared to hydrocarbon fuels. It still takes more hydrogen (by weight) than gasoline to move a vehicle a given distance at a given speed. And as a pilot and aircraft owner, I always think about the dead weight of the storage system itself. Aluminum or fiberglass tanks and neoprene hoses are hard to beat.
“Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have determined that an inexpensive semiconductor material can be “tweaked” to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight. … When an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken. The hydrogen can then be collected.”
From: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-alloy-hydrogen-fuel-sunlight.html
4 step solution to higher gas prices: buy more oil company stock, collect more dividends, thank people you see refueling their vehicles, enjoy a pint on them.
Hydrogen is the most problematic of all transportation fuels and, of course, without nuclear energy it makes no sense at all. If we had enough nuclear energy to make all that clean energy for transportation we’d be better off just putting it in batteries. From what I understand it is currently not feasable to transport hydrogen either by rail, truck or pipeline and the gas would need to be produced at the point if sale.
The discovery is nice, but only one of many hurdles that need to be cleared.
Hyrogen isn’t a fuel, it’s an energy transfer medium. Because hydrogen has to be extracted from other molecules, like methane, it will return considerably less energy burning the hydrogen than just using the methane. Thus the ERoEI is negative, a net energy loss. So begs the question, why do it?
Charles Dolci says:
August 30, 2011 at 10:21 pm
Let me get this straight. Burning gasoline in our cars releases a greenhouse gas, CO2, which is causing global warming. That’s bad, so the solution is to use hydrogen cells that will emit a greenhouse gas, water vapor, which will cause global warming. And that is somehow better????
Someone needs to explain to me what I am missing.
——-
The degree of sensitivity of the climate to increased CO2 is unmeasurably small. That’s what you are missing, and you visit this site??????
“… A possible solution is to store hydrogen in a safe chemical form.”
Would storing hydrogen in a safe form like water not be more economical? then all they would have to do is separate the hydrogen in the engine, there is technology that already does this efficiently, I suppose they’re just making the process more complex to monopolize an energy source that would be sold to the consumer, they cant do that with water without heavily regulating and taxing it.
The problem with Hydrogen is the amount of energy needed to harvest hydrogen. Obviously hydrogen is abundant in water, but we need electricity to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen… so we are still stuck with where that electricity comes from.
The laws of thermodynamics rule out using hydrogen fuel cells to harvest hydrogen.
LarryD (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/30/fuel-cells-get-the-dynamite-treatment/#comment-732466) and several others have highlighted the central problem: hydrogen is not an energy source.
Here’s a simple test for this hydrogen proposal and any other: Use the energy generated from the hydrogen to power the whole process, beginning with the initial creation of the hydrogen. If the complete cycle delivers excess usable energy economically, then and only then are you in business.
PS. I recently wrote to a university being scammed by a “perpetual energy” merchant, urging them to test the complete cycle before committing funds. I don’t think they even understood what I was saying, and they were a university. Does the education system still teach anything useful?
One danger of Hydrogen, which has not been mentioned, is that it can autoignite when leaked from a pressurized reservoir. Don’t know what kind of pressures are involved in the Ammonia Borane storage medium, so this might not be an issue with vehicles using this system. However, storage, transportation and distribution of H2 would almost certainly require that the gas be highly compressed and/or liquified, and in these circumstances the danger of autoignition from a leak is definitely present.
Although the dangers of H2 explosions and fires are often overstated, the very wide limits of flammability and the possibility of ignition without an outside source mean that there are some real hazards that must be dealt with.
Some great answers above re: dangers of hydrogen. I don’t believe that anyone mentioned that hydrogen is odorless and tasteless and invisible like natural gas. Unfortunately, it cannot be odorized because of its high storage pressure and one really doesn’t want to expose fuel cells anyway to sulfur compounds, for example mercaptans, or sulfides.
In any case, here is an experment that one can do at least once if you do it in the right order. Pour diesel into a beaker and ignite it with a Bic lighter. You might get something like a candle flame if it does indeed ignite. Next do the same with a beaker of gasoline. The immediate ignition might burn the hairs off your hand and arm but then it will burn wildly, but still not too dangerous.
Open a lecture bottle of hydogen into a beaker and light it, most likely you will be killed unless you were able to close the valve. Of course if the tank had ruptured, closing it is not possible.
Mike Jonas says (August 31, 2011 at 9:34 am): “LarryD and several others have highlighted the central problem: hydrogen is not an energy source.”
Right, it’s a way of storing energy. Big deal. So are fossil fuels (nature’s way of storing sunlight that fell on the Earth millions of years ago) and so is uranium (nature’s way of storing the energy of a supernova billions of years ago). The question here is cost. For example, in the future when fossil fuel becomes prohibitively expensive and the world goes nuclear, will it be cheaper to produce hydrogen (at a net energy loss) to fuel vehicles, or will it be cheaper to produce electricity (at a net energy loss) to power vehicles?
@Gary Young Hladik Driving in Boston traffic, I would rather have a battery get broken than a container of CNG or H2. They love to travel at 70+ mph 1 car length back around here.