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.
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So . . . we’re gonna need about a billion trillion solar panels and wind turbines to generate the electricity we’re gonna need to generate the hydrogen to fuel the cars. OR, we could use hydrocarbons to produce H2.
Hmmm . . . what problem was it we were trying to solve again?
‘I plugged my power strip into the extension cord, and then I plugged the extension cord into my power strip, but my computer still won’t run.’
the problem is defined by history. if hydrogen is such a piece of cake why haven’t we been using it for decades.
there are a number of applications for liquid \gasseous fuels. most of them are stationary. and those use the easiest to handle fuels. fuels that are semi fluid or fluid. among them are powdered coal, oil and natural gas. this is mainly due to ease of transportation from a remote source.
then we have the transportation industry. i won’t talk about air transport as it is really out of this league.
in the transportation world you really need to store the fuel easily and safely. this is in actuality a relative statement. steam locomotives burned coal and because coal can burn on the ground in the middle of a rainstorm they had a tendancy to put the coal bunkers in more remote locations, like a mile or so from the local town center. then some of them shifted over to heavy oils and they applied the same safety features.
since then the railroads have tried the various gasses LNG, Propane…… this has been over the last 60 years. for various reasons they just don’t seem to catch on. they hooked one of the biggest steam locomotives in the world up to a propane tank car and found that 18,000 gal of propane could not fuel the loco with a reasonable train 100 miles.
time marches on.
another railroad tried running contemporary diesel locomotives on natural gas. yes they put another 18,000 gallon tank between the two of them and gave it a try. they found that natural gas has a tendancy to burn the tops out of pistons and in the process yields only about 75% of the horsepower that the same locomotive does as a common ordinary diesel……….
so you say whats the big deal, well locomotives for serious work now cost about 1.8-2 MILLION dollars each so giving away 25% of the power in a given batch means that you have to buy quite a few more to get the same desired result.
there have been an awful lot of very intelligent people trying for a very long time to fine a better way of fueling vehicles, there is no holy grail. those who claim to have found it are simply trying to raise capital for continued research or fraud.
in the real world of engineering the greatest innovations in the art yield only 1-3% advances. anything over that is snake oil.
C
As I write this, my computer says there have been 102 responses to the article. Most saying what a bad idea it is to use gaseous hydrogen as a transporation fuel. Which is exactly why the researchers at USC are looking at other ways of on-board storage of hydrogen.
First though, why fuel cells rather than diesels? A diesel’s theoretical thermal efficiency is around 38 percent; a fuel cell’s thermal efficiency could be as high as 60 percent.
It seems from some comments that not everyone understood that this is an on-board process. The vehicle has a tank of ammonia borane (H3NBH3). According to a Wikipedia article, ammonia borane is a solid, and is generally produced by reacting diborane (B2H6) with ammonia. Just guessing here, but the ammonia borane is probably in a liquid slurry. The ammonia borane undergoes some catalyst assisted reaction which liberates the H2, to be used in the fuel cell. Again, just guessing, but remaining compounds in the slurry are probably dumped to an on board “spent fuel” tank for recycling.
The real question of course is: could it EVER be a cost effiective competitor to petroleum fuel?
“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.”
Putting two bad ideas together will rarely generate a good one.
As one who has worked on numerous large commercial hydrogen plants used in the energy and fertilizer business, it is difficult to comprehend the rational of expecting that it will ever be practical to supply the energy needed to power very many automobiles with hydrogen. As with most of the alternative fuel initiatives we are just wasting taxpayers $$ and fooling the citizens into believing that the Government is replacing fossil transportation fuels.
One needs to remember that every time you convert one form of energy to another there is a loss that occurs as heat. It will take a major breakthrough to replace the energy supplied by fossil fuels and the government is fooling around with trivial concepts rather than fundamental research.. .
Hydrogen is fascinating to me so I appreciate the article, but I think we can mostly agree that we are many years from making it mainstream, affordable, and safe. I am a commuter that found CNG car conversion kits as a very viable and quite simple solution. Not only is it a very clean burning fuel, but the kits are very affordable and I save about 65% off my old gasoline bill. I leanred a lot about the facts from http://www.skycng.com. They dont sell anything, they just have good infor about government regulations and real life bi-fuel conversion stories.
Code tech,,,
No shirt, why you could take a little (light weight plastic) sealed container of that motion lotion and store it safely for many months in a cool place with no special equipment, and then when you needed some useful work done you could design some highly advanced machine that would use your material to cut grass, generate electricity or provide some form of personnel conveyance that would move you to different location at speeds of 88 to 120 feet per second, maybe more. Is that your phone ringing, ??? It might the Nobel committee !
@old engineer says on August 31, 2011 at 7:52 pm:
The large diesel engines made by Wartsila have thermal efficiencies that can exceed 50%. Smaller engines for land transportation, obviously have a ways to go as you point out, but the potential for further improvement with diesel is there.
Fuel Cells have some practical problems in these studies that significantly reduce the achievable thermal efficiency. Principally, fuel cells cannot “idle”, like an ICE, so the excess power generated has to be “dumped.”
(Ref. page 5)
Thus, the thermal efficiency is greatly reduced and the buses end up having poorer fuel economy than equivalent diesel-powered buses. This may be solvable with a fuel cell hybrid design, but that would significantly increase both the weight and capital costs even more when compared to diesel buses. Please see the Sankey diagram on page 25 of the CUTE Technical Findings.
Or, if this works, we just need the sunlight.
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/09/new-alloy-could-split-water-to-make.html
If it’s “bad” to put CO2 into the atmosphere, why isn’t it “bad” to put H2O into the atmosphere?
Carbon can be blended into hydrogen (coal gas or some other carbon gas) to improve H2 performance. Please don’t reply with petrol and diesel do it better. As a peak oil contingency (when oil cannot be delivered to market quick enough to meet demand), we no longer have options. Yes, I know there is lots of oil left, however it is extravagant “positive thinking”, to conclude flow rates will always be sufficient. With oil sand production ramping up, shale coming on stream, I can’t foresee peak oil soon. Still, there IS China and India…
Keep in mind, that H2+C mix does not require any significant modifications to our present engines (fuel cells are not a requirement). This makes it an excellent transition fuel (if we have safe storage). We just need to know when. GK
Mooloo writes:
“Hydrogen gas is immensely more explosive than methane when used in cars.”
This is false.
http://debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index.php/Argument:_Hydrogen_in_cars_is_less_dangerous_than_gasoline
aaaay josh:
have you ever seen a battery explosion blow the hood off of a ford sedan in a grocery store parking lot?
just a 180 amp hour car battery.
illuminating.
C