From the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES and the “flux capacitor” department.
Hydrogen cars for the masses one step closer to reality, thanks to UCLA invention
2-in-1 device also uses supercapacitor to store energy that could power computers and smartphones
UCLA researchers have designed a device that can use solar energy to inexpensively and efficiently create and store energy, which could be used to power electronic devices, and to create hydrogen fuel for eco-friendly cars.
The device could make hydrogen cars affordable for many more consumers because it produces hydrogen using nickel, iron and cobalt — elements that are much more abundant and less expensive than the platinum and other precious metals that are currently used to produce hydrogen fuel.
“Hydrogen is a great fuel for vehicles: It is the cleanest fuel known, it’s cheap and it puts no pollutants into the air — just water,” said Richard Kaner, the study’s senior author and a UCLA distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and of materials science and engineering. “And this could dramatically lower the cost of hydrogen cars.”
The technology, described in a paper in the journal Energy Storage Materials, could be especially useful in rural areas, or to military units serving in remote locations.
“People need fuel to run their vehicles and electricity to run their devices,” Kaner said. “Now you can make both electricity and fuel with a single device.”
It could also be part of a solution for large cities that need ways to store surplus electricity from their electrical grids.
“If you could convert electricity to hydrogen, you could store it indefinitely,” said Kaner, who also is a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute.
Traditional hydrogen fuel cells and supercapacitors have two electrodes: one positive and one negative. The device developed at UCLA has a third electrode that acts as both a supercapacitor, which stores energy, and as a device for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, a process called water electrolysis. All three electrodes connect to a single solar cell that serves as the device’s power source, and the electrical energy harvested by the solar cell can be stored in one of two ways: electrochemically in the supercapacitor or chemically as hydrogen.
The device also is a step forward because it produces hydrogen fuel in an environmentally friendly way. Currently, about 95 percent of hydrogen production worldwide comes from converting fossil fuels such as natural gas into hydrogen — a process that releases large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air, said Maher El-Kady, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher and a co-author of the research.
“Hydrogen energy is not ‘green’ unless it is produced from renewable sources,” El-Kady said. He added that using solar cells and abundantly available elements to split water into hydrogen and oxygen has enormous potential for reducing the cost of hydrogen production and that the approach could eventually replace the current method, which relies on fossil fuels.
Combining a supercapacitor and the water-splitting technology into a single unit, Kaner said, is an advance similar to the first time a phone, web browser and camera were combined on a smartphone. The new technology may eventually lead to new applications that even the researchers haven’t considered yet, Kaner said.
The researchers designed the electrodes at the nanoscale — thousands of times thinner than the thickness of a human hair — to ensure the greatest surface area would be exposed to water, which increases the amount of hydrogen the device can produce and also stores more charge in the supercapacitor. Although the device the researchers made would fit in the palm of your hand, Kaner said it would be possible to make larger versions because the components are inexpensive.
“For hydrogen cars to be widely used, there remains a need for a technology that safely stores large quantities of hydrogen at normal pressure and temperature, instead of the pressurized cylinders that are currently in use,” said Mir Mousavi, a co-author of the paper and a professor of chemistry at Iran’s Tarbiat Modares University.
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Am sure terrorists would love some hydrogen powered cars to turn into bombs too
Thats pure Fearmongering. When it comes to hydrogen, some people think of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. When the reactor buildings blew up there, the cause was exploding hydrogen, which had accumulated inside as a result of the ever-increasing fuel rods. Such images and the memory of the detonating gas reaction from chemistry lessons arouse the concern: Can this happen at the pump of the future?
It is extremely unlikely. Because for a detonation, the hydrogen concentration in the air must rise to at least four percent. This is almost impossible at the pump, because hydrogen is extremely volatile as the smallest of all elements. It rises and disperses before a critical concentration can be achieved. This would require a closed room – but a gas station is open.
In the event of a leak in the system, safety valves that detect a pressure drop also close. And if hydrogen has become self-evident at any point and should grind the maintenance routine, a deflagration, so a rapid burn-off, is more likely than a detonation. Escaping hydrogen gas could ignite and burn, for example due to a discarded cigarette. Like a camping stove.
What remains is that hydrogen is no more dangerous than gasoline, rather less, as it evaporates faster in the air. Modern hydrogen tanks withstand up to 800 bar pressure so that even a traffic accident does not emit gas, in contrast to lithium-ion batteries, which are much more dangerous.
Also double down with your fearmongering.
The bigger problem is hydrogen in the energy balance. It still needs a lot of energy to produce hydrogen. Also, the shift of production to “renewable energy” brings a poor energy balance, as these do not work neutrally. There is the crack point and there is still research to do. But the comments here on the alleged explosiveness of hydrogen are so off the mark. Never, even when deliberately triggered, has the explosion of a modern hydrogen tank been observed.
Germany is of course already building hydrogen filling stations…
http://h2-mobility.de/en/h2-stations/
I’m not sure what advantage is gained by having a local, in situ, supercapacitor, as opposed to storing the charge in a large scale facility elsewhere on the grid. Super capacitors are either able to store electricity economically, or they aren’t.
I can see that local storage of electrolytically-generated hydrogen might be beneficial in that it removes the need for H2 transport and the storage would be distributed and remote from the user, thus reducing hazard. But then you come up against the issue of making sure that the solar-cell or windmill always has a water supply. That may sound trivial to some but having to constantly “irrigate” large fields of solar cells in any location, never mind remote deserts, is an awful lot of expensive plumbing.
“If you could convert electricity to hydrogen, you could store it indefinitely,”
The Hydrogen? or the electricity?
What am I missing?
HHH
The researchers designed the electrodes at the nanoscale — thousands of times thinner than the thickness of a human hair.
How do you get any more than once times thinner?
It seems that thermodynamics is a lost science.
I still like the genius of Toyota in fitting the ugliest car body to a very limited production hydrogen vehicle to meet demands of CARB in CA and say you did it. That way they limited corporate cost and economic damage to the rational populations and regulators elsewhere. The best corporate strategy in today’s world is to fight advocacy stupidity with smart stupidity in rapid response teams of stupidity engineers. Well done.
The stupid reigns supreme when you witness people trying to fight a not yet existent problem of the future with the dead-end technology of the past. Rather like telling Robin Hood that a howitzer will be coming in a couple of hundred years so he had better start building a bigger bow and arrow now.
In a few hundred years time none of this technology will exist except in museums of wasted resources. No Ice cars, no hydrogen cars, no plug in electric cars, no wind turbines or solar panels screwed on to roofs. We’ll probably take our energy from the densest source available in some kind of nuclear device. Possibly small transportable devices. Or, possibly, some energy source that we cannot yet conceive. Dark Matter?
The snowflake generation will die out and fear of the atom will dissipate. The Club of Rome will be found out as the freak show that it is. Griff and Ivan will go to their graves howling that their vision of the past for use in the future was never fulfilled. Coal and oil will be used as feedstock to create the plastics of the future not wasted by being burnt. My memorial will read that I didn’t give a toss about non existent climate catastrophies when I was alive and certainly don’t give a toss from the grave.
Indeed, we are back with windmills and a contemporary version of leaving your water in sunlight to warm
The primary problem with hydrogen as a fuel remains the same. Hydrogen is the “Elizabeth Taylor of elements” – it is always married to something else. The divorce (not to mention compression and storage difficulties) will consume more energy than you will ever extract from the hydrogen “fuel,” thereby making it completely useless.
Covered most of these basics in detail in essay Hydrogen Hype.