Sci/Tech Breakthrough Material Creates Hydrogen, Heat When Exposed To Water

[Prometheus]

At last, little chunks of aluminum everywhere can be something greater then a soda can or a baseball bat. Thanks to a special reactive alloy, some of those lucky little nuggets could solve the world’s energy crisis.

Jerry Woodall, an engineer at Purdue University, has created an aluminum alloy that reacts with water to create hydrogen and heat. He is encouraging venture capitalists to design a system that uses both — capturing the hydrogen as fuel and using the heat to pull clean water out of the air. The greatest benefit of using aluminum is its abundance.

"There is enough aluminum on the Earth’s crust to supply the whole world’s energy needs," Woodall told InnovationNewsDaily.

To make use of this aluminum, Woodall melts it and combines it with gallium, indium and tin. In room temperature, these last three ingredients coarse through the metal as a liquid dissolving the grains of aluminum around it. In this state, water can react freely with all the material. As pellets of the alloy drop into water, they spontaneously split the water into heat and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be used to power devices, or it could feed into a fuel cell to produce electricity.

Just 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of the aluminum alloy provides 12.9 kilowatt hours of energy when exposed to water. This compares favorably to coal, which yields only 6.7 kilowatt hours.

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This is awesome!

 

[tom_mai78101]

Yeah! See ya, coal!

 

[Narks]

woot

but still not renewable

 

[phyrex1an]

Just 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of the aluminum alloy provides 12.9 kilowatt hours of energy when exposed to water.

And you need ~15 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce one kilogram of aluminum. You can recycle it, but then you lose some of the aluminum in the process alternatively needs to deal with some nasty waste materials. That the aluminum needs to be mixed with some other materials doesn't make the situation much better.

Cool, yes. Solution to the energy crisis, yeah right. Bribe some politicians instead if you want a solution.

 

[UnknowVector]

Badly written article. This _cannot_ be used as a net source of energy.

Any reaction you make between those metals (some of which are QUITE valuable all on their own (sorry, gallium price is kinda old.) (
1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams (thank you Google))) and water, will have to be reversed, taking the same amount of energy it released, in order to "recycle" this stuff.

As phyrex1an said, getting at raw aluminum is not cheap either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Production_and_refinement

Also, the article misrepresents things in the "split the water into heat and hydrogen" sentence. The decomposition of water is an endothermic reaction, hence why fuel cells do any good in the first place, because the inverse reaction going from diatomic hydrogen and oxygen back to water is exothermic. Hence also the Hindenburg. Any extra heat produced will be from oxidizing the metals.

Better written article: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/101007WoodallBoats.html

Sounds like they think it would be a good replacement for hydrogen fuel cells on boats, since it's easier to carry the aluminum alloy than a bunch of hydrogen. Land based energy source + used aluminum alloy -> aluminum alloy -> ship -> used aluminum alloy -> hydrogen gas for the actual combustion reaction -> ship moves. Probably safer too.

Need stuff, thanks for bringing it up Prometheus . The world can always use more efficient ways to store excess energy.