H2 from aluminum, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html

http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html

Interesting!
But aluminum is already produced massively from alumina at dams, because electricity isn"t as expensive there as at nuclear powerplants. No hope for cheaper aluminium.

To power notebook computers etc, the price of hydrogen is little of a concern, so it looks nice.

The real competitor to aluminum in such uses isn"t gasoline, but methanol.

Some supersonic torpedoes already use the aluminum-water reaction as a rocket engine (directly, without added oxidizer). They may have known of the effect of gallium.

Interesting that he sat on it for 40 years...!

Whats the filling station protocol?

Every 400 miles or so you have to forklift out 350 pounds of wet alumina and re forklift back in 350 pounds of pellets. Then pump in several hundred more pounds of water? No more do it yourself 24hr filling stations.

If your trunk gasket has a leak and it rains does the car fill with H2 and explode?

Brings a whole new meaning to the word filler neck door. No more quick top offs before leaving for work.

New prank opportunity: Flush some down the water closet in the rival dorm.

Dr. O

When you reduce alumina back to aluminum it takes less energy. You only need buy aluminum once, then recycle it by hiring someone to add electrons to it. It is no where near as expensive as making virgin aluminum.

My thoughts, exactly.

However, it might work if the hydrogen was produced on-demand by the gas station, and then immediately compressed/pumped into the car. Then you only need to pump electricity and water into the station; it can continuously reuse its alumina/aluminum & gallium. At least this would solve the problem of transportation and long-term storage of hydrogen...

Of course, one would have to wonder whether this is cost-competitive with other on-site hydrogen generation technologies (such as, for example, using sunlight and titanium oxide as a catalyst to split water...)

What's the point? If you use pure H2 you at least don't have regenerate Al2O3. Electrolysis of water can be done at any source of cheap electricity.
What about Li? it is lighter and will produce plenty of H2 if you (slowly !:) add water

Of course, I was assuming that straight electrolysis is somehow less efficient than this aluminum/gallium process. If it's actually more efficient, then you're right: there is no point.

(About Li: the problem there, is how would you keep it from reacting with everything else under the sun? I assume the Al/Ga alloy is not nearly as reactive... And would LiO be just as easy to reduce as Al2O3?)

This post has been edited by Pink Elephant on May 16 2007, 11:35 PM

Could someone explain to me what happened to the Aluminum-Air cell reported on by Dr. Petr Beckmann in his Publication "Access to Energy" about 30 years ago? The energy density of that system IIRC, promised to be MORE energy dense than regular gas by a factor of 5 or 6. in the form of DC power.

Like many things, the promised development time was estimated to be 25 to 30 years down the road with a potential for quiet smokeless aircraft with heavier net payloads. Ditto automobiles. I would imagine self contained cartridges no heavier than a 5 gallon bottle of water being exchanged as needed in a minute. No longer time to replenish than refilling your gas tank takes.

This prof. isn't necessarily the first one to discover the process. There is a guy in the US, and another in the Philippines ?1956? that are both using aluminum to split water. The difference is that they seem to be using high frequency electricity to disrupt the skin formation process. Go to u-tube and look it up.

There are actually 4 very interesting "energy/hydrogen from water" videos on u-tube. 2 guys from the US (one of them I mentioned), another from the Philippines (mentioned) and another from Australia.

The second US guy and the Aussie both do "flammable water" and it's induced apparently by high amperage through normal water.

I think there's also a fifth, but I might be getting mixed up. He's also in the US and appears to be doing the "flammable water" thing with his "HHO" equipment. Pours in distilled water and gets this bright blue flame out the other end. Burns through brick, melts solid steel bearings in a few seconds, blasts through steel plate like butter. Even purports to be able to drink the condensate of the flame. Appears to be running the equipment off of electricity as well.

Interesting equation that one: Electricity + water --> flammable liquid --> heat + water

Go figure.

It solves the problem of storing hydrogen . Hydrogen gas escapes even through metallic containers and it would be safer to produce it and use it immediately. The bigger problem in the northern U.S., Canada, Russia, Europe etc. is liquid water. For more than 50% of the year it is likely to freeze. Any large amount in the exhaust system will plug it up . This applies to fuel cells and this aluminum process. In the aluminum process mentioned here water has to be readily available as an initial product and probably needs to be transported to the solids through narrow tubes,pipes or jets. Guaranteed to freeze and ice will not readily be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. Hopefully a lot of thought will go into this aspect before establishing a depot in the Yukon, North Dakota , Berlin and other cold localities.

so how do you get alumina back to aluminum metal "easily" ?

We could generate heat by taking shredded aluminum and mixing it with iron powder, the thermite reaction will release so much heat it can power an engine.

Pour a thin oil into the tank and drain it out of the bottom along with the pellets. The pellets themselves might flow freely in the same way coffee beans are dispensed. (There's no mention of how much surface friction the pellets have so it's hard to say what would work best.)

Water would only be added in small amounts to the tank, so at most the pellets should only be moist. The real trick is that since the pellets would actually gain mass as you use them, how do you design a fuel gauge?

Partial tank changes would also be a bit of an issue. Multiple holding tanks being used in succession or passing the pellets through a reaction chamber is going to be needed. Either way adds complexity to the system though, wich mainly means more crap to break.

As someone else mentioned, colder climates are going to be an issue any time you use water as a fuel. A heating element and a short distance from water to reaction chamber can help with that. There's still the issue of water/moisture expanding and contracting every time it freezes though, wich of course means more things that break.

And to top it all off, even with recycling aluminum, it'd take a LOT more aluminum to power to cars already on the road. Aluminum is great for releasing energy, to bad it takes so much to refine it.

It's an interesting reaction, but I don't think it's really a feasable plan. I'm betting the best results are going to come out of super caps or a new battery design.

[ On 16-May-2007 by Enthalpy
Some supersonic torpedoes already use the aluminum-water reaction as a rocket engine (directly, without added oxidizer). They may have known of the effect of gallium. ]

Did you really mean supersonic torpedoes?

From Wikipedia: In salt water, sound travels at about 1500 m/s ...

Hardly believable, in current technology, that a torpedo could travel almost a mile [1640m] in a little over a second.

?