Micromotors Race About By Turning Water Into Hydrogen Gas 85
MTorrice writes "Microscopic particles of aluminum and gallium rocket around using water as their fuel. The particles, which are 20 micrometers in diameter, are asymmetric: A chemical reaction on the back side of the particle forms hydrogen gas bubbles that propel the motor forward. Over the past several years, bioengineers have built micro- and nanosized rockets that zip through liquids, fueled by chemical reactions between the materials that make up the rockets and their environments. The engineers hope someday these tiny motors could help deliver cargo, such as drugs, in people. Unfortunately, many of these motors require toxic hydrogen peroxide as fuel source, limiting their use in the body. To overcome that constraint, the new micromotors harness a well-known reaction between aluminum and water to produce hydrogen gas."
Where has the Oxygen gone to ? (Score:3)
If the rocket blurbs out H2 and the backends, and as I understand, water is made of 2 Hydrogen and 1 Oxygen (H2O), where has the Oxygen gone to?
Re:Where has the Oxygen gone to ? (Score:5, Informative)
Aluminum oxide byproduct.
I've been familiar with this reaction for awhile. You can see youtube videos of it. Gallium is expensive but can be recycled from the waste making the process a fairly reasonable method of transporting energy in a lightweight, and compact way.
This is a clever application and I will keep it in mind as a "gas generator", rocket, or source of pneumatic pressure.
Aluminum Oxide? (Score:2)
Aluminum Oxide.
Alzheimer's here we come.
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Aluminum hydroxide is where it goes
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Re:Followup question: Why doesnt my bike do the sa (Score:4, Informative)
Actually aluminium does rust. But unlike iron rust, aluminium oxyde produces a solid and stable surface
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sigh, spent all my mod points already...
the WP article about "Aluminium rust" [wikipedia.org] is quite informative.
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Aluminum is neurotoxic, no?
Re:Where has the Oxygen gone to ? (Score:5, Funny)
Two guys walk into the bar. They have both lost all their money in a bad divorce. The bartender goes to them what will you have.
The first man goes Ill have some H20, the second man said Ill have some H20 too.
The second man died shortly afterwards with a foaming mouth.
20m in diameter (Score:4, Funny)
Re:20m in diameter (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot's lack of unicode support strikes again! There should have been a mu there, oops.
Re:20m in diameter (Score:5, Insightful)
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Engineering time and it started life as perl written in 1997 by a college student.
Re:20m in diameter (Score:5, Funny)
Engineering time and it started life as perl written in 1997 by a college student
That makes sense - how can anybody complete a new feature with only fifteen years of development?
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I wonder if the Geek.net overlords have implemented unicode support at SourceForge or Think Geek.
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Engineering time and it started life as perl written in 1997 by a college student
That makes sense - how can anybody complete a new feature with only fifteen years of development?
True. That's only about as long as Perl 6 has been in development.
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I actually asked CmdrTaco this, and his stupid excuse was, that you couldn't keep things secure with all those special control characters and stuff.
Which is bullshit, because
1. ASCII also has control characters (<0x20)
2. Unicode specifically has a nice separation of types of characters into different blocks. And there are tons of tables online on which are which. Hell, Regex even has complete Unicode-compatible character classes to make this separation. So one only needs to filter all chars in non-allowe
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I’ve come to the conclusion, that CmdrTaco just doesn't give a shit. (Guess even he considers the site not worth the effort anymore. :/)
I don't know Perl beyond the basics, but I'm going with a wild guess that, over the years, there's at least some thoroughly tested, debugged and properly secured Unicode libraries out there able to replace whatever crazy REGEX runs behind /.'s code, probably with minimal effort.
On the other hand, I can also see how converting the huge text database might make things somewhat more difficult, or at least time consuming, take for instance that time when the number of comments hit the 32-bit limit in the DB's i
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I’ve come to the conclusion, that CmdrTaco just doesn't give a shit. (Guess even he considers the site not worth the effort anymore. :/)
Yeah... I heard he hasn't even come to office for the past year....
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Because it is not fun to rewrite your entire codebase to deal with unicode?
And it is even less fun to rewrite only a part of your codebase if you can't use typechecking to keep the two "domains" apart.
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In other words "Ha ha! You were making fun of a type o and you yourself made a type o!"
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Either that or: you bow, they "administer" it
20 m diameter particles? (Score:2)
"The particles, which are 20 m in diameter, are asymmetric..."
Where I come from, 20 meter diameter anythings would rarely be considered particles!
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Re:so... (Score:4, Informative)
Read TFA - or heck, even just the /. blurb, and you'll see aluminum is consumed in the reaction to produce hydrogen. It's not free energy.
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my point is that it's poorly reported. there's no mention of how much aluminum it takes to make hydrogen, nor how much hydrogen one might expect from the process.
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No, they use fuel like everything else. You know as clearly stated in the article and the summary.
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TFS: a well-known reaction between aluminum and water to produce hydrogen gas
TFA: 2Al + 6H2O -> 3H2 + 2Al(OH)3 (with correct subscripting in the article...)
I guess "well known" would depend on the population you are refering to, but anyone who has done any chemistry must have done that one.
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The summary gives the impression that aluminium acts as catalyst in a chemical reaction that produce bubbles of hydrogen by consuming water as fuel. But we know that cannot be true, as that would imply they are extracting energy from an endothermic reaction.
More likely it is actually consuming aluminium as fuel and using water as oxidant. But that is certainly not clearly stated in the summary.
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"reaction between aluminum and water" means what it says.
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But since it only said that the water acted as fuel, the aluminium must play a different role in the reaction. That's why I think it gives the impression the aluminium is a catalyst in the reaction.
side effects include Spontaneous Combustion (Score:4, Funny)
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Hydrogen fuel (Score:3)
is this something that could be used to cheaply make hydrogen for fuel? If you put 6.02 * 10^23 of them in water how much hydrogen would it produce?
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Not enough to replenish the energy consumed by the aluminum production process.
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Speaking of the laws of physics - the GOP are having their convention right now, have they said that they are going to repeal the laws of thermodynamics?
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How does this compare, efficiency-wise to other processes for hydrogen production? If you had another source of energy (nuclear, solar, etc), and were interested in converting that energy to hydrogen (perhaps to then synthesize something like ammonia or di-methyl ether), would this be an efficient way to go about it?
Re:Hydrogen fuel-Looking forward to the car (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the cool thing coming out is Toyota's Hydrogen Car for 50k or so in 2015. In order to store hydrogen in a tank, you must first compress it. Hydrogen is a material that erodes a lot of materials it comes in contact with, so dealing with it is somewhat more challenging than other fuels. Compressors exist for hydrogen, but I couldn't find a price for under $12k. Before I become a hobbyist in this, I need to make sure I can afford it, and $12k for the compressor is what makes working on a personal hydrogen refueling station unfeasible for me.
I think if hydrogen car economy takes off, everyone will have their own refueling station because the only two inputs required are: Electricity and Water. Then you lose some power converting the electricity into hydrogen but being able to store it in fuel tanks as opposed to expensive batteries that wear out makes it nice. We're looking forward to time where people invest in their own solar panels on their property so they pay less in utilities too.
I think in the short run of a hydrogen economy, you'll have hydrogen refueling stations, but in the long run, people will be making personal stations too. Besides harmless emissions from hydrogen, the cost of fuel will be extremely low compared to gasoline. Of course if the price of the car is greater than the price of a gas powered car and its lifetime of gasoline, there is only going to be a niche market. But if Toyota can get these things for under $25k and they don't have any serious downsides like the electric car's problem of battery arrays dying.... It could be the future.
Because of this, I want to become a hobbyist, and maybe own my own refueling station some day, but I don't want to get too involved if I can't afford a hydrogen compressor. Anyone know of a place to get a hydrogen compressor for under $12k?
Re:Hydrogen fuel-Looking forward to the car (Score:4, Informative)
Besides harmless emissions from hydrogen, the cost of fuel will be extremely low compared to gasoline.
Only if the cost of the electricity used to hydrolyze the water is also extrememly low. For the foreseeable future, the only viably-large source of electricity that is close to carbon neutral will likely be nuclear power - sun and wind likely won't be sufficient for a long time. Also, power from sun, wind, and fission are currently priced artificially higher than power from oil, because with oil we're 'borrowing' from future generations to support our extravagant lifestyle but aren't even calculating the principal, never mind the interest...
I'm all in favour of building 'hydrogen economy' vehicles and infrastructure right now, even though it's not yet clear exactly how we'll come up with enough clean energy to justify it, unless we go all-out nuclear, the prospect of which scares the sh*t out of me. But let's be VERY clear that in the short term we may in fact be increasing carbon emissions by doing so. There are WAY too many people out there who see zero emissions at the tailpipe and think the problem is solved, when in fact total emissions per mile driven may well be higher than those produced by a gasoline engine. Joe Public needs to be educated about such things, and the makers of various 'environmentally friendly' technologies aren't about to do that if it risks harming their sales. We in the tech and scientific communities have an obligation to start getting the word out that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
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Instead of stepping up the hydrogen/fuel cell business (which needs two additional conversions of energy), why not just put more effort into better batteries and do away with all that expensive and probably large equipment and put the electricity to work directly?
I really don't get hydrogen proponents...
We need three things from batteries:
- Longer life
- Faster recharge
- More storage
And in a lot of situations, a bit of organizational talent helps to work around some, if not most, of an all electric car's li
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I just googled a random factlet: It says, refining a gallon of gasoline uses between 4 and 7.5kWh.
So a Model S can go 500 km on 85kWh which means it can go 23.5 km per kWh (assuming refining used 'only' 4kWh) and thus per gallon.
As a comparison, a 2 litre Audi A6 gets 28 MPG. that's about 48 km per gallon.
So you might say, hey, the gas engines are actually better! You'd be wrong.
This means that half the electricity a Model S uses, is used anyway by a gas engine! This means, if we switched over to all electr
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D'uh, sorry people, I seem to be not quite all there right now... of course it's not 23.5 km per kWh at all... but the per gallon part should be correct, I hope...
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you still need cheap energy for the both.
what good is a hydrogen station when cheapest way to get hydrogen is from gasoline??
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Of course if you have a place for a lot of solar/wind farms, they can pay for themselves in 5-10 years with tax credits just on one's own home. So if you're making hydrogen for a refueling station, you could probably charge 1/3 what a gasoline station charg
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Problem is hydrogen sucks as a fuel. It's not just the density/compression and corrosive problem you described. H2 molecules are tiny - about the smallest molecule there is (only a few
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What we need is a cheap and cheesy way to make nitromethane in bulk. No idea how, but that would solve several problems at once.
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I think in the short run of a hydrogen economy, you'll have hydrogen refueling stations, but in the long run, people will be making personal stations too. Besides harmless emissions from hydrogen, the cost of fuel will be extremely low compared to gasoline.
Aside from the unintended consequences of adding tons of water vapor to the atmosphere it's a great idea
Increasing concentrations of the most powerful greenhouse gas, increased precipitation over the most populous regions of the world, and local climattic changes like Phoenix AZ's humidity increase that no longer allows the use of cheap evaporation coolers... are ALL easily projected results
Considering that doing this today will require massive use of fossil fuels, and future expansion will require
Re:Hydrogen fuel (Score:5, Informative)
The only way to cheaply make H2 for fuel is to use substances which start off with high Gibbs free energies. You're probably familiar with many of them - methane, propane, various petroleum products, as well as alcohols and sugars/wood. Converting these substances to H2 for fuel is pretty much the same as burning them in an internal combustion engine, except with additional intermediate steps and huge storage, transportation,and delivery complications. There's an advantage in that there's no pesky carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur in the second step (hydrogen -> water) so we don't get CO2, nitrous oxides, and sulfides as byproducts. But you still need to deal with those byproducts in the first step (fuel -> hydrogen). So it's questionable whether the tradeoff is worth it.
Incidentally, this is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not a fuel. Raw hydrogen gas is pretty much non-existent on this planet. So you're not getting free energy from the hydrogen. You're taking energy from other sources (burning coal or petroleum, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar) and storing it by converting something into hydrogen gas, then releasing that energy when you burn the hydrogen (well, releasing what's left after efficiency losses). Any energy calculation of the hydrogen economy has to take into account the efficiency losses due to this multi-step conversion process. It's almost bad enough to knock a hydrogen fuel cell car's efficiency down to the efficiency of an ICE gasoline car. (60% efficient fuel cell * 60% efficient hydrolysis = 36% efficiency. Modern ICEs are close to 30% efficient.)
In TFA's case, the energy used to convert aluminum oxide into metallic aluminum is used to liberate the H2 from the H2O (the Al being converted to Al2O3 by the extra oxygen in the process). So it's almost certainly wasting more energy than if you just did straight electrolysis on the water. The only benefit is that aluminum is very compact and easy to handle as a fuel source, much more so than hydrogen or storing electricity in a battery.
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I'm out of mod points or you'd get one for the well put explanation.
Cave Johnson Here! (Score:4, Funny)
If you've cut yourself at all in the course of these tests, you may have noticed that your blood is pure hydrogen- that's normal. We've been shooting you with an invisible micromotor that's supposed to turn blood into hydrogen, so all that means is it's working.
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Notice how nobody panics if everything goes according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying
can't tell if you're serious (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you think it kills the germs in a cut?
Toxic yes, hazardous less so (Score:5, Informative)
Notice how it foams up as soon as it hits blood? Blood is full of peroxidase. Breaking down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen is routine housekeeping, since your body actually produces hydrogen peroxide as a weapon for the immune system to use.
So: toxic, but gets detoxified almost instantly, and anyway wouldn't it be in the equivalent of a fuel tank?
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Since when has hydrogen peroxide been toxic? To this day, I still pour it on my cuts to help clean the wound before applying antibiotic ointment and bandages.
A concentrated solution of alcohol would also act as disinfectant (highly hygroscopic, extracts water from cells, kill germs)... but would still be toxic ingested in certain amounts or injected straight into the blood stream.
As to why hydrogen peroxide is toxic [wikipedia.org] - capable of generating atomic oxygen and free radicals. While on external wounds it's beneficial (degrades the proteins, accelerates coagulation), one wouldn't like this to happen inside the body.
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Your body produces hydrogen peroxide directly in the bloodstream on a fairly regular basis. Nature produces it on a far more regular basis. Rainwater contains hydrogen peroxide. Our body evolved in the presence of this substance. Although it reacts with cells we are talking about seemingly random cells in very tiny quantities and byproduct is oxygen which bonds pretty much immediately with hemoglobin. The body certainly has no trouble replacing cells that belong but won't replace any toxins or byproducts
Spontaneous combustion.... (Score:2)
I don't think I'd want a bunch of micro-rockets in my blood stream blowing hydrogen bubbles. What happens when I get cut next to someone smoking or a stove with all that hydrogen in my veins?
Aluminium is the fuel, not water (Score:5, Informative)
argh, again this kind of misleading headline that makes the people who only read the headline think a perpetual machine is finally invented.
The energy comes from aluminium, aluminium "burning" into aluminium-oxide.
Putting the "converting water into hydrogen" into headline is misleading reporting.
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Yeah "converting water into hydrogen by burning aluminum" is a more appropriate summary.
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"Putting the "converting water into hydrogen" into headline is misleading reporting."
Yes, but it's great misleading reporting since it implies the fission of oxygen and the fission products all the way down to hydrogen. That's a somewhat endothermic process (cough, cough). Who needs to read the article with that great title?
Could be dangerous (Score:2)
Hydrogen bubbles in your veins can easily be deadly.
That's like saying petrol cars run on air (Score:2)
nano drug trafficking (Score:2)
"The engineers hope someday these tiny motors could help deliver cargo, such as drugs. "
lol. nano-drug-trade. "BTC received, sending off ten billion bots with the coke tonight, expect bell-curve delivery tommorow around noon"
The pain! The pain! (Score:2)
why can't they use this to make helium? (Score:2)
Since the world is running out of Helium supplies, it would be nice if scientists could develop ways of generating helium from micromotors.
Catalyst? (Score:1)
Hey, couldn't these be used as a catalyst to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells and/or internal combustion engines?