Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel Using Sunlight 360
intellitech writes "Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, a University of Kentucky-University of Louisville team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken (abstract). Because pure hydrogen gas is not found in free abundance on Earth, it must be manufactured by unlocking it from other compounds. Thus, hydrogen is not considered an energy source, but rather an 'energy carrier.' Currently, it takes a large amount of electricity to generate hydrogen by water splitting. As a consequence, most of the hydrogen manufactured today is derived from non-renewable sources such as coal and natural gas. The team says the GaN-Sb alloy has the potential to convert solar energy into an economical, carbon-free source for hydrogen."
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Re:So, no current needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So, no current needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why, particularly? I would guess that which one would be "better" would be a calculation that combines ease of access, cost, aesthetics, and ROI. Often, operations done at large scale can be done more efficiently than in a distributed fashion. Other times, the cost of distribution can offset this interent efficiency.
We don't yet know which one is "better" - the market is still merging.
One area that I'd personally love to see more solar panels is over parking lots. Nothing quite beats the misery of walking out of a nice, 75 degree mall into the blistering, 100-degree heat in the summer time, only to sit down in your 160 degree car, cursing and swearing at all that damned free energy the sun packed into your car.
But cover that parking lot with a lattice of solar panels so I'm getting into a merely hot 95 degree car while all that energy is used to power the A/C at the mall I just got out of, that would be swell.
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Nothing quite beats the misery of walking out of a nice, 23 degree mall into the blistering, 37 degree heat in the summer time, only to sit down in your 71 degree car, cursing and swearing at all that damned free energy the sun packed into your car.
Fixed that for you. Now stop using those damn Fred Flintstone units!
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LOL, we need a metrification plugin for Firefox so that we don't have to hear the rest of the world complain about how we measure our milk :)
Re:So, no current needed? (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing quite beats the misery of walking out of a nice, 296 Kelvin mall into the blistering, 310 Kelvin heat in the summer time, only to sit down in your 344 Kelvin car, cursing and swearing at all that damned free energy the sun packed into your car.
Fixed that for you. It's 21st century already.
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Most thermometers cannot even measure the (absolute) temperature to within one K/degree C without careful calibration. So that is kinda moot :)
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Measuring in bits is higher resolution than bytes, kilobytes, etc, but that's no reason to do it in general usage. Arguing about which arbitrary units of measurement are better is as bad as arguing which side of the road is the correct one, or thinking that some highly paid sports team full of non-locals has anything to do with the locals.
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With regard to the solar hydrogen technology, this is a waste of time. We can already convert solar to hydrogen, by connecting a solar panel to normal electricity driven hydrogen cracker. The problem is efficiency. As the article never mentions efficiency once, I can only assume that this s
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"C is not higher resolution that F. So I don't think that is the argument for changing."
Who said this? The argument for changing is that Celcius is unit compatible with Kelvin, meaning it slots right into a self-consistent, logical, base-10 system of measurements, plus the fact that the entire world, except the US and Belize, uses it. Scientists would use Kelvin in the US as well.
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plus the fact that the entire world, except the US and Belize, uses it.
So if the rest of the world jumped off a bridge, you think that's a reason for the US and Belize to do the same?
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"." is more concise.
Re:So, no current needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
People's rooftops could be used as well. I heard of a program somewhere where they pay you a monthly rate to put energy back into the grid from solar panels placed on your roof. Requires a capital investment, though, which you earn back over the years (20 years IIRC). So unfortunately longer than the majority of people stay in one house.
There are companies here in the UK that do that (essentially you are renting your roof area to someone for them to put their panels on, and in payment they give you a cut of the money they make). It seems like a good idea to me because most individuals can't afford a long term investment like PV (which costs thousands of pounds and takes 10-20 years to break even). Unfortunately I've also heard that this is incompatible with most mortgages, so until those kind of problems can be fixed it isn't going to be very wide-spread. Here's an idea - how about the mortgage lender offering to shove PV panels on your roof as part-payment for your mortgage?
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I'm too lazy to install VPN software to get article access from my couch, but the abstract only discusses the 2.0 eV absorption, which is about 620 nm. That is certainly one of the wavelengths of interest, being near the solar spectrum max irradiance, but if the catalyst doesn't absorb at any other wavelengths, it'll not be of much use at all. The other thing to consider, of course, is that Nocera's catalysts are already made and just being industrialized, while the controlled doping of this particular Sb
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At 20% these would be very useful if they are cheap.
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TFA says this is a theoretical result, and they're currently trying to make the actual alloy to see if it's practical.
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I'm too lazy to install VPN software to get article access from my couch
Most schools have an EZproxy or similar system available through the library. A quick bookmarklet in the style of [javascript:void((function()%7Blocation.href=location.href.replace(/%5Ehttp%5C:%5C/%5C/(%5B%5E%5C/%5C@%5D+)%5C/(?:)/,%22http://0-%22+%22$1%22.replace(%22%5C:%22,%22.%22)+%22.proxyserver.your-uni.edu/%22);%7D)())] can allow easy journal access without having to screw with VPNs and such.
Containment (Score:3)
Is there a cheap way to contain hydrogen yet?
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Heh. There's an entirely different truth in this statement.
If this truly works, and the ability to produce hydrogen is, cost-wise, limited to the initial purchase cost of the equipment, the roof space, and the water bill, I wouldn't be surprised if some very, very powerful and rich companies that are currently making the bulk of their money by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground work as hard as they can to purchase and/or stomp in to the ground a technology potentially this revolutionary.
Remember, fossi
Paranoid and unfounded (Score:2)
It's likely I have the roof space on my house to generate all of the hydrogen I'd need for all of my vehicles.
I'll just pick on this one point. This is in fact very unlikely, and very very unlucky for a large majority of people.
You claim the oil companies will kill this but you totally misunderstand them. They will be more than happy to refine hydrogen on a massive scale and bring it to stations just like today for the many, many people who cannot or will not put all this equipment together. They don't
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Problem is that you cannot safely transport hydrogen in a car. Sure... if you want to be in a bomb go ahead.
That's why there has been so much research into metal hydride storage. Storing compressed hydrogen is insanity, IMO.
I know there has been some very promising developments in point source hydrogen production using Aluminum and Gallium, but then the true costs are recycling the Aluminum back. Basically it would work out quite well, but we would need to build 50 nuclear plants in the US to provide the
Safety is not that big an issue (Score:2)
... At least, not compared to petrol. The major point is that, should the tank rupture, the light hydrogen safely escapes upwards. Even explosions tend to safely float up.
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It's not as easy as that article makes out. Storing hydrogen is very hard. The molecules are so small that it will permeate through any reasonable container in a time frame comparable to the expected lifespan of a vehicle. Furthermore, as hydrogen gas permeates steel, it induces embrittlement of the metal, which makes the tank increasingly less suitable for containment in the event of an accident.
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very powerful and rich companies that are currently making the bulk of their money by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground work as hard as they can to purchase and/or stomp in to the ground a technology potentially this revolutionary.
Yeah, they'd much rather be in the filthy, risky oil-business with all it's lawsuits and political-backstabbings. All this clean, carbon-neutral fancy, schmancy high tech stuff has to be stamped out no matter what.
PS: Much more likely they'll try to monopolize it.
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Who cares, 'burn' it right there and use the energy to pump water uphill.
If it works, which I doubt.
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Energy stored as the potential energy against gravity of large volumes of water is not the most convenient of automotive fuels.
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You're right, but for the wrong reasons. I could substitute "gasoline" for "water" in what you said and it would sound equally plausible.
If I'm understanding you correctly. I'm not sure I am, I'm still parsing and reparsing what you said.
Regardless, to the GP: don't use the power generated by combusting the hydrogen to pump the water uphill. Let electrolysis form gas which will naturally want to rise to the top of the hill, and burn it there to turn it back into water.
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Who cares, 'burn' it right there and use the energy to pump water uphill.
If it works, which I doubt.
My car won't run on uphill water.
Who cares about containment (Score:3)
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Three ways.
Compressed gas (not really safe, compressed H2
causes embrittlement of metals eventually).
Liquefied gas (safe enough unless you want a mobile
tank, like in an automobile) - can vent large amounts
of material rapidly if the tank is breached
Intercalation. Hydrogen can weakly bond to some
kinds of surfaces (like O2 bonds to hemoglobin),
and this allows storage at low pressure of lots of
room-temperature H2. It's only capable of outgassing
slowly, because release of H2 cools the intercal
Re:Containment (Score:5, Funny)
Wanted: monovalent to occupy vacant orbital. It's a quad, but the other three spots are spoken for. If you are an H, we'll be an alkane. If you're a hydroxyl, we'll be an alcohol.
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2 of them would probably combine to make Ethane. But a 3 carbon string with 8 h's is a more energy dense fuel and can be liquified. Gives almost as much power as gasoline.
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Isn't that Propane?
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Re:Containment (Score:5, Insightful)
This is basically what you do if you want oil and you don't want go to Mother Nature's Giant One-Time Only Sale (All coal and oil accumulated over the last 500000000 years is old inventory and must go now! This is a one-time offer, bound to end within 200 years of starting! Don't miss out! Extra discounts available for first 50% of supply, for details please inquire within. No warranty is implied; Buyer takes full responsibility for any mass extinctions, polar meltdowns, or disastrous climactic shifts resulting from use of product. No returns accepted, all sales are final.).
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Access to energy is social justice (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a better story than lowering the standard of living for everyone. I'd rather use technology to raise everyone up, even if it is only to the modest levels that you and I take for granted.
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Access to energy is social justice
So, it's unjust that I pay for the energy I use now, and pay taxes to subsidize some of what it takes to develope, transport, and secure it?
What you're saying is that I'm not being treated fairly because I have to pay? Or are you saying that people who don't pay for the energy they use are being treated unjustly? Or is it the people who don't pay for the energy they don't use? This whole justice thing is confusing. Here, let me look that up...
Hmmm. No. I couldn't find a definition of "justice" that m
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Wow, let me bask in the glow of your self entitlement.
Social justice means recognizing that all men were not born with equal opportunity. It's a notion which conservatives tend to ignore, but the reality is that a person growing up poor, black and let's say blind is not going to have the same road to prosperity that somebody that's born black and sighted or black, sighted and rich wil.
Social justice recognizes that anybody can fall on hard times, no matter how careful they are, and that there's dignity in a
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Wow, let me bask in the glow of your self entitlement
No, what you're saying is that I'm not entitled to things I do myself, but other people are entitled to what I do.
Just because you're lucky enough not to have to worry about such things does not mean that you have any more right to them than anybody else does
Who says I don't worry about suddenly becoming blind, or poor, or injured and unable to work? Other than you, I mean, since you know.
I've seen the folks that work janitorial and in kitchens and chances are good that they work harder than you do for less.
Really? I work about 90 hours a week, and haven't had a single week actually "off" in about ten years. Nobody paid my way through college - I didn't get to go, because I had to work. Hey, look! Horrible injustice - somebody else got something I didn't get! I bet
Re:Access to energy is social justice (Score:5, Funny)
Really? I work about 90 hours a week, and haven't had a single week actually "off" in about ten years.
Selfish bastard. You could share some of that work, there's enough to do for two or three people there.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Man, the entitlement sense some people have! You don't even realize how many benefits you get from having a stable society, do you?
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"So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed"
Some. Others believe ideas to be flawed because it is convenient to do so. There is a fair portion of blinkered immorality on both sides. The left have the hippie "do-gooders" who just want to feel good themselves and actually cause harm and the right have the selfish who hide behind misrepresented and misapplied economics so they don't have to give anything up.
They
Re:Access to energy is social justice (Score:4)
Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little.
Like the idea that if we cut taxes on billionaires even more, jobs will follow? Conservatives seem pretty "tolerant" of that bit of magical thinking.
So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad".
No. They look bad because their policies fail, over and over again, to the point where any reasonable person might start to suspect that "assist[ing] the less fortunate" is not actually on the conservative agenda. To be fair, it depends on how you define failure: if your goal is a nation full of desperate peasants who will work themselves to death for scraps from the nobility's table, conservative policies are a resounding success.
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To be fair, there probably are conservatives who believe in assisting the poor. They just aren't represented by the politically powerful conservatives. And there are definitely liberal programs that are misguided. Some of them are startlingly repressive, to the point where I really doubt their right to the name liberal. And I'm not a liberal.
FWIW, there is *NO* political party that represents my views. I favor decentralization, but not at all costs. I favor less control by the Feds of the States, and l
Dirty Hippie (Score:2)
Yea, you got it, but look - if I have to pay another $0.1 per litre for this to work, then get lost. I like my standing in the world, and I don't want everybody else to enjoy anything even close to it.
So stick your solar utopian dream into your next bowl and puff away. If we wanted to help the world, why would we behave like we do?
Big Oily Brother protects our superiority.
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Social justice must come from economic models (Score:2)
In the free market, the customer-base with the most money usually rule. Technological developments are usually targeted and priced for the wealthy, simply because there aren't much money in poor people.
Only after saturating the upper- and middle-class markets, there might be leftover-scrapes for the lower-class, either by lowering the price closer to manufacturing costs, or simply through resale of used devices. At that point though, the upper- and middle-classes are on the next cool thing, while the lower-
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It seems to me that energy is too important to be left to private enterprise. Let the people control the energy.
Billing (read: taxation) based upon energy usage would be about the fairest tax imaginable.
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Believe it or not, a car is a necessity in much of the US if you want to have a job. And you can thank the people that fight against the taxes necessary to properly fund mass transit for that. We've got a good system in general around here, but there are times during the week when one can't find a bus anywhere.
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Greatest day of my life was when I left that Re
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So what?
The average jobless American is not poor, they are abundantly wealthy. Did their child starve to death today due to them not having any food to feed to it? How many miles did they walk today to collect drinking water for their family?
Oh, and on the other part - I don't have a license let alone a car and yet I have a job in the US. And no I do not live or work in NYC (left there years ago).
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a car is a necessity in much of the US
Believe it or not the US with it's 300 million people only represents 4% of the world population. So who gives a shit what is necessary in the US?
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Believe it or not the US with it's 300 million people only represents 4% of the world population. So who gives a shit what is necessary in the US?
Perhaps the people who live in the US....
Just saying.
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, Those Type "A", sociopath fuckers will be wiped from the planet in a hail of lead and fire.
You sure are delusional.
History has shown that those sociopathic fuckers and their armies[1] are the ones who will be doing the wiping out.
[1] The majority of people follow orders and/or do whatever everyone else around them is doing. Good pawns for the sociopathic leaders.
No meter means no development (Score:2)
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Great... now drink or drive takes on a new meaning (Score:2)
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
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Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Is that a real question? Of course you pick the car. It provides mobile shade in which to search for more water.
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Or, you could take the door off the car, keep the water and go searching for more water on foot. And if it get hot, just roll the window down on the car door you are carrying.
Re:Great... now drink or drive takes on a new mean (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you're stuck in the desert with a bottle of water... you have to take a pick whether you drink your water or pour it in your car
Easy answer really. Drink your water and pee on your car.
awful amount of could in the article.. (Score:2)
"Novel Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel from Sunlight"
"University of Louisville and University of Kentucky researchers are currently working toward producing the alloy and testing its ability to convert solar energy to hydrogen"
"The researchers say their findings are a triumph for computational sciences, one that could potentially have profound implications for the future of solar energy."
"The GaN-Sb alloy is the first simple, easy-to-produce material to be considered a candidate for PEC water splitting."
Re:awful amount of could in the article.. (Score:5, Informative)
ChE here. I read the article (hooray for university journal access), and I know exactly why there's so much hedging: this is a purely computational, DFT paper, with no experimental results to back it up. In the academic world this is not particularly uncommon, and DFT studies are an amazingly powerful tool to identify (potentially) optimal material combinations that would take researchers centuries to discover by systematic experimentation. But that's just it: "potentially". DFT often (necessarily) overlooks potential external effects that only occur in real systems. Somebody higher up really jumped the gun by making a full press release on a typical journal article in the photocatalysis field.
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Only 1/2 the problem (Score:2)
Of course the efficiency of the photocatalyst in using electromagnetic radiation to perform electrolysis is only 1/2 of the problem.
The other problem is how to prevent corrosion of the catalytic surface that allows the catalyst to work long enough so that it can be used in a practical system. The DOE is basically funding research in this area and their goal for a practical material is 10,000 hours (a little over a year). Right now the best stuff is only about 5% of this goal. As a comparison, the platinu
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Well, the other part that's exciting is that GaN is a heavily-studied semiconductor, so hopefully achieving the desired 2% Sb doping won't be difficult. But you're right, theoretical papers like this are a dime a dozen.
Not the answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
When I look at how badly most things are managed, at the ignorance and greed that rule the world, I'm quite convinced that properly implementing what we already know could solve more problems than inventing further methods and discovering new things. In everything from energy policy to urban planning to human health we could achieve an almost paradisaical state if we just chose to do those things correctly that we already know how to do correctly and assisted the entire human race in doing the same.
I'm not advocating cultural imperialism here, I'm just there's plenty of universal ground on which to share with any persons or cultures easily implemented, universally agreeable methods.
Which is more likely? (Score:3)
Personally I think cold fusion (or a similarly improbable technological breakthrough like the sunlight->metal->hydrogen described in this article based solely on computer simulation) is by far the more likely of the two possibilities, so I find joy in reading stories lik
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We already have materials that do this water to hydrogen conversion, they just are not very efficient. Also guess how lasers, transistors, Solar cells etc are designed? By simulation. More or less. And they work pretty closely to the models.
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This is a great point. Innovation is great, but at some point one has to wonder, is it really about innovation anymore? It's similar to starvation. It isn't that we don't have food. The problem can be political/socioeconomical.
We need to figure out how to get existing innovation to where it is needed. We already have plenty of technical answers. But maybe the real questions that need answered right now are not technical.
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On the bright side, they guys that said in the 1970s that the world would run out of food by now were correct given what was going on at the time. However China got their act together after Mao died and went from a pending train wreck to an exporter of food. Without greater improvements in agriculture than we currently have we are apparently facing a crisis some time in the next few decades whether oil prices g
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Important point- power used (Score:4, Insightful)
GaN is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
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True, but the LED guys are all busting their asses to find a cheaper substrate, and I've seen a few academic blurbs (not unlike this one) suggesting that some material or another looked "promising".
Efficiency? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does the paper talk about the efficiency of this solution vs Photovoltaic panels and electrolysis? If the hydrogen and oxygen would be split over a large area (say a roof or larger), how would the gasses be collected? It sounds like an interesting result, but not so practical in application...
Re:Efficiency? (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like an interesting result, but not so practical in application...
What's worse that this: based on the abstract [aps.org], all they did is to theoretically compute the composition required to lower the bandgap from 3.8 eV to a 2eV required to split the water. Since not yet realized in practice, lots of other things are not (yet) known:
1. efficiency (including the problem of keeping off the recombination of H and OH that most probably result)
2. stability to corrosion
would be the first two to pop into my mind.
There's also a new nickel catalyst process (Score:3, Interesting)
2 weeks ago this same source reported on research at the PNWNL [sciencedaily.com] that uses a Nickel catalyst for a 1000x improvement over the platinum catalyst process now used, for example, on the ISS.
Gallium - probably too expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
It uses gallium, which also makes great solar cells, more efficient than anything else. But the cost of gallium solar cells is so high that they're only used on spacecraft. They're about 3x more efficient than silicon solar cells, and 300x more expensive.
Same site carries the same story from 2008 (Score:2)
Separation of the gasses (Score:2)
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Safety? (Score:3)
I don't see anyone else mentioning this... but isn't hydrogen explosive? [wikipedia.org]
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It's the gasoline vapors that are extremely flammable. The gasoline liquid is less so. Hydrogen on the other hand is pure gas, and I would think (IANAC) it's much much more volatile and explosive.
IANAC - I am not a chemist.
Re:Another Great Sounding Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of these are going anywhere years later?
Most aren't. Some are. That's pretty much the way R&D works: most projects fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives, generally for the better. If you're not interested in hearing about the early stages, when success or failure is impossible to predict, that's fine; no one's making you read those stories.
He says (Score:2)
While working on a netbook with access to the internet in a carbon fiber fly by wire airliner that can fly from one end to the planet to the other without refueling controlled by an auto-pilot that knows exactly where it is and can check the weather ahead of it constantly with no human intervention both from its own sensors and external ones...
The future is here it just that the goalpost has been moved. What you got is old hat, what you haven't got yet is new, until you get it.