Purdue researchers "perfecting" new hydrogen-generating technology
By Donald Melanson 
posted Aug 28th 2007 4:50PM
posted Aug 28th 2007 4:50PM
Those mad scientists at Purdue University seem to think they have something big on their hands, with them now claiming that they're "perfecting" a new hydrogen-generating technology that they first announced earlier this year. According to the researchers, the technology could represent a "pollution-free energy source" for a whole range of applications, with it effectively generating "hydrogen on demand." To do that, the researchers added water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium, which attracts oxygen from the water, letting hydrogen loose in the process. This latest development centers on a new and improved form of the alloy that boasts a higher concentration of aluminum, which apparently allows it to react more rapidly with water to form hydrogen. While the technology is still under " intense investigation," the researchers are planning to detail their findings at the 2nd Energy Nanotechnology International Conference that goes down in Santa Clara, California on September 7th.
[Via TG Daily]
[Via TG Daily]
Please I need your opinion about my idea of extracting energy from A-Field
Hello
The Aharonov-Bohm effect proved the existence of the potential vector A, the question that tapped me the spirit since a long time is: how to extract energy from this potential of Eather?
I have grouped below some studies and experiences to unmask physical demonstrations of this potential :
1) Aether control via an understanding of orthogonal fields by Rick Andersen http://gravitation.org/Start/Experimente/Aether%20Control%20-%20Orthogonal%20fields.pdf
2) Toroid coils and Vector Potential by Telos www.rafoeg.de/20,Dokumentenarchiv/30,Wissenswertes/,Gravitationstheorien/Telos_Experiment.pdf
3) Telos' toroid coil experiment replicated by David Mason (CTG Labs) http://www.ctglabs.com/teslos1.htm
4) Jean-Louis Naudin's A-Vector Toroid Tests http://jlnlabs.imars.com/vpexp/
5) Tests Verify A-Vector Gravitational action by Jerry Bayles http://electrogravity.com/AVectorTest/AVecEGOK.html
6) The Motional Electric Field by Nils Rognerud http://www.electrogravityphysics.com/html/sec_2.html
7) The Moving Charge Sensor circuit designed by Thomas B. Jones http://www.ece.rochester.edu/~jones/demos/ahern.html
The document of Rick Andersen "Aether control via an understanding of orthogonal fields" finishes by a suggestif entitled schema "A difference in aetheric pressure create a partial vacuum an may generate lifting force" : I humbly think that this idea can be a base for developing a true and effective device for the conversion of the Eather field in free energy.
Thinking about the usage of the alternate current instead of the DC used in those experiences;
Let us hope for the best : Injecting alternate current in two toroïdal coils will perturbe more the aether field so as to collect more energy from the interior and the exterior of these coils.
The excess of energy will come fom the conversion of the A-field, the energy will not appears from anywhere and the principle of conservation of the energy would be respected.
I simplified this 'crazy idea' in the picture accompanying this post, I have liked to carry out the experiences myself to be able if necessary to readjust the mounting, use more toroids to form a conical one almost closed in the summit, find adequate tension and intensity of the input current, but for lack of means : the best i can do for the present is only publishing this post . I wish that you excused me for this breach.
Summarized of the procedure:
Input:
Two toroïdal coils of different radius powered in AC. This coils has not ferromagnetic core, all their air gap is occuped by the flat coils ‘B’.
Output:
1) Coils 'B' inside the air gap of the toroïdal coils, the form UUU of these coils allows reducing the effect of the Lenz law, this flat coils produces scalar waves, according to Bearden the scalar waves perturb the field of the Aether. I think that this flat coils are indispensable and are the key to perturbing the A-Filed requisite to rob his energy. The coils ‘B’ will not be saturated since they are an open circuit.
2) Coils 'A' to exploit the A-Field at the exterior of the toroïdal coils, equally for the coils 'B'; these ones must annihilate the back EMF. Certainly, we need electromagnetic core for the coils ‘A’ like in transformer.
A big question remains : The currents induced in the coils 'B' and 'A' will they surpass in tension and intensity the current injected in the toroïdal coils (Over Unity) ? I hope to collect your opinions on this subject.
In any case i will pass to experimentation as soon as i will obtain the necessary means.
Cordially
MASSINISSA
Schema at http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/9696/andrs2qn8.jpg
pirate comment in, 3....2....1....
damnit i was too late
Pirates love hydrogen
Gyarr, der be gold from aluminum!!
Is the guy in the middle a pirate as well as a scientist?
Nope, but there's a good reason why the guy on the left is wearing goggles.
I have a feeling the Pirate Joke will quickly supersede the Wii, Play Doom, and will it blend one liners in future Engadget postings... Argh!
I am glad to hear this. Cheap and free energy is a good thing... um the reliability of the new technology is a little suspect in my mind however seeing the photo with the man and the eye patch.
Free eh? How much energy is expended in mining the bauxite for the aluminum and then how much more is spent refining the aluminum into a useable form so that it can then be alloyed with the gallium to make this happen? You think aluminum is just laying around in chunks like gold waiting to be melted down? How much energy is required to make the gallium?
Any Hydrogen power source requires more energy to create it than it does to then use the hydrogen, no matter how clever the use of the hydrogen.
Hydrogen power is a Don Quixotic sad pursuit.
Hmm, aluminum just lying around...how about those billions of aluminum cans everyone throws away every year?
Fred, you could use the same argument for extracting oil couldn't you?
This is a very exciting find. I hope that this team of pirates is correct. If this alloy is a catalyst for extracting hyrogen from water then I dare say that the amount of energy used in the process of extracting gallium, refining readily available aluminium (which evo correctly points out, is easy to obtain) and processing the alloy would be returned several-fold with the introduction of water to the alloy for fuel.
The beauty of this is that we already know hydrogen is a powerful source of energy and we also know that it is a primary component of one of earth's most abundant resources (H20). Find a catalyst for this and voila! No precious laws of physics broken. We are simply making water a source of fuel thanks to its hydrogen properties.
It's about time we returned to the Leydon Jar line of research before we suck the planet dry of all other available options. This looks like a promising start.
Pirates are always technologically ahead of everyone else, at least in the technology world.
I know it says "react" with water, but this alloy sounds more like a catalyst. Anybody know the details?
I don't get it where is the pirate joke?
Avast!! There be HydRRRRRogen in that tube.
I'll bet you could accomplish the same thing with ARRRRRRRRgon.
I wonder if he has a prescription lens for the eye with the patch?
I'm willing to bet he gets upset when Foreigner's "Double Vision" comes on....
We all know that they're really working on ninja repellent.
Damn, I knew I wouldn't be the first to make a pirate comment, but I thought I could at least get in the first ninja comment.
when aluminum oxidizes it is coated by a thin layer of oxidation. The oxidation is then halted because the layer keeps the aluminum beneath it from reacting with the air or in this case the water. Somehow the gallium keeps this protective layer from sticking or forming and allows the reaction to continue at a fast rate. The discovery science channel had a segment about this on its Eco-Tech show i believe.
Potentially you could dump a hand full of this alloy in pellet form into a car along with water and create the reaction on demand rather than having to tote around a big ass tank of highly volatile Hydrogen.
Any technology that improves the efficiency of isolating hydrogen is promising, in my books. This sounds like an extremely cool idea, but it leads me to a couple of questions:
1) Is there a byproduct? Can it easily/cheaply be "recharged", or at least reused for something else?
2) Just how much energy is expended to produce the alloy? I know aluminium production is EXTREMELY energy intensive. Once all the inputs have been accounted for, what is the real net here?
Just as an aside, I think the best application for wind energy is in electrolysis to sequester hydrogen; it's probably much more usable there than feeding it into the grid. But that's just MY opinion.
Brett, using electricity to split water, then recombining it produces half as much power as transmitting the same amount of electricity, putting it into a battery, and producing work from the power in the battery. That's why "hydrogen power" (actually "hydrogen energy storage") is dumb. Electric power is so much more efficient.
Damn, I had a nice detailed comment, but IE ate it. Here's the summary: The byproduct of this reaction is aluminum oxide, if we assume (best case) Al2O3 is the oxide produced that's .11lb of hydrogen per 1lb of Al. It takes about 6.2 kWH of energy to produce aluminum from Al2O3, and there are alot of steps to get to Al2O3 from what you get out of the ground, but lets ignore that for now and assume aluminum is produced from the byproducts of this reaction. It would take about 3.3 kWH to produce the same amount of hydrogen using electrolysis. Now lets try to use this in a car: lets shoot for a 500 mile round trip; assume 27 mi/lb of hydrogen [source national hydrogen assoc.] that means about 18lb of hydrogen and 166lb of aluminum (~1 cubic foot), and don't forget the 160lb of water (about 2.5 cubic feet). A filling station would have to deliver this order of aluminum and water to a bunch of cars in a reasonable amount of time. I don't see this as practical, and if you say wanted to just change out your aluminum every 3000 miles that would be about 1000lb of aluminum; about 6 cubic feet!!
Dude, totally get rid of IE!! Heck even nasty ol' Netscape works better!!
www.mozilla.com/firefox
or go here:
www.mc1171611.com
and the neat little JavaScript module will reroute you to the proper page ;)
@maxpower
IE apparently has many vulnerabilities too... that's why I use firefox.
But no, IE didn't "eat" your comment; your connection speed is simply too slow. Let me guess, you're using a wireless connection? Still, I believe that IE would have saved it, so when you hit the back button it would pop up again.
Beware of double-posting!
It's called a monocle, smartguy.
This is like what the guy said in "Jokes with a guitar" on youtube
Do you have a link?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xifrfej8dkm&nr
This is what Stanley A. Meyer did to invent his water powered car back in 1997. Of course he was assassinated. It's basically a special type of electrolysis. Now Denny Klein is doing it. Hopefully he doesn't get poisoned like Stanley Meyer was.
About damn time I had my hydrogen powered car.
Once we run out of oil, we can run out of water. We will have to decide if we would rather drink water or put it in our car to go out.
I know, i know, the world is 2/3 water, but still we cant use it up
the concern is more on fresh water, which is alot less the the 2/3 you are talking about. You can't "use up" water because it get reintroduced into the environment. What you can "use up" in a sense is fresh water, and we're not going to be capable of recycling enough water sooner or later. That's the only concern.
How exactly would the water be used up? You're drinking the same water dinosaurs pissed in.
When you burn the hydrogen as fuel, you get water back.
2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O
People are made up of a lot of water.......just a variation of Soylent Green
More information here:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/08/purdue-research.html
A presentation by the group from April07: (warning PDF)
http://hydrogen.ecn.purdue.edu/2007.05.01-Woodall.pdf
A paper from 1972 whose authors use a similar technique:
http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=406&gTable=japaperimportPre97&gID=48127
It seems like the part of this technology that makes it economically viable, novel, and currently relevant is that they are synthesizing this material with nanoscale dimensions so that the aluminum is efficiently used in the reaction.
well, the guy on the right could use some perfecting...
I believe the correct statement is, "Purdue? more like Purdon't!"
Some retard at an ND pep rally said that...yeah, didn't get any laughs there either.
The goggles do nothing!
...an easy efficent way to seperate hydrogen from water could easily be one of the most signfiicant technological advancements of the 21st century. Until then, Hydrogen cars are just a big farce. Electric FTW!
these metal catalyst techniques are really rather boring compared to bio-fuel-cells (containing either isolated enzymes or micro-organisms)
But wait an aluminum alloy? Aluminum is extracted using electrolysis, where will we get the electricity to do this - oil :p
How about.... coal? (one of several obvious answers I could give you aside from oil).
None of this matters! Some oil company will come along and buy the rights to this technology then shelve it. This will never see the light of day.
Nice work guys, scientists discover something revolutionary which could change the world forever, and history will remember the announcement for all of the pirate comments that were posted.
To Your Call Once More We Rally;
Alma Mater Hear Our Praise;
Where The Wabash Spreads Its Valley;
Filled With Joy Our Voices Raise.
Form The Skies In Swelling Echoes
Come The Cheers That Tell The Tale
Of Your Vict'ries And Your Heroes,
Hail Purdue! We Sing All Hail!
Chorus:
Hail, Hail To Old Purdue!
All Hail To Our Old Gold And Black!
Hail, Hail To Old Purdue!
Our Friendship May She Never Lack.
Ever Grateful, Ever True,
Thus We Raise Our Song Anew
Of The Days We've Spent With You,
All Hail Our Own Purdue!
Boiler up!
'But wait an aluminum alloy? Aluminum is extracted using electrolysis, where will we get the electricity to do this - oil :p'
Indeed, this is actually the whole problem. Making aluminum back from aluminum oxide costs a lot of energy and is in fact very dirty. I've seen this news-item on physics.org a couple months ago.
Aluminum is a very stable and easy to handle energy carrier, but it is also very heavy. It doesn't do much better then batteries.
Yes it takes a lot of electricity, which is why most (if not all?) generate their own electricity using cheap and clean hydro power. Alcan in British Columbia does exactly that. They built their own dam, and sell us their excess electricity.
Aluminum is not heavy.
That's a major reason Aluminum is used in stuff. Cos it's light.
There is a guy in Clearwater Florida safely separating hydrogen and oxygen from water right now... His work is based on (or stolen, depends on who you ask) Browns Gas.Browns gas dates back to the 60's and can use fresh and saltwater. The process uses electrolysis to separate the two molecules. The guys name is Denny Klein, he claims that he has created a bolt on part for late model cars to use the technology. He states that his own car gets a 30% increase in mileage when using the technology which is said to work alongside the gas engine.
http://www.hytechapps.com/applications/
Also have a look at what browns gas is capable of. A hand held torch with temperatures exceeding the surface of the sun seems pretty cool to me.
I understand the bit about the oxygen trying to combine with the aluminum, but are they sure that the oxygen is being seperated from the H2 and not just what's already diffused into the water from the air? Is this process strong enough to break the oxygen free from the H2? Chemistry is not a strenght of mine...
Am I the only one who didn't immediately think "pirate" when he saw the guy with the eyepatch? With that dark suit, he looks more like a Bond villan, or some other kind of mad scientist.
"Excellent work, my polo-shirted goon. Soon, soon we will make London tremble...and then...THE WORLD! MUHUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH"
I know those guys!
OMG! First thing I was thinking, everyone's wearing glasses even if you have something else, then I saw the patch... OMG it's number 2 from austin powers!
Nonetheless, best photo ever from engadget today, as Homer would say it, "so far!"
The kid on the right is going to earn an eyepatch if he doesn't wear safety glasses or goggles.
These guys will be sitting pretty within a year due to a big hefty buyout cheque from Big Oil. The only 'application' this will be used for is taking up shelving space.
"Big Oil" wont be so BIG when they run out of OIL.
hackedbyjoe @ Aug 28th 2007 8:51PM
"Big Oil" wont be so BIG when they run out of OIL."
We all know that Big Oil will do anything and everything within its power to keep us on oil until every single drop has been used.
Looks like the process of "perfecting" has had some mishaps along the way... :D
BOILER UP!!!! go Purdue
Actually, these guys announced their findings months ago, but couldn't get funding from the feds to further their research. There was a suggestion of bias against their lab, because they weren't a member of the old boys club of energy researchers already sucking at the NSF funding teat.
Al2O3 is going to be pretty hard to recycle to pure Al. You can do so via energy provided by solar-thermal power systems, but now you're limiting the rate of hydrogen generation to the rate of aluminum recycling. This is because the power delivered from solar-thermal and other systems is less than what might be available from an oil-fed electrical grid. Thus, this system is a WORKABLE solution for on-demand hydrogen generation. The problem is refueling -- you'll likely have to wait a while for your fuel to be usable again.
yoooo they got a pirate to perfect hydrogen generating technologie wow , carrot face and frat boy should win a nobel prize......thats like getting tony danza to work on a blog for engadget
check out Aquygen™ Gas : Hydrogen Technology Applications Aquygen™, also known as HHO gas, is already providing value in commercial use for: Fusing, Brazing, Cutting, Welding, Soldering, and Heating. ...it is only the beginning
http://www.hytechapps.com/aquygen
Also Google: Brown's gas
I dunno...sounds dangerous to me - I mean, if you're not careful, someone could lose an eye...
Oops...too late.
I did some math here, based upon my interest in seeing how a hydrogen storage system of "Purdue-pirate Al-80%/Ga-20% + Water" would stack up when compared to current H2 storage methods, compressed gas, liquefaction and conventional metal hydrides.
As one commenter mentioned earlier, the amount of H2 present in this system would be pretty small, about 5.5% H2 by mass. This is based on the quoted chemical reaction being: "3H2O + 2Al -> 3H2 + Al2O3". However this is actually a pretty decent storage capacity when you consider the Department of Energy FreedomCAR target for 2010 is 6.0% H2 by mass. Somewhat exciting.
However, then another commenter reminded me that you get the water back when you "use" the hydrogen. If you were to use a PEM fuel cell, as it would allow for simpler recycling of pure hydrogen than a combustion engine, one could drastically reduce the water/H2 weight need for a system like this to operate.
The math would go as follows, to provide 6 kg of H2 (roughly equivalent energy to full tank of gas in a passenger car), normally this system would require 54 kg of water and 54 kg of aluminum (I'm going to ignore the Gallium to make things simpler). If you could recycle the water from the exhaust of your engine/fuel cell, one could perhaps get away with only 1/10 the amount of water and keep on re-using it until the entire supply of Aluminum is reacted to Aluminum Oxide. Therefore you'd have a complete system that weighs approximately 60 kg and provides 6 kg of H2, or 10% H2 by mass - this surpasses the DOE FreedomCAR 2015 goal of 9% H2 by mass.
Of course there's a bunch of important factors that are unknown, mainly how quickly the Purdue Al/Ga alloy can catalyst water into H2, will it be fast enough to feed a 150 kW fuel cell stack?
Lastly I'm not interested in the amount of energy it requires to convert the alum.-oxide product back to elemental aluminum. Hydrogen *in our* economy presupposes that cleanly produced electricity is plentiful and cheap, something that isn't the case now, but hopefully will be as time goes on.