Originally published July 3 2005
Hydrogen gas may be fuel of the future if volume problem is overcome
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Hydrogen is gaining popularity as the fuel source that will eventually replace petroleum, and PhysOrg.com is reporting the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory has received $1.6 million to discover a way to allow a vehicles to carry enough hydrogen to be practical.
"With compressed hydrogen gas, you simply can't carry a tank big enough to travel very far," Ames Lab senior scientist Vitalij Pecharsky said.
"The answer is a hydrogen-rich, solid fuel that mimicks the hydrogen content of methane, where four hydrogen atoms encapsulate a single carbon atom."
According to Pecharsky, methane and similar hydrocarbon compounds have covalent bonds that keep the hydrogen atoms tightly "locked" in place.
The energy required to break those bonds is very high compared to the energy you'd get from the hydrogen produced.
The ideal solution would be a hydrogen-rich solid material that would give up its hydrogen atoms easily, through moderate heating or by other means.
That's why Pecharsky and fellow Ames Laboratory scientists Marek Pruski, Victor Lin and Scott Chumbley are looking at some novel materials -- light-metal alanates, borohydrides, amides, imides, and their derivatives -- that have a total hydrogen content exceeding 10 percent by weight.
A key component in the research project is solvent-free mechanochemical processing, a technique Ames Laboratory researchers had shown back in 2002 to work well when applied to complex hydrides.
The vial is vigorously shaken and mechanical energy transferred into the system alters the crystallinity of the solids and provides mass transfer, eventually breaking down the solids and releasing hydrogen, or combining the materials and hydrogen gas into new compounds.
Ames Lab chemist Victor Lin has developed a way of using the nanoscale pores in a self-assembling polymer as "molds" to precisely control the size of the material particles going into the milling process.
Parallel with the materials' characterization, the group will work with physicist Purusottam Jena of Virginia Commonwealth University to develop first-principle theoretical models based on the experimental data.
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