Found a new technology for producing hydrogen from water using aluminum

Hydrogen has been considered for a long time and is used in some places as an environmentally friendly fuel. But the wider use of hydrogen fuel is hindered by a number of currently unresolved problems, the main of which are storage and transportation. However, a team of researchers from the US Army Research Laboratory, while conducting experiments at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds near Maryland, made an accidental discovery. Having spilled water on a bar of a special aluminum alloy, the composition of which is still kept secret, the researchers noticed an instantaneous process of rapid evolution of hydrogen.

From the school chemistry course, if anyone still remembers it, hydrogen is a by-product of the reaction between water and aluminum. However, this reaction usually takes place only at a sufficiently high temperature or in the presence of special catalysts. And even then it goes quite “leisurely”, it will take about 50 hours to fill the tank of a hydrogen car, and the energy efficiency of this method of producing hydrogen does not exceed 50 percent.

All of the above has nothing to do with the reaction in which the new aluminum alloy takes part. “The efficiency of this reaction is very close to 100 percent, and the reaction itself is ‘accelerated’ to maximum performance in less than three minutes,” says Scott Grendahl, research team leader.

Using a system that produces hydrogen on an on-demand basis solves a host of problems. Water and aluminum alloy are easy to transport from one place to another, both of these substances are inert and stable in themselves. Secondly, no catalyst or initial impulse is required to start the reaction; the reaction starts as soon as water comes into contact with the alloy.

All of the above does not mean that researchers have found a panacea for hydrogen fuel. In this case, there are still a number of issues to be clarified or clarified. The first question is whether such a scheme for producing hydrogen will work outside the laboratory, because there are many examples where experimental technologies work perfectly in laboratory conditions, but fail completely in field tests. The second issue is the issue of the complexity and cost of producing an aluminum alloy, the cost of utilizing the reaction products, which will become factors determining the economic feasibility of a new method of producing hydrogen.

And in conclusion, it should be noted that the clarification of the above issues, most likely, will not take so much time. And only after that it will be possible to draw conclusions about the further viability of the new method for producing hydrogen fuel.

Source: http://www.dailytechinfo.org