Drop-outs Patent Hydrogen Production Method

Take drano, add scrap aluminum cans and you get novel way to make hydrogen gas.

Source: Nashua Telegraph in EVWorld.com

A 69-year-old, 10th-grade Canadian drop-out and his 58-year-old Norwegian cousin, who himself left school in the eighth grade, have just been granted two U.S. patents on a process that produces hydrogen by throwing discarded aluminum cans or foil into water laced with Drano.

Not only is their discovery likely to force scientists to rewrite basic chemistry texts but it also might open up an easy way of producing the nonpolluting gas – the so-called "energy of the future" – from trashed aluminum.

Ease of production is vital because while hydrogen is found widely in nature in water, freeing up the gas is generally expensive and difficult.

The new procedure is so easy that "you can do it in your sink if you just don’t let kids play with the sodium hydroxide (a basic component of Drano) when you are done," said George Jenkins, a University of New Brunswick forestry professor who has been working with the cousins to develop the technology.

The genesis for the discovery, said Jim Andersen, a mill owner from New Denmark, New Brunswick, was the two cousins’ long-term interest in inventing things – and a book.

After reading "The Coming Energy Revolution," which describes the role of hydrogen as a future energy source, "We decided to look at it ourselves," said Andersen, who has worked in the forest industry most of his life.

So Erling Reidar Andersen, his Norwegian cousin, started to fool with various mixtures based on what he knew about diving suits that produced hydrogen as a by-product of heat. He called excitedly one night to announce that he had come up with what he thought was a novel way of making hydrogen in pots on his kitchen counter.

Later, the two Andersens were at the University of New Brunswick talking to Jenkins about another of their projects and mentioned what they had found.

"My reaction to that was that everyone knows metal in water can produce hydrogen, but the reactions stop," Jenkins said. "And I showed them by putting a copper penny in a glass of water. They said, ‘But our reaction doesn’t stop.’ "

What the two school-drop-out inventors had discovered was that instead of sodium hydroxide breaking down and creating the aluminum equivalent of rust to snuff out the reaction – a process described in most basic chemistry books – the corrosive chemical was actually a catalyst. That is, it didn’t break down, and the reaction continued as long as more water and aluminum were added.

Further experiments found that in the right mixture, aluminum cans are completely dissolved in as little as five minutes.

Everyone involved takes great pains to point out that this energy-generating reaction is in no way akin to a famous bogus table-top energy source – cold fusion.

"What you are essentially doing is liberating energy which was put into the aluminum when it was made," Jenkins said. "It’s not the same as getting something for nothing from cold fusion."

Outsiders who have looked at the patent agree and say what the amateur inventors found has real promise.

"It is perfectly reasonable and doesn’t violate any fundamental laws of chemical reactions. That is to say, it is not, say, a priori bogus, but (the) future will say how well it works," University of Toronto chemistry professor Ulrich Fekl said.

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Shedding New Light on Fuel Cells

By Amit Asaravala Wired.com

Chemists at the University of Massachusetts at Boston say they have discovered a way to double the efficiency of a solar-powered process used to generate hydrogen fuel. The breakthrough could clear the air of concerns over the environmental record of the auto industry’s much-anticipated fuel-cell vehicles.

Currently, the majority of hydrogen fuel is produced through steam reformation, a process that mixes steam with natural gas. Critics of fuel-cell technologies have argued that shifting from gasoline to a fuel created from natural gas will do little to help the environment, nor will it reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.

Solar processes, on the other hand, use the energy contained in light from the sun to split water molecules into separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The method is safe for the environment but — up until now — has been too inefficient to consider seriously.

"This is a fundamental step in hydrogen production," said UMass professor Stuart Licht, the project’s team leader. "This confirms that we can create tremendous amounts of hydrogen simply by using solar energy and water."

Unlike current solar hydrogen generators that only make use of the electrical portion of light particles, the UMass process also harnesses the thermal energy produced by the infrared portion of the spectrum. This energy is used to heat the water to 600 degrees Celsius, at which point it is injected into an alkaline solution and then forced to split into hydrogen and oxygen molecules using electrical energy.

A paper detailing the new technique is scheduled to appear in a December issue of Chemical Communications.

According to Licht, the process is 30 percent efficient, meaning that the amount of hydrogen generated stores 70 percent less energy than the light that was used to produce it.

By contrast, previous processes were only 18 percent efficient at best.

"The key difference is the use of the thermal portion of the photons," said Licht. "We’re taking advantage of the full spectrum and using different portions of it to achieve different means."

Still, Licht said the technique is not completely ready for commercial use, and the rollout of solar hydrogen technology could take two to five more years.

Other researchers said this estimate is much too optimistic.

"Solar-cell-based approaches have a much longer road before they can compete — maybe 20 years or so," said John Turner, a principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

In any case, both researchers agree that more research into solar-produced hydrogen is necessary if fuel cells are to be a viable replacement for today’s gas-guzzling engines.

Said Turner, "With additional research directed at lowering the cost of the solar cells, coupled with engineering optimization of systems such as the one proposed here by professor Licht, solar energy could provide us with the electricity and hydrogen we need to power our society."

In addition to the work being done at UMass, in the past month two other U.S. universities have announced their intentions to step up their research of solar hydrogen technologies.

The first announcement came from Ohio’s University of Toledo, which was awarded a $2 million Wright Capital Project Fund to help establish the Center for Photovoltaic Electricity and Hydrogen.

The second was from the University of Nevada’s Las Vegas Research Foundation, which has just purchased a $1.4 million solar-powered hydrogen generator from Connecticut-based Proton Energy Systems, a company specializing in fuel-cell systems.

"Solar (power) is opening up a lot of very exciting possibilities," said Licht. "We’re heading toward a society that uses clean hydrogen as its primary fuel, and that’s wonderful."

http://wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,61245,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7