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Very exciting News About Hydrogen Production

Started by Solitary, August 22, 2013, 01:12:39 PM

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Solitary

QuoteFrom phys.org - August 2, 8:39 AM  


"
 A University of Colorado Boulder team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to efficiently split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel."

 

The CU-Boulder team has devised a solar-thermal system in which sunlight could be concentrated by a vast array of mirrors onto a single point atop a central tower up to several hundred feet tall. The tower would gather heat generated by the mirror system to roughly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,350 Celsius), then deliver it into a reactor containing chemical compounds known as metal oxides, said CU-Boulder Professor Alan Weimer, research group leader.

 

As a metal oxide compound heats up, it releases oxygen atoms, changing its material composition and causing the newly formed compound to seek out new oxygen atoms, said Weimer. The team showed that the addition of steam to the system—which could be produced by boiling water in the reactor with the concentrated sunlight beamed to the tower—would cause oxygen from the water molecules to adhere to the surface of the metal oxide, freeing up hydrogen molecules for collection as hydrogen gas.

 

"We have designed something here that is very different from other methods and frankly something that nobody thought was possible before," said Weimer of the chemical and biological engineering department. "Splitting water with sunlight is the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy."

 

A paper on the subject was published in the Aug. 2 issue of Science. The team included co-lead authors Weimer and Associate Professor Charles Musgrave, first author and doctoral student Christopher Muhich, postdoctoral researcher Janna Martinek, undergraduate Kayla Weston, former CU graduate student Paul Lichty, former CU postdoctoral researcher Xinhua Liang and former CU researcher Brian Evanko.
Solitary
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

stromboli

Spent most of 4 years on a submarine with and O2 generator that split Oxygen off and discarded Hydrogen overboard. Now this does the opposite, more or less. In order to do that, you first must have pure water, or nearly pure H2O. So my first question is whether or not this could be done with, say, sea water or other less pure sources. Submarines have water purifiers to create the necessary pure water. If you have to first purify the water, you have an energy loss in the process, and so-called cheap Hydrogen becomes less so.

The next question is one of volume. I'm guessing that to create Hydrogen at a level that would power just internal combustion engines would require mass amounts of water, on the order of thousands of gallons daily, or more. In order to produce mass amounts of Hydrogen you need a fairly prodigious plant in terms of size, essentially building something like refineries that now produce gasoline. And, of course, there would be attendant problems of moving the water and placing the plants near the source, and so on.

In other words, it might be a "solution", but it ain't happening next week.

Icarus

Now we just need to find a way to add Nitrogen into the mix so we can replace the Haber process.

stromboli

The main source for Hydrogen for the Haber process is Methane. I assume that the elimination of Methane alone would improve the efficiency, at least hopefully. It would certainly clean it up.