Hydrogen Generation

[dadeo]

I ran across this a few months ago. This Purdue prof (http://hydrogen.ecn.purdue.edu/) uses aluminum and gallium to cook up hydrogen gas. It's a simple yet complex process and I don't fully understand all the science (http://hydrogen.ecn.purdue.edu/2007.05.01-Woodall.pdf) but it looks promising, though not from renewable resources.

There are videos and more docs in the first link above but I posted it on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnv_ZXdd_II) in hopes of getting the word out there. BTW, I have no ties with Purdue or the prof.

Making Hydrogen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnv_ZXdd_II)

[scienceking]

Basically, Aluminum, like all metals which form positive ions, has an affinity to bond with negative ion forming elements like oxygen. If you heat the aluminum up to give the reaction more activation energy, the hydrogen in the water ends up having less affinity for the oxygen atom than the aluminum does, and so they basically switch places as the Al2O3 combination is therefore more stable than the H2O.(the heat is basically the "nudge" to start the reaction up)

Obviously, the Hydrogen has to go somewhere, and as there would then be even less water to hold it in solution as ions when the precipitate is formed, it is released as a gas product.

This is pretty cool, and could be used for hydrogen power plants of sorts. It would produce a ton of the aluminum oxide solid waste which would need to be disposed of which makes it less cool than hydrolysis, but Aluminum oxide has uses and can also be reprocessed into useful materials again at cost. The energy bump needed to produce molten aluminum on the fly, however, would limit this to power plant type applications as that is a massive amount of starting energy even if the end result is an energy profit.