Purdue professor on the "aluminum enabling hydrogen economy"
About a month ago, the Purdue Energy Center held a symposium on the challenges and technologies of the hydrogen economy. One of the presenters was Jerry Woodall, and his research continues to be mentioned this month because of the process he has developed that makes hydrogen "by adding water to an alloy of the metals aluminum and gallium," Purdue says. There is already a startup company (with the monstrosity of a name AlGalCo Inc.) operating at the Purdue Research Park to make generators that use Woodall's technology and it's possible that this technology could one day replace gasoline in vehicles. There is a 26-minute online presentation of the gallium-aluminum technology available here. Woodall says that the reaction of aluminum with water has the same energy content per unit weight of oil, about 20,000 BTUs or about 6 kWh per pound. And, since aluminum is safe and plentiful, it has high potential to create "aluminum enabling hydrogen economy" (click forward to slide 10 of 20 for Woodall's explanations about using gallium to disrupt the passivating oxide process).
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[Source: Purdue University, topic submitted by Michael]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Luke 1:19PM (5/16/2007)
I can understand this guy's passion for his subject, but this is never going to work:
1. If you need 260lbs of aluminium to travel 350 miles, there are Li-Ion batteries out there that can take you almost that far.
2. The price of 2c/kw for electricity is too low, and there are very few advantages of using the electricity close to the power plant. Long range high voltage cables have about a 97% efficiency.
3. I can see a horrible situation where it is cheaper to dig up more aluminium than to recycle the oxide, so we end up with more mining and big piles of Al2O3 everywhere.
4. Battery tech is on the verge of taking off in a huge way, in the two directions of supercapacitors and nano-scale modifications to Li-Ion electrodes.
One recent announcement showed a 100% increase in capacity over Li-Ion, albeit with discharge rate issues.
A 100% increase in Li-Ion capacity would make other mobile energy solutions utterly irrelevant, and it is coming.
A tank of hydrogen has a very high energy density, but it is a fix amount and cannot increase. Hydrogen is hydrogen, and has a certain instrinsic energy value.
A charge in a supercapacitor on the other hand has no fixed upper limit. As the tech improves the capacity improves.
And once you add in the fact that capacitors can be recharged in seconds, and that you can generate the electricity however you like, and transport it without having to truck it, it's a bit of a no-brainer really.
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Tony Belding 1:56PM (5/16/2007)
I don't see the purpose of hydrogen in this plan. If you are providing aluminum to the vehicle, and that aluminum is going to be oxidized and recycled anyhow, then why not simply use aluminum batteries?
Aluminum batteries provide outstanding energy density, up to nearly 1 kWh/kg, or about four to five times what you can get out of li-ion. The big problem is that nobody's made an aluminum battery practical to recharge, they are basically used once and then disassembled and recycled. This aluminum-hydrogen-gallium scheme doesn't sound like it would be any better in that respect.
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rick 2:28PM (5/16/2007)
typical disconnected university type. this is a well known chemical reaction. you can also do this with magnesium and zinc as well as others. but:
1) he can't find anybody to sell him electricity for $.02/kwh
2) he can't find anybody to sell him aluminum for $.70/lb. It's currently worth $1.35
i once witnessed a magnesium fire where the fire officials didn't know what they were dealing with. they were trying to put out the magnesium fire with water(Ha!) what they accomplished is to create little mini hydrogen bombs when the burning magnesium stripped the oxygen from the water they were dousing it with! Quite a fireworks display...
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Chris M 12:23AM (5/19/2007)
I also noted that aluminum air batteries would be much better use of "aluminum fuel", considerably more efficient and far less expensive than this crazy scheme. He is obviously angling to get some of the H2 research funds the DOE is generously handing out, and with this inept administration, he just might get some.
In his financial analysis, he noted that enough aluminum to fuel a long trip (equivalent of burning 20 gallons of gasoline) using this method would cost $180. Ouch indeed! (and this figure may be low...) But, (he said) if the recycling center is next to a nuclear plant the cost could go way down to only $65! At that point, I was ROFLMAO! Totally inane! And he is supposed to be a professor? Look, Aluminum is currently electrolyzed using the cheapest source of electricity available, and it ain't nuclear. And then he proposed using solar electricity... This guy ought to get a gig as a stand-up comedian.
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GaryB 2:07AM (5/20/2007)
The biggest thing I got out of this was that "out of the box" thinking. The problem with batteries is they currently have a non-intersecting Venn diagram: You can get high energy density, but not high cycle time, or compact size but not enough power etc.
Here, if you're willing to get rid of cycle time all together ... maybe something would make sense. Make one-off aluminum batteries, remake them at "filling centers". It could be these are like cartrige reloads so that the "fill" time is very fast "click out, click in".
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tzer0 1:41AM (10/22/2007)
This is a horrible idea. Fuel Cells rejoin the oxygen and hydrogen back into water. But this doesn't. There is a finite amount of water on Earth, and less than 1% is fresh. Taking it out of the ecosystem for fuel is the worst idea I've even heard!
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