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Diamonds Are a Fuel Cell's Best Friend
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 16, 2007 01:22 PM
from the pretty-much-have-to dept.
from the pretty-much-have-to dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Davis have used nanocrystals made of diamond-like cubic zirconia to develop cooler fuel cells. Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C. This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C. Obviously, this could lead to a widespread use of fuel cells, which could become a realistic alternative power source for vehicles. The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear."
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great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And a divorce when she discovers they're cubic zirconias.
Any man who would like about what the engagement gift deserves the kind of woman who would leave him over something so trivial.
Hint: an engagement gift should have a clear dollar value, and be something that your significant other wants. If she wants a ring, get her a ring -- but don't forget to have a "how do you feel about engagement gifts" conversation first. Maybe she'd be happy with a $200 ring and a new computer, new car, or just a $4000 vacation somewhere.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Cool! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
FUCK THESE GUYS AND THEIR FUCKING PATENTING.
This is technology with real potential to help a debilitating planet, if we started implementing this in 1-2 years, maybe it would actually do something to help save the world from having its natural resources sucked from its insides to the atmosphere. Everyone is so busy raping the planet and trying to get theirs, they don't stop to think about what imp
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, imagine a new power source appears. Very cheap, very efficient. GM and Ford switch their engines to use it. What happens to the price of gas? It drops until it's as cheap or cheaper than the new source and as i said, car engines will get bigger, more powerful and thirstie
Re:great (Score:4, Funny)
We'll know that is true as soon as DeBeers tries to corner the market in CZ, or even fuel cells.
Parent
Re:great (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:great (Score:5, Informative)
Women told De Beers marketing they don't. Based on that, De Beers developed a campaign to promote surprise proposals and the 'two months salary' rule. That is a matter of historical record. Whether women of the day really wanted a flashy ring or not is something you and I will never know.
But sure, try to paint me as a naive fool. Set up a strawman involving a complete tangent and knock it down. Go nuts. You come across as a petulant whiny bitch, as usual.
Parent
Re:great (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you're thinking about diamond's company researcher from the 1970's:
Women are in unanimous agreement that they want to be surprised with gifts.... They want, of course, to be surprised for the thrill of it. However, a deeper, more important reason lies behind this desire.... "freedom from guilt." Some of the women pointed out that if their husbands enlisted their help in purchasing a gift (like diamond jewelry), their practical nature would come to the fore and they would be compelled to object to the purchase. -Daniel Yankelovich, Inc. (working for) N.W. Ayer (working for) De Beers
And the observation that people give gifts that are fancier than what people would choose to get themselves is hardly limited to De Beers or engagement rings. What do you think the Christmas shopping season is all about?
Anyway there's no reason to make such angry arguments, when your arguments are based on pulling made-up statistics out of your ass. If you're actually interested in the history of diamond marketing (I suspect you're just interested in being a jerk) there's an interesting (if dated) take in The Atlantic Monthly [theatlantic.com].
Parent
Uh-oh (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Uh-oh (Score:5, Interesting)
Diamonds, on the other hand, are extremely efficient thermal conductors, so they are quite efficient at heat transfer, making them terribly unsuitable to this sort of application where heat is already the major problem.
So CZ is cheaper, easier to obtain, and (for once) actually has the chemical advantage over the diamond. Cool indeed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Uh-oh (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Wonderful. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wonderful. (Score:5, Funny)
Just make sure you don't leave an ink jet cartridge in your car in plain view of passers by.
Parent
Your fuel cell is going to be pissed... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Your fuel cell is going to be pissed... (Score:5, Interesting)
They may have been hard to tell apart 200 years ago (doubtful), but there is no way a competent gemologist could make that mistake today.
Parent
Cooler... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cooler... (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I disagree with you that Hydrogen is probably a bad choice for vehicle fuel, there's a few things that are worth pointing out:
1. "A BOMB" Presumably you meant _A_ (as in singular) bomb, and not an atom bomb. Anything highly flammable can be confined and made to explode. Obviously, hydrogen is no different...but a pressurized tank is really no more likely to explode than a gasoline tank. As the hydrogen is released from a compromised vessel, it will burn vigorously, if it has been ignited, just like natural gas, propane and even gasoline. The one nice thing about hydrogen is that it is lighter than air, so if it does leak, it goes up into the sky and dissipates, unlike gasoline vapors, which hug the ground and will occasionally find an ignition source to flash back to the point of the leak.
2-5. Agreed
6. We move natural gas around in pipelines, the same could be done with hydrogen gas. However, it's that expense thing that comes into play. Since the cheapest way to produce hydrogen gas is from steam reformation from natural gas, it would be more economically advantageous to produce hydrogen at least regionally, if not on a smaller scale instead of transporting hydrogen long distances in pipelines.
7. Pretty much the same thing that happens to large propane tanks. If they catch fire, they can BLEVE (boiling liquied expanding vapor explosion). However, if the tanks are placed underground, the point of ignition for the leak would be enough of a distance away from the tank that this would not be a problem. Remember, hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, too.
8. Right now it is, anyway. Might be okay for city buses, perhaps.
9. Agreed
10. One rather well founded piece of speculation is that it will become a module of a system like many components currently in cars that is simply replaced or swapped out. Even master auto technicians don't crack open the case on a computerized engine control module to fix a faulty component on a board, they simply swap out the whole box, potentially sending the faulty unit back to the manufacturer. Why couldn't a similar principle apply here?
Also add 11 to your list that hydrogen is usually just an additional (and perhaps unnecessary) step in energy conversion, not an energy source in and of itself. Everything is solar powered, it's just a matter of how many steps of conversion happen between the point where the solar radiation reached earth and where someone puts it to practical use.
Okay, I've done the Slashdot thing. Countered some of your arguments, although I agree with your stance on the use of hydrogen in privately owned passenger cars. Heck, I even worked in a car analogy (sort of..). Ten reasons on electric cars or ethanol hybrids? Probably can't come up with ten, but the best is "the technology/infrastructure is just not quite there yet"...just the same as it is with hydrogen.
Parent
Re:Cooler... (Score:4, Informative)
1 - If you drive a liquid H2 car, you're driving A BOMB! One that can never be turned off, unplugged, get in a bad crash, or run out of fuel or it will explode!
Sure but that's pretty much true of any energy storage system. It's not like gasoline, or for that matter modern batteries are all that safe either. Also any tank capable of storing compressed H2 is going to be inherrently pretty strong.
- what happens if the great big H2 tanks at the filling station are involved in an earthquake, terrorist attack, or extended power outage?
The gas escapes and dispurses? We already have tanks and pipelines with propane and natural gas all over the place and those are far more dangerous than H2 which at least has the advantage of being lighter than air.
- it's FUCKING expensive!!!
It looks to me like generating H2 via electrolysis of water is in the same general ballpark effenciency wise as charging/discharging batteries (both somewhere in the 50% range).
- Solid (metal infused) H2 tanks take approximately 6-8 hours to refill with enough H2 to drive 150 miles. This is MUCH worse than electric only cars. (In fact, using Toshiba's new battery technology, we could refuel electric cars in 90 seconds, to 90% charge.
- we don't have ANYTHING resembling an industry for transportation, storage, or pumping of H2.
It's not like we have the infrstructure in place to charge an electric car anywhere near that quickly either in most places. That's a LOT of power.
- it's too damned big of a system. Cars would have to be the size of hybrid SUVs and loose either 2 seats or the trunk to run on H2 safely.
Same problem with batteries.
- will you trust a grease monkey to fix an H2 powered engine? (no offense to my many talented automotive engineering friends) Do you have any idea what it might take to fix an engine like this? can it even be repaired at the component level safely?
H2 engines are pretty much the same as gasoline engines so I'm not sure why you think they would be more dangerous to work on. Working with an electrical system capable of delivering thousands of watts for an extended period of time doesn't sound exactly safe either.
Parent
Re:Cooler... (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Recharge times don't matter if you have a standard tank form and run your system like propane tank exchanges.
3. The price is rapidly dropping from $6 gge when GWB came in office to around $4 today and dropping fast. It's projected to drop under $3 gge in 2010 at which point you're within the realm of commercial practicality. 2010 is not that far off.
4. H2 is created by lots of different creation pathways. Some are very clean while others are fairly dirty. You can change your microbe mix in a water treatment plant to optimize for hydrogen production, for instance, and use the hydrogen to help power the plant.
5. Actually, we do have such an industry, it would just need to be scaled up to handle a mass changeover. But a thin infrastructure with local production of hydrogen in government pumps on interstates would allow people to travel across the country with a hydrogen car and would be buildable for well under $100M. That would let people start creating demand for more pumps and then the market could take over.
6. Since you can make hydrogen from just about anything, I think that centralized production is likely to be much less important in a hydrogen world than it is in a petrochem world.
7. What happens to the H2 tanks is exactly what happens to the gasoline tanks today. Explosions happen. Leaking hydrogen is less of a hazard than leaking gasoline not least of which because hydrogen is very light and will tend to float up pretty quickly, dispersing to harmeless concentrations very fast.
8. Huge tanks are just nonsense. There are companies that have built normal sized tanks that can hold enough hydrogen to go 300 miles. Right now it's a question of getting the price down to the point where it's practical.
9. Fine, name one practical alternative. The key bit about hydrogen is that it serves wonderfully as a middleware energy storage mechanism. Everything else either won't scale, won't work, or is likely not dropping in price fast enough to make it in time.
10. H2 doesn't power the engines in fuel cell cars, electricity does. Batteries aren't getting better fast enough to have electric cars. hydrogen fuel cells get the juice to the electromotors (which I do trust a grease monkey to maintain) and are likely going to start showing up in vehicles in the next 5 years (GM says 2011 which means they're already gearing up car designs today).
Yeah, you thought up 10 reasons why it won't work. They just have the disadvantage of being bogus, every one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1 - Liquid is only a little over twice as dense (heh, "only") and definitely not worth the added issues.
2 - High-pressure gas storage tanks, though, are working now (in prototype form, but still) and fairly safe. (It's not like gasoline is safe. Ethanol isn't very happy either, although it's not inherently bad.)
3 - Getting cheaper all the time.
4 - Depends on how you make it.
5,6,7 - Produce hydrogen on-demand. Several technologies exist. Also several storage technologies exist that make this a non-issue
CZ = C * 1.4 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And not bathed in blood of slave labor. Never forget that advantage.
When (Score:3, Funny)
Sensationalism rears its ugly head again... (Score:5, Insightful)
fuel cell temperature (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At t
zirconia's been used this way before (Score:5, Informative)
2. Zirconia has been used for a fuel cell 'catalyst' for a while. Here's a reference [ecnext.com] to a two-year-old paper about a related fuel cell system.
3. I say 'catalyst' in the above, because zirconia's only sort of a catalyst. While the zirconia remains more or less zirconia, it's not just offering a surface for reaction chemistry: it's actually exchanging oxygen [acs.org] with the reactants during the reaction.
4. Still, it's interesting and weird that the electrical potential is being transferred by protons, rather than electrons (as per TFA.) I'm not familiar with that, just with holes and electrons, so that bears more reading.
Low-temperature fuel cells are new? (Score:3, Interesting)
Two years ago, Georgia Tech has announced, that they were capable of pushing it up to 120 deg (source [gatech.edu])
and last year, Volkswagen announced the development of a fuel cell working at 160 deg (source [worldcarfans.com]).
The Myth of the Hydrogen Economy (Score:3, Informative)
"So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.
The spokesmen for the hydrogen hoax claim that hydrogen will be manufactured from water via electrolysis. It is certainly possible to make hydrogen this way, but it is very expensive--so much so, that only four percent of all hydrogen currently produced in the United States is produced in this manner. The rest is made by breaking down hydrocarbons, through processes like pyrolysis of natural gas or steam reforming of coal.
Neither type of hydrogen is even remotely economical as fuel. The wholesale cost of commercial grade liquid hydrogen (made the cheap way, from hydrocarbons) shipped to large customers in the United States is about $6 per kilogram. High purity hydrogen made from electrolysis for scientific applications costs considerably more. Dispensed in compressed gas cylinders to retail customers, the current price of commercial grade hydrogen is about $100 per kilogram. For comparison, a kilogram of hydrogen contains about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. This means that even if hydrogen cars were available and hydrogen stations existed to fuel them, no one with the power to choose otherwise would ever buy such vehicles. This fact alone makes the hydrogen economy a non-starter in a free society."
Fuel cells can now become wide spread (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is a meta-news meta-blog site so article summaries are like a game of telephone. A scientist publishes a paper, it is boiled-down for a journalist, the journalist distills that into an article, a blogger summarizes the article, and the article is summarized to Slashdot. Net result: "I found a way to fabricate ziconium oxide at 15nm" becomes "Fuel cells can now become widespread, thanks to diamonds!"
It's a Roland the Plogger story. A bogus one. (Score:5, Informative)
First, it's a Roland the Plogger story, so it's probably wrong.
Second, it's another one of those "we made some minor advance in materials science on a laboratory scale and this will change the world Real Soon Now" stories. It's too early to be making claims like that. All they have is a new material that might be good for something. Maybe.
Third, it's one of those surface chemistry/crystal chemistry as "nanotechnology" stories. "Nanotechnology" has turned into a buzzword for getting funding for surface chemistry work.
We patented the idea. Next step: profit (Score:3, Funny)
Don't hold your breath (Score:5, Insightful)
... and this is contradictory how exactly? Just because it's hot does not mean it is inefficient. Indeed, high-temperature FCs have the highest efficiencies, ranging up to 70% with combined cycles.
They already do. Have been for decades. See PEM fuel cells [wikipedia.org]. The point is that there are bunches of possible FC designs around [wikipedia.org], TFA probably meant the SOFCs [wikipedia.org], the only ones to reach 1000 degrees.
As a fuel-cell researcher (yes I have a damn PhD in the field) I am very skeptical of anything surfacing on news releases and containing the "patent" word—It just makes my bullshit detector go crazy.
This technology is still very experimental, there is no working prototype, and if I had a penny for every new fuel-cell design that appeared any year I would have Bill Gates cleaning my toilet with his tongue. Besides, the article is quite badly written: it confuses high-temperature SOFC, assumed when the high temperature range is given, with low-temperature FCs that need platinum, which SOFCs do not need at all. It's like confusing an internal-combustion engine with a steam engine.
I am not saying it is complete vaporware, but it certainly seems overblown. People find new ways to design FCs and their components all the time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Cubic Zirconia is much more than just cut glass, read up about it. You're right in saying that they're not diamonds, but they are indeed diamond-like, they're much harder than most other gems (though far off from diamond) and have a very similar physical appearance. It's one of the most diamond-like substances available along with moissanite (silicon carbide). As for cheap, cubic zirconia are certainly far far cheaper than diamonds, but not particularly ch
Re:Cubic Zircona != Diamond (Score:4, Informative)
CZO (Actually Zirconium-Yttrium-Oxide) is only similar in appearance to diamond. In all other respects it is completely different.
The most important difference is that diamond does burn in oxygen while CZO is an excellent oxygen conductor (yes, a crystal that conducts ions by a hole transport mechanism). This is also the effect that is used in fuel cells. There is really no relation to diamonds. Pure popular BS-science.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The real benefits here seem to be durability, and safety. At 1/10th the heat, your components will take substantially less wear. And safety? Far far better to be hit with a jet of 50-100C gas from a ruptured cell, than to be hit with a 1,000C jet of gas from a ruptured fuel cell...1000c is about where silicon melts, so I'd rather be hit with something the temp of boiling water than to be a pi
Re:realistic alternative power source for vehicles (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Unless you plan you coat your fuel tank with powdered aluminum and iron oxide, and then connect that to some sort of static electricity igniter, you aren't going to have a hindenburg style disaster. I mean, geez, you know that cars are full of highly flamable liquids, right now, right? It is kind of like last century when some people chose to stick with gas lighting in their homes because they thought electricity might be a fire hazard.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your scenario of the fuel tank "blowing" presumably refers to a mechanical rupture. Either fuel would quickly escape from the tank and potentially form an explosive mixture with air. Because gasoline vapor is more dense than air, the explosive air/gasoline mixture tends to hug the ground and stay near the source of the vapor (i.e. the liquid ga
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:realistic alternative power source for vehicles (Score:4, Informative)
reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg [wikipedia.org]
"The Nature of Hydrogen:
* Hydrogen is less flammable than gasoline.
* Hydrogen disperses quickly.
* Hydrogen is non-toxic.
* Hydrogen combustion produces only water.
* Hydrogen can be stored safely. Tanks currently in use
reference http://www.hydrogennow.org/Facts/Safety-1.htm [hydrogennow.org]
Both websites refer to the causes of the Hindenburg disaster, pinning the blame on the blimp material for the largest part of the fault.
The Hindenburg really wasn't a hydrogen disaster, it was an airship disaster that happened to also involve hydrogen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)