A New Way To Make Water, And Fuel Cells 107
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably know that it is easy to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. After all, this chemical reaction is known for more than two centuries. But now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have discovered a new way to make water. As states the UIUC report, 'not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.' But be warned: don't read the technical paper itself. It could win an obfuscated contest — if such a contest existed for scientific papers." Yet another advance in fuel cell technology; we discussed a different one just the other day.
Pet Peeve: UIUC (Score:4, Informative)
ohnoitsroland (Score:5, Informative)
The Snake-Oil X-Man!
Re:Pet Peeve: UIUC (Score:5, Informative)
Good to know either way, but whether you like it or not, the majority of folks know it best as UIUC. Sorry that you're so well known and all.
Also, if they don't want to be known as UIUC, perhaps a change of domain name is in order...
sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Free Energy (Score:4, Informative)
Making the alcohol consumes the very energy released by the fuel cells along with water. If the alcohol is fermented vegetation, that bacterial process consumes some of the energy to process the higher-energy sugars and carbohydrates in the vegetation. The vegetation is the key, because it converts the actual source of energy, sunlight, into those sugars. But by the time the alcohol hits the fuel cell, already over 95% of the sun's energy is lost in other processes before the final 50-80% max efficiency is applied to the usable 5%.
This is not about "making water". (Score:3, Informative)
Poor Zachariah Heiden made some comment that included the partial sentence "unconventional metal hydrides can be used for a chemical process called oxygen reduction, which is an essential part of the process of making water", and all the context got thrown away.
The actual paper seems to be "Homogeneous Catalytic Reduction of Dioxygen Using Transfer [acs.org]
Hydrogenation Catalysts".