Piezo Crystals Harness Sound To Generate Hydrogen 187
MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport."
This SOUNDS Like A Breakthrough! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This SOUNDS Like A Breakthrough! (Score:5, Informative)
But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
No.
Sincerely yours,
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Re:This SOUNDS Like A Breakthrough! (Score:5, Funny)
No.
Sincerely yours,
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
But isn't the First Law of Thermodynamics to never talk about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
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That only counts on a raed.
Pools closed.
etc.
etc.
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Re:This SOUNDS Like A Breakthrough! (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, that depends on what you do with the hydrogen. If you re-oxidize it by combustion, obviously no energy will come out.
If you fuse it into Helium, you've got free energy until you run out of water.
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Sure, but current fusion technology still has a ways to go before we can start using it for electricity.
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What part of 18% did you not understand? :P
And is it really 18% or 0.18% (Score:3, Informative)
The air to water transition is a huge impedance change. so most sound will be reflected not transmitted into the water. Second Since they are talking about 18% of the absorbed energy being converted and not 18% of the incident energy, even once it gets into the water most of the incident energy is probably reflected or absorbed in the water itself.
Unless they have already taken these into account it seems like the conversion rate of air acoustic energy to hydrogen energy must be in the fraction of a perce
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I'd not be too quick to judge here. I'm of course not doing a whole lot of math here, but let's apply some common sense...
Any time you apply energy to water, it generally winds up expressed as heat - so you get evaporation, and that's before we even start talking about the crystals doing the work that they do. You could of course presume you have an airtight container trapping the vapors, but now you're talking about a pressure vessel. In either case, you're not going to get a pure hydrogen - you're goin
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But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
No.
Sincerely yours,
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Not if you take into to count the power of Dance!
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But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
Only if you are willing to listen to Barry White all the time...
You'll never find,
another vibe like mine,
to shake those crystals,
the way I do...
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"You'll Never Find" was sung by Lou Rawls, not Barry White. And now they're both dead. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW!
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Jeez, EVERYBODY knows you shouldn't cross the streams...
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But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
Am I missing something here? The summary clearly states - "any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport". Even if the conversion efficiency was MUCH less than it is (18% fta), it would still be worth it since you're using sound energy that is wasted anyway. It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice sinc
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Your absolutely right, you're just getting bogged down with the pedantic ramblings of the Slashdot crowd.
They're joking and arguing about a perpetual motion machine, nothing to do with reality...
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It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED.
Even better, in many cases said noise is undesirable and needs to be blocked or deflected as it is. Using it to generate hydrogen instead = win/win?
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You must be new here.
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Do you (or anyone else in this thread) realize just how little energy is in noise, from which this crystal can only extract 18% at best, and that a large percentage of the noise will radiate in directions that don't pass through the crystals, let alone be absorbed by them?
I say it again, It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED. In this case, your argument is irrelevant since it is simply NOT about how much of the sound energy is radiated in other directions. So what if it does? It would done so anyway - that's the default situation. We're not hiring gnomes to produce the noise for this system - the noise occurs naturally. If you can harvest a fraction of it, it's still worth it. The questio
Spamradio (Score:2)
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I'd like PiezoAnalogyGuy to chime in on this topic.
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Thanks for the laugh! Even if there was no 2nd law*, you wouldn't need it. Put this thing on the seashore and there's plenty of noise AND water.
A kind of related question for slashdotters better at math and physics than me - if you plug a potato [wikipedia.org] into a glass of water, how much hydrogen could you produce? How powerful would a potato bomb be?
* The second law of thermodynamics sayss that the entropy of an isolated macroscopic system never decreases, or (equivalently) that perpetual motion machines are impossib
But Mom... (Score:5, Funny)
"If we dont play it at full volume we wont be able to save the enviroment!" ;-)
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That's why it goes to 11.
Cost Effective? (Score:2, Insightful)
If not, can this be made cheap?
Also, how much can this be scaled up?
Re:Cost Effective? (Score:4, Funny)
If it's cheap, can it be incorporated into bedsprings?
Re:Cost Effective? (Score:4, Funny)
If it's cheap, can it be incorporated into bedsprings?
I get the feeling that it would be of extremely limited use to the /. community if it were
Re:Cost Effective? (Score:5, Funny)
Au Contraire, I'm certain the /. readers have already taken this problem into their own hands...
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The energy is powering their wristwatches already.
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I haven't read TFA[1], but this isn't new at all; in fact, electricity has been produced this way for hundreds of years, albeit very tiny amounts of electricity. A piezoelectric microphone [wikipedia.org] produces electricity, as does a coil and magnet microphone. Take a microphone, put each lead on the end of a diode to convert it to DC, plug the diodes into water, and one lead will produce oxygen while the other lead produces hydrogen. However, the amounts produced will be incredibly tiny.
You can buy a piezoelectric micr
Thermodynamics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thermodynamics (Score:4, Interesting)
The #1 problem here would be.....
If you had an infrastructure where highway barriers were full of water, generating a perfectly combustion mixture (like, not just good, but perfect) flowing into pipes, which would (obviously) need to be somewhere close to the road. If they are elevated, they run a risk of contact with a vehicle, or flames from an accident. I've seen bridges melt from accidents under them. Below the road, the gases rising create an extreme explosion hazard at ground level. One cigarette butt thrown out a window, and you could have an entire highway explode.
Anywhere around a highway is a potential heavy impact and fire hazard. If you watch the news, you'll see the "freak" accidents where cars leave the road and end up in houses or other buildings, or burst into flames for various reasons. Anyone who's worked for a while as in the emergency response industry (police, fire, paramedics) have seen vehicles on their roof. Thousands of pounds of pressure may break a pesky hydrogen pipeline.
I'm not against it though, it sounds like an interesting idea, although not a solution. If cars were powered by hydrogen instead of gasoline, and the noise on highways produced hydrogen to power them, the evil laws of thermodynamics jump in and say "don't get your hopes up."
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Using some of that energy that being absorbed by the sound barrier sounds fine, even if that cars run on hydrogen. You are not going to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics, but if you get a better sound barrier with free hydrogen to boot, why not?
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I agree. Some, but not all, would be recovered. Folks will get anxious if they aren't reminded.
I'd worry more about the tremendous explosion risk. The farther away from the road, the less effective it would be. But, the closer you put it to the road, the larger risk it becomes. Being that not all accidents happen *on* the road, it's a huge risk. Beyond the mentions above, in one community I lived in, there was a nice car-sized hole in the concrete wall. It was down th
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Seems like the actual barrier could be near the road with some guard rails in front of it and the rain reservoir quite far away. Reducing the risks somewhat. Besides the news networks would love this.
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Well, you do have a valid point there. There's nothing better for the ratings that big explosions and body parts strewn along the roads.
I'd hate to be on the cleanup crew when there's an accident on I-95 or I-10, and the explosion blows cars off the road for miles. I'd think it would be cost prohibitive to have flashback arrestors every few feet.
Something like this [www.cbc.ca] would have been more catastrophic if a hydrogen/oxygen filled line was anywhere near it.
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I might be missing something, but we don't we just make the cars quieter?
Um, no (Score:2)
I happen to enjoy the shriek of my Ferrari, you insensitive clod!
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Adds mass to the car, meaning it is going to be getting even worse mileage.
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And, finally, delivering [topgear.com].
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I can just see the headlines now. "1,000 dead as 1 mile of I-900 explodes into flames."
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you could have an entire highway explode.
That would be AWESOME. Wait, I mean... oh the humanity.
Re:Thermodynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
Liquid fuel used in automobiles is about as volatile as anything gets (at least in public spaces). Ng, Hydrogen and other compressed gasses are considerably safer. They dissipate quickly, require fairly small windows for ignition, and most of them require significantly more spark to fire up in the first place.
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Consider what was suggested.
The crystals would break down water. It releases hydrogen, sure. What do you think happens to the oxygen? It's in the same mixture. It's actually a very wonderful mixture, since it is broken down from a very happy molecule. I ran a torch on pure gases from electrolysis. It makes a nice hot and virtually invisible flame. That's a hint that it's a great mixture. Sure, the gases would rise, but it's rising from a pipe of some sort. If the barric
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What do you think happens to the oxygen? It's in the same mixture.
You throw away the Oxygen as it is created. When the hydrogen is combusted eventually, oxygen will be taken from the air for the purpose.
Re:Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think so.
Flammability Concentration Limits [engineeringtoolbox.com]
Hydrogen 4% to 75%
Gasoline 1.4% to 7.6%
The auto-ignition temperature [engineeringtoolbox.com] is indeed higher for hydrogen, 500 Celsius compared to 280 for gasoline. I had not known that.
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I dont get why you guys are discussing the possiblity of a hydrogen burn/explosion. This would only happen if the hydrogen is stored, and then only if it gets stored in large amounts. At the infinitessimal amounts that appears to be released during this process, it makes no sense to even try to store it beyond what makes for an efficient amount to bother igniting it. Storing hydrogen is impractical at best, and as hydrogen has the smallest possible atomic structure, it can pretty much escape any container,
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Actually, the #1 problem here would be that it would be disgustingly expensive, an ineffective sound barrier and an inefficient energy source.
To start with, lining the highway with any kind of fancy tech would be fabulously expensive. Maybe you could install parabolic concentrators to reduce the cost, but it would still be impractical this side of Dubai.
Second, consider how loud a speaker with a few watts of power, compared to a nearby highway. Truck rumblings will probably hit the wall with something on
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Below the road, the gases rising create an extreme explosion hazard at ground level. One cigarette butt thrown out a window, and you could have an entire highway explode.
That's only a problem with gasses that are heavier than air, like gasoline fumes, etc. Hydrogen is lighter than air, so would float up and not pool on the road surface
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That's a great idea! Let's put them along all the California highways!
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I figured banning cars was the easier one. :)
No cars would mean no car accidents. It would also mean that if we intended the system to be a fuel for the cars, then it wouldn't be needed.
If they banned smoking, there would be a lot more upset people. :)
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I don't know where you live, but in the approximately 20 US states that I've driven in over the last few years (Generally along I-5, I-10, I-75, I-95) I can't say that I've seen more than the occasional locations with sound barriers, and with the exception of the lower supports of overpasses, none were 20 feet tall. 8 to 12 feet are about as tall as I've seen for sound barriers, and those are usually in limited locations, such as where a highway passes by a residential community that bitched
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You couldn’t use rain, since it wouldn’t be clean enough. And any dirtiness would attach to the crystals, until the thing stops working.
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Actually, due to an echo chamber effect, it probably would work better.
However, the application which immediately sprung to mind for me was: use it with waterfalls. Not only would it be continual and mostly consistent power generation (with a replenished water source), but it could be used to supplement existing hydroelectric power plants (dams).
(I didn't read the article, but does this device require non-pure water - ie one with an electrolyte - to assist in the splitting? If it did not, it would be signif
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Although not wildly popular due to resistance from builders who are used to building with stick
Stick ? So you're one of the three little pigs ? Remind me never to visit your house.
Mr Wolf.
Interesting side-effect: (Score:3, Interesting)
Can be used as noise insulation. There might be some drawback to building walls serving as giant water tanks, but the upside is that living next to the freeway might actually have some benefits.
Car Troubles... (Score:5, Funny)
Too little energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're correct. There is far too little energy available from sound waves to be useful.
Wall linings (Score:4, Interesting)
If these can be manufactured cheaply enough, I imagine boards of this being made and marketed by Gib for any place where you want soundproofing or a room with 'dead' acoustics.
Any vibrations? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Maxwell's Demon is impossible because it is 100% efficient. This thing is 18% efficient, which is entirely believable.
Whats the real efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whats the real efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
You should measure not only the efficiency, but the total cost of energy generation.
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Sound waves are being generated all over nature as a natural left over of different processes.
Sorry, but sound fucking sucks as an energy source. Take an 90 dB noise for instance, which is rather loud. What power does that noise deliver to a square meter of area? About 1 milliwatt.
It's interesting that they got the efficiency as high as they did, but even if it was 100% efficient, 1 milliwatt per square meter just absolutely blows. It's a waste of time.
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Exactly! Still there's an innovation factor of harvesting the electricity used to do it from noise. It's still to be seen if this can produce enough hydrogen to power, say, a vehicle, without having to wait days to fill the tank.
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This weeks Green Energy Hype (Score:5, Interesting)
So this was the best Slashdot could come up with for this weeks Green Energy Hype of the Week? Guess it was a slow week because this one is lamer than most.
Ok, ASSuming they can figure out a way to separate the H and O before they just combine again. ASSume this tech actually works outside the lab and can be scaled up. ASSume it performs as advertised when scaled up. 18% conversion efficiency on sound waves? Sound doesn't carry a lot of energy to begin with and they will harvest 18% of it before losses in compressing the H. Oh wow, if we ran this stuff down a mile of busy highway we MIGHT generate enough energy to push one crappy green gocart/car down that highway every day.
And that is the problem with most alternative energy schemes, they depend on ignorant people who don't know how the world works. There are LOTS of ways to extract energy from nature. The problem is that there aren't many that can compete with the existing sources because they are just so darned good, which was why we standardized on them in the first place. And if we actually do find a new good source, once scaled up it is a veritable certainty that we will discover that it too isn't a free lunch and that it also has a downside somewhere. And the second certainty is that the Greenies will be working to ban it because if it actually works it won't be alternative anymore. Kinda like music, when that great alternative/undergound band signs a contract and releases a hit most of their original fans declare them 'sellouts' and glom onto the newest unheard of band.
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So wait, our current energy sources are so good and new ones might have problems so we should never try to innovate?
No, just don't get over-excited about every new thing, without first looking at the costs and benefits. To use an analogy - if you're walking down the street with your girlfriend, it might not be a good idea to yell "boobies!" and run after every woman you see. Sure, you might get lucky now and then, but 99% of the time you're going to be disappointed.
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At least that's what I heard...
I mean, come on, this is an article about how to use zinc oxide crystals and excess noise to create hydrogen. The way he's reacting, it's as if a hippie drum circle invaded his backyard and started shouting about cars that ru
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Ah, now it makes sense. I guess I missed the part about people flipping the fuck out, or the claim that this breakthrough was destined to save mankind.
Come to think of it, I still can't find these anywhere, just a story providing a brief overview of this discovery and how it might someday result in some unspecified degree of power generation from noisy sources, along with some discussion and nerd jokes about that story in this thread.
As for the concerns that jmorris42 listed, they are just as vague and base
Ah, Zinc Oxide... (Score:3, Funny)
Yada yada yada (Score:2, Interesting)
This gas can't be transported... (Score:4, Informative)
My question is this "If you're producing Hydrogen... aren't you also producing Oxygen at the very same time?" So here you are creating a combustible gas mixture in a stiochiometrically perfect balance to go BOOM-POW!!! The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them. You need to pump this straight into a combustion chamber or fuel cell, because it's ready, willing, and able to off the instant it's created. It cannot be transported anywhere.
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My question is this "If you're producing Hydrogen... aren't you also producing Oxygen at the very same time?"
Yes. What you're really getting is so-called Brown's Gas, an oxy-hydrogen mixture. In conventional electrolysis you get the two gases produced at discrete electrodes, so it's easy to keep them physically separate.
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> The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them.
H2 quickly rises. O2 slowly sinks (air is ~78% N2, and O2 is slightly heavier than N2).
So you build your water tank to have a lot of space above its "fill to here" line, and you put a long, thin, vertical tube out the top. Let the process go naturally until you trip a pressure gauge, at which point you bleed pure H2 from a valve at the top and almost-pure O2 from a valve at the bottom. You should get twice as much H2 as O2, of course (2 H20
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IIRC, if you're using direct current, hydrogen and oxygen are produced at opposite ends of the wire. So separating them is automatic.
Amazing Tech (Score:3, Interesting)
This is such a beautiful idea.
Beautiful beautiful idea.
I will never think of something like this.
I do not care whether it is possible to generate energy efficiently or not - this is a really really cool tech.
Here's an Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
While this of course wouldn't be effective as a primary generative source, it could be very useful as a secondary income/efficiency improvement. Some current examples similar situations are 1 - Sugar Beet Processors: They use the dried leftovers from the plants to power the plant for processing sugar beets, somewhere in Hawaii they used to generate all of the electricity for the community from the excess power at the sugar beet plant. 2 - Dairy farm Power: Some larger dairies these days actually use the m
Fuel from sound? Not to be sexist, but.... (Score:3, Funny)
How are they going to collect it? (Score:2)
Catalyst? (Score:2)
can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil.
Whoever wrote this needs to hand in their geek card for not understanding the word "catalyst".
If we could, somehow, produce hydrogen in a reaction catalyzed by oil, our energy problems would be solved.
At last: a use for politicians (Score:2)
How does this compare to Hydro plants? (Score:3, Interesting)
Concerts / Sports (Score:2)
So Rock and Metal bands can illuminate their concerts by playing louder? Niiicee
Also think the soccer / football matches, the louder the fans, the brighter the field.
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Give me the option to have -1 given emphasis and leave me to post as much as I fuckin' like down here, you google-dick-sucking fucktards.
Um, not to be one of those self-absorbed, uninformed heavily biassed assholes, but I believe the first 'G' in google in you google-dick-sucking fucktards should be capitalized.
you Google-dick-sucking fucktards.
There, FTFY. Have a nice day.
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I suppose it'd be called "Volume", and the next one "Volume 2".
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1
1
1
More than you earn, buddy
respectively.
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...what about nightclubs? I'm pretty sure the heavy bass would be able to produce at least enough energy to cover the lights, especially since they're off for the most part.
Nightclubs?
Nightclubs?
What about Congress?
This invention is screaming to be used in DC.