It is now possible to make hydrogen using no electricity, and no heat other than room temperature. This is peer-reviewed, in Science, the world's premier scientific journal. This is real. This could be big.
"... our method allows us to produce hydrogen without supplying heat, connecting to a battery, or adding electricity. Once the aluminum clusters are synthesized, they can generate hydrogen on demand without the need to store it."
Interested in running your car using water as the fuel? Follow below the fold.
Scientists at Penn State University and the Virginia Commonwealth University have discovered a way to produce hydrogen by exposing selected clusters of aluminum atoms to water.
It turns out that the reaction is based on a specific physical arrangement of aluminum atoms in the nano-clusters.
They found that a water molecule will bind between two aluminum sites in a cluster as long as one of the sites behaves like a Lewis acid, a positively charged center that wants to accept an electron, and the other behaves like a Lewis base, a negatively charged center that wants to give away an electron. The Lewis-acid aluminum binds to the oxygen in the water and the Lewis-base aluminum dissociates a hydrogen atom. If this process happens a second time with another set of two aluminum sites and a water molecule, then two hydrogen atoms are available, which then can join to become hydrogen gas (H2).
There are obvious technical difficulties to overcome before this technology can become widespread. Aluminum in foil, airplanes, and canoes forms a one-atom thick layer of aluminum oxide, while these nanoclusters are pure aluminum, meaning they could never be exposed to air.
Also, having stripped hydrogen atoms off the water molecules, the remaining hydroxyl groups contaminate the clusters, stopping further reactions. The latter problem is already being addressed in ongoing research:
Khanna hopes that the team's findings will pave the way toward investigating how the aluminum clusters can be recycled for continual usage and how the conditions for the release of hydrogen can be controlled. "It looks as though we might be able to come up with ways to remove the hydroxyl group (OH-) that remains attached to the aluminum clusters after they generate hydrogen so that we can reuse the aluminum clusters again and again," he said.
Sources:
Science Daily
AAAS