Comments for New Way To Split Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen Developed »
Posted By myfairlady 8 months, 3 weeks ago in Science & TechnologyThe design of efficient systems for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, driven by sunlight is among the most important challenges facing science today, underpinning the long term potential of hydrogen as a clean, sustainable fuel. But man-made systems that exist today are very inefficient and often require additional use of sacrificial chemical agents. In this context, it is important to establish new mechanisms by which water splitting can take place.
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windfrostComment removed: Hard Banned
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beavith18 months, 3 weeks ago
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interesting science.
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the problem here is that the complex is built around ruthenium. its part of the platinum group elements that you've never heard before: rhodium, osmium, rhenium, iridium and palladium.
they are rare and expensive here on earth.
hmmmm. actually, those elements are much more common on iron-nickel meteoroid/asteroids. just one more reason to explore the solar system...-
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BB648 months, 3 weeks ago
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beavith18 months, 3 weeks ago
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i think the mechanism is important, but the chemistry of the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) is pretty peculiar.
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photosynthesis has a Mg center. hemoglobin, as all us red blooded americans know ;-) , is based on Fe. N fixation by bacteria is based on Mo.
if we can reproduce the Ru work in something like Ni, it'd have a whole lot more utility.
On the other hand, if it only works with Ru, lets start mining asteroids!
the next obvious question to study is how well this works in steam. it seems to take quite a bit of energy to recover the H2.
(sigh) i guess there still is no such thing as a free lunch.
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hyperbola8 months, 3 weeks ago
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Actually ruthenium is part of the palladium series, not the platinum series. Its abundance is similar to that of molybdenum, platinum, gold, ... in fact, it is one of the common "impurities" in gold and platinum mining activities and could probably be obtained about as efficiently as those metals if there were sufficient demand.
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One should, of course, also remember that there are hundreds of research groups pursuing similar goals worldwide and this one is not particularly different from many others. Perhaps the final result will be a biological system, or a pseudo-biological system?
Genetically Engineered Blood Protein Can Be Used To Split Water Into Oxygen And Hydrogen
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/06120...-
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beavith18 months, 3 weeks ago
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PGMs are a mining term. it includes all those elements in that region of the periodic table because they have similar mining properties. they don't have truly minable ores (except Pt, and even that is not very concentrated) and are concentrated from other worked ores. for instance Re is mainly collected from Ni mining.
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if there were cheap sources of any of them, they would be more widely used, just because of their myriad uses. Pt and Pd demand are close to world production. other PGMs? economically important curiosities..
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frctm58 months, 3 weeks ago
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Given its abundance in water, hydrogen offers great promise as an alternative fuel. However, as a vehicle propellant, it still has many problems. Storage is the biggest issue with hydrogen. Liquefying it or compressing it requires energy. Three basic methods are used to store hydrogen. One is an insulated tank that keeps the gas cold enough to remain in a liquid state, another is just an old fashion high pressure welding style tank. The third method is hydrogen absorbing metals but their capacity is very limited. The insulated tank will not keep the hydrogen in your car indefinitely. If you let it sit to long, the gas will eventually evaporate. Welding tanks are very heavy and can't be charged safely at a service station. More likely it would just be swapped out for a new tank. Hydrogen is also extremely dangerous. It will ignite in a much broader ratio of fuel to air mixtures than gasoline. Anything from 5% to 75% is ignitable. Every car would be a potential bomb in a traffic accident.
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beavith18 months, 3 weeks ago
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frctm58 months, 3 weeks ago
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hydrogen is more volatile and more inclined explode than gasoline. Gasoline only burns at a one to sixteen air to fuel ratio and is in a liquid state at room temperature. Hydrogen, as I pointed out already, can burn or explode in a far greater range of fuel to air ratios and will be in a gaseous state the moment it comes out of its enclosure therefore making it much more likely to explode like a bomb. Hollywood creates the impression that cars are rolling bombs, but in reality cars rarely explode. It takes an extraordinary combination of circumstances to make this happen. The tank would have to be nearly empty and something like a spark would have to ignite the fumes while they were in an enclose space. The mixture couldn't be too rich or too lean. Plenty of cars catch fire but almost none actually explode.
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tadair9198 months, 3 weeks ago
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ruthenium rock, eh?
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you know, i've seen something like this before.
follow this link:
http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/watercar/h20ca...
and watch the video at the bottom.
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prophyporcritesComment removed: Spammer, Hard Banned
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chevydog8 months, 3 weeks ago
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Interesting article. Ruthenium is of course pretty scarce. And making an organo-metallic compound of it would repesent some pretty sophisticated chemistry.
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Hopefully, this is a real advance and not just another cold fusion episode.
For the cynically minded, I offer a "law" propounded by a chemist friend-- In any field of experimental endeavor, the most promising results are obtained immediately and are not reproducible.-
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tadair9198 months, 3 weeks ago
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you could buy ruthenium for pretty cheap.
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http://www.shopmetals.co.uk/ruthenium_rod.html-
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chevydog8 months, 3 weeks ago
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Being dense, I couldn't translate that to something I understand--e.g. $/oz. I do speak metric, though not fluently.
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Also, what do the typical compositions mean? Thought they were %, but that doesn't make sense; ppm?. ppb? Those are little bitty wires!
There's alot we don't know about this that hopefully will be cleared up as time goes on.
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