Pee... Power??

Perhaps we've got it all wrong... maybe beer soaked college football fans are the answer. Maybe stuffing them in the bathroom - like cattle in the walkway, connecting them nose-to-ass on their march to the feedlot - lining them up like watering statues, and having them twinkle away doomers' disamay... is our energy Independence is the answer!

I picked this one up from the Daily Drumbeat. It was too funny to pass up (link):

Urine-powered cars, homes and personal electronic devices could be available in six months with new technology developed by scientists from Ohio University.

Using a nickel-based electrode, the scientists can create large amounts of cheap hydrogen from urine that could be burned or used in fuel cells. "One cow can provide enough energy to supply hot water for 19 houses," said Gerardine Botte, a professor at Ohio University developing the technology. "Soldiers in the field could carry their own fuel."

Pee power is based on hydrogen, the most common element in the universe but one that has resisted efforts to produce, store, transport and use economically.

Storing pure hydrogen gas requires high pressure and low temperature. New
nanomaterials with high surface areas can adsorb hydrogen, but have yet to be produced on a commercial scale. Chemically binding hydrogen to other elements, like oxygen to create water, makes it easier to store and transport, but releasing the hydrogen when it's needed usually requires financially prohibitive amounts of electricity.

By attaching hydrogen to another element, nitrogen, Botte and her colleagues realized that they can store hydrogen without the exotic environmental conditions, and then release it with less electricity, 0.037 Volts instead of the 1.23 Volts needed for water.

One molecule of urea, a major component of urine, contains four atoms of hydrogen bonded to two atoms of nitrogen. Stick a special nickel electrode into a pool of urine, apply an electrical current, and hydrogen gas is released.

Botte's current prototype measures 3x3x1 inch and can produce up to 500 milliwatts of power. However, Botte and her colleagues are actively trying to commercialize several larger versions of the technology.

A fuel cell, urine-powered vehicle could theoretically travel 90 miles per gallon. A refrigerator-sized unit could produce one kilowatt of energy for about $5,000, although this price is a rough estimate, says Botte.

Bottoms' up to energy independendence!

- Brewskie

Copying Nature's Cheap-Made Hydrogen

Why has humankind been using exotic materials for hydrogen catalysts? Nature's been doing it on the cheap - iron, nickel and sulfur! Now researchers at the University of Illinois have seemingly caught up to nature's coy play (link):

Scientists have long been puzzled by nature's ability to use cheap and plentiful building blocks – iron, nickel and sulfur – to achieve the catalytic performance seen in rare and expensive metals. In particular, two enzymes – iron-iron hydrogenase and nickel-iron hydrogenase – function as hydrogen processors, much like platinum.

"Nature relies on a very elaborate architecture to support its own 'hydrogen economy,' " said Thomas B. Rauchfuss, a professor of chemistry and corresponding author of the paper. "We cracked that design by generating mock-ups of the catalytic site to include the substrate hydrogen atom."

The researchers' model of the nickel-iron complex is the first to include a bridging hydride ligand, an essential component of the catalyst.

"By better understanding the mechanism in the nickel-iron hydrogenase active site, we are learning how to develop new kinds of synthetic catalysts that may be useful in other applications," said graduate student Bryan E. Barton, lead author of the paper.

- Brewskie

Hydrogen Storage Breakthrough

Stanford researchers recently discovered a hydrogen-rich compound that may help overcome a major hurdle with hydrogen fuel storage...

A hydrogen-rich compound discovered by Stanford researchers is packed with promise of helping overcome one of the biggest hurdles to using hydrogen for fuel--namely, how do you stuff enough hydrogen into a volume that is small enough to be portable and practical for powering a car?

The newly discovered material is a high-pressure form of ammonia borane, a solid material which itself is already imbued with ample hydrogen. By working with the parent material at high pressure in an atmosphere artificially enriched with hydrogen, the scientists were able to ratchet up the hydrogen content of the material by roughly 50 percent.

"Including the hydrogen already stored in ammonia borane, this new material can store around 30 weight percent in total," said Yu Lin, lead author of a paper describing the work that was published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Department of Energy has set a target for hydrogen-powered vehicles of having an on-board storage system able to store 9 percent, by weight, of hydrogen in 2015. The new compound, called ammonia borane-hydrogen, contains more than triple that amount.But the fly in the hydrogen is that the sought-after storage system
must function at ambient pressure and temperature conditions. The process Lin
used to get the added hydrogen into the ammonia borane has to take place at a
minimum pressure that is approximately 60,000 times the usual pressure at the
surface of the Earth.

"For energy applications, we need to stabilize the material near ambient conditions," said Lin, a graduate student in geological and environmental sciences. Currently, most hydrogen-powered machines use either compressed hydrogen gas or liquid hydrogen, which needs to be maintained at high pressure or very low temperature, respectively, relative to ambient temperature and pressure. These methods have associated safety concerns in the case of compressed hydrogen and require significant energy for cooling in the case of liquid hydrogen.

- Brewskie

Toothepaste Compound Brings Big Hydrogen Solar Breakthrough

Titania, titanium dioxide, titanium white, or CI 77891. Mythic stuff. It's used everywhere: semiconductors, oxygen sensors, protein cleaver... food coloring, sun tan lotion, kitty litter! When you see fake snow in a movie... that's pigment white 6!

The egg-heads of Northeastern University, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have gone further to display the potential, demonstrate its value, why it's paramount to fulfilling the 35-year dream of hydrogen fuel cells inspired by Akira Fujishima (link):

Increasing the available surface area is one way to boost a catalyst's performance, so a team at Northeastern has been studying techniques to build tightly packed arrays of titania nanotubes, which have a very high surface to volume ratio. They also were interested in how best to incorporate carbon into the nanotubes, because carbon helps titania absorb light in the visible spectrum. (Pure titania absorbs in the ultraviolet region, and much of the ultraviolet is filtered by the atmosphere.)

This brought them to the NIST X-ray spectroscopy beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)**. The NIST facility uses X-rays that can be precisely tuned to measure chemical bonds of specific elements, and is at least
10 times more sensitive than commonly available laboratory instruments, allowing researchers to detect elements at extremely low concentrations. While making
measurements of the carbon atoms, the team noticed spectroscopic data indicating
that the titania nanotubes had small amounts of potassium ions strongly bound to the surface, evidently left by the fabrication process, which used potassium
salts. This was the first time the potassium has ever been observed on titania nanotubes; previous measurements were not sensitive enough to detect it.

The result was mildly interesting, but became much more so when the research team compared the performance of the potassium-bearing nanotubes to similar arrays deliberately prepared without potassium. The former required only about one-third the electrical energy to produce the same amount of hydrogen as an equivalent array of potassium-free nanotubes. "The result was so exciting," recalls Northeastern physicist Latika Menon, "that we got sidetracked from the carbon research." Because it has such a strong effect at nearly undetectable concentrations, Menon says, potassium probably has played an unrecognized role in many experimental water-splitting cells that use titania nanotubes, because potassium hydroxide is commonly used in the cells. By controlling it, she says, hydrogen solar cell designers could use it to optimize performance.

- Brewskie

More Proof Why You Won't Need Platinum for Fuel Cells

(Editor's note: although blockquote works well for some bloggers, but its usage has proven finicky with Ghawar Guzzler. Excerpts from articles will be presented in italics until, otherwise noted.)

Researchers have grown arrays of carbon nanotubes which, under demonstration, may be capable of fulfilling the necessary role of catalyst with fuel cells - eliminating the need for exotic materials such as platinum; and they're cheaper and longer lasting, too boot.

Excerpts below include,

More than half the cost of fuel-cell stacks comes from platinum, according to the Department of Energy. "Fuel cells haven't been commercialized for larger-scale applications because platinum is too expensive," says Liming Dai, a materials-engineering professor at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, who led the work. "For electrodes, you need a cheaper material that still has a high performance."

Dai and his colleagues make electrodes by depositing the carbon-nanotube arrays on a composite film of polymer and carbon nanotubes. In a Science paper, the researchers show that using the material as a cathode gives four times higher current densities than do conventional platinum-coated electrodes. "There has been very limited success to finding a replacement for platinum, and [carbon nanotubes] could be one," says Prashant Kamat, a chemistry professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Carbon nanotubes, which are known to be electrically and mechanically robust, could overcome other issues that platinum faces. Carbon monoxide can stick to platinum's surface and make it less effective, Dai says. Also, platinum is not very durable, and its properties degrade over time. "Carbon nanotubes have long-term operational stability and do not suffer from carbon-monoxide poisoning," Dai says.

And...

To make the nanotube electrodes, Dai and his colleagues start with a compound containing carbon, nitrogen, and iron. They place this on a quartz substrate and heat it in the presence of ammonia, resulting in nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes growing straight up from the surface. Then they oxidize the array to remove residual iron and transfer the array to a polymer film. Immersing the electrode in a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, the researchers found that it speeds up the cathode reaction of oxygen and electrons.

Meanwhile, others are working on different platinum substitutes. Kotaro Sasaki, who does fuel cell catalyst research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and his colleagues at Brookhaven are making atom-thick platinum films, which would use much less of the precious metal. Researchers at Monash University, in Australia, have made cathodes from a polymer called PEDOT. At Argonne National Laboratory, researchers have made nanotube arrays loaded with small quantities of platinum or iron.

- Brewskie