« Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) | Main | Trading on the mind market – buying and selling innovation »
May 16, 2007
Purdue professor on the "aluminum enabling hydrogen economy"
About a month ago, the Purdue Energy Center held a symposium on the challenges and technologies of the hydrogen economy. One of the presenters was Jerry Woodall, and his research continues to be mentioned this month because of the process he has developed that makes hydrogen "by adding water to an alloy of the metals aluminum and gallium," Purdue says. There is already a startup company (with the monstrosity of a name AlGalCo Inc.) operating at the Purdue Research Park to make generators that use Woodall's technology and it's possible that this technology could one day replace gasoline in vehicles.There is a 26-minute online presentation of the gallium-aluminum technology available here.
Woodall says that the reaction of aluminum with water has the same energy content per unit weight of oil, about 20,000 BTUs or about 6 kWh per pound. And, since aluminum is safe and plentiful, it has high potential to create "aluminum enabling hydrogen economy".
All I can say is wow! The implications of this are quiet staggering. Two very abundant elements on the Earth and we can mix them together and get energy out equal to oil. I expect to read this kind of stuff on a conspiracy site, not from a major university. I've gone over the math, it's so simple that I can't see how it wouldn't work. The demonstration is particularly interesting. The time frames seemed a bit long, but it's pure science not an attempt at practical application. But the most amazing part of all, is that you can reverse the process and use the aluminum again. I've got to kick it around for a little bit to see if I can find some problem with it, that didn't come up in my first review of the technology. I'm not sure if it's the way to go with cars per say, but for generating electricity for your home it's definitely an interesting option. You could definitely get better energy storage with this method than we would normally have with a battery for example. Watch the presentation, it's extremely interesting, I hope the work continues to provide such exciting results.
Read more over at AutoBlogGreen.
Posted by Jamison at May 16, 2007 4:15 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.daffodillane.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/8249