[Red Badger]

Stanford scientists have developed a low-cost device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. Gas bubbles are produced from electrodes made of inexpensive nickel and iron. Credit: Mark Shwartz/Stanford Precourt Institut for Energy

Stanford graduate student Ming Gong (left) and Professor Hongjie Dai have developed a low-cost electrolytic device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen at room temperature. The device is powered by an ordinary AAA battery. Credit: Mark Shwartz/Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy

Video at Link................

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-scientists-splitter-ordinary-aaa-battery.html#jCp

[MrB]

Energy from burning hydrogen to power a vehicle << energy needed to split that hydrogen out of water

[RandallFlagg]

Bookmarking

[2ndDivisionVet]

We truly live in an age of miracles, yet barbarians, both foreign and domestic, threaten to ruin it for everybody.

[Kirkwood]

The batteries come from battery bushes. Free for the picking.

[factoryrat]

So they figured out how to overcharge a nickel-iron battery. That was a problem with those old batteries, they were pretty tolerant to overcharge, but they gassed out really bad, and you would have to replace the water lost. A dry cell at 1.56 volts is able to overcharge a nickel-iron cell at 1.2 volts, which happens to be close to the voltage required to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

[the_boy_who_got_lost]

So...is there actually a net gain in power? Or will we have to keep burning coal to power the battery to power the catylist to convert water into hydrogen/oxygen?

[Sgt_Schultze]

the novel water splitter could be used to make chlorine gas

So a terrorist could quietly slip into the air handling facilities in any high rise and drop off a device which plugs into a standard outlet, turn it on and walk slowly away as inhabitants of the complex are poisoned.

[smokingfrog]

I wonder if it will be practical to retrofit a battery powered car with a fuel cell?

[dfwgator]

[KarlInOhio]

The voltage level isn’t that important because voltage level shifting is easy and pretty efficient. I’ve regularly kicked 1.5 volts to over a dozen to drive LCD screens. Where this would be useful is storing intermittent energy sources like solar as hydrogen gas rather than in batteries, and that depends on how efficient the energy conversion is and how cheap the hardware is, not at what voltage it is done.

[nesnah]

Dihydrogen monoxide (water) is the most significant “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere.

It dwarfs CO2 by many orders of magnitude.

[Moonman62]

His next goal is to improve the durability of the device.

........

Now we know why this device will probably never reach the market, and why they decided to do science by press release instead.

[AZLiberty]

This is a REALLY misleading article. It makes it sound like you can get all the hydrogen you want out of a AAA battery. WRONG!

The advance here is that they invented an affordable catalyst that makes hydrolysis work at low voltage. But you still have to provide as much energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen as you get back when you burn it again. And you always have to provide a bit more because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Therefore, there is no net gain of energy here, or no new energy source, just a slightly better way of converting electrical energy into potential energy in the form of hydrogen gas.

[Zathras]

I came up with the same idea...
In 6th grade.

I guess you don’t need to be smart to get into Stanford.

[woerm]

bump for later thx for the link

[PA Engineer]

There is nothing new here. I did the same thing with in Junior High 35 years ago. Energy in is energy out less than electrolytic splitting and fuel cell efficiency. The "best" air fuel cells operate at 65 percent efficiency. The technology has been around for a 100 years.

Overall lead acid charging efficiencies are still competitive if not better than the electrolysis fuel cell cycles. Granted there is a weight trade off.

There are also issues of passivation of nickel under DC control.

Shaking my head.

[TalonDJ]

Are you freaking kidding me? I did that in fifth grade... and the setup looked the same. What is this, Amateur hour? Electrolysis is so simple you would be laughed out of a science fair.

[Royal Wulff]

They don’t teach the First Law of Thermodynamics at Stanford?

[Ocoeeman]

Folks This is a Joke.

Please its not April Fools

[Organic Panic]

Is this satire??? We did this stuff in middle school chemistry. I see they got in the obligatory “a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.”

But we can’t burn hydrogen in our cars. It produces dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide as an exhaust gas which is WAY worse for global warming than natural gas.