Posted on 06/09/2022 3:38:58 AM PDT by dennisw
This medium releases 99.99 percent pure hydrogen, which could power electrical grids, hydrogen fuel cells, cars, or hydrogen-injected diesel trucks.
Former computer-chip manufacturing engineer Paul Smith founded Plasma Kinetics in 2008. The Arizona-based startup has developed “solid-state” hydrogen storage, essentially transferring the gas onto a proprietary film wound in many layers inside a canister. He says the tech could challenge batteries in both efficiency and environmental friendliness.
When unspooled and run past a laser—the film moves from one reel to another, like movie film through a projector—the solid-state storage medium releases 99.99 percent pure hydrogen, which could power electrical grids, hydrogen fuel cells, cars, or hydrogen-injected diesel trucks. Plasma Kinetics asserts that its storage system is 30 percent lighter, 7 percent smaller, and 17 percent less expensive than a lithium-ion battery per kilowatt-hour. Those claims have reportedly attracted capital from the likes of Toyota, though Smith declined to confirm any investments.
Due to these successes, Plasma Kinetics had to put its plans (and patents) on hold for nearly a decade because the Department of Defense wanted to gain a lead in applying Smith’s methodology to missile tech and other military applications. Now, the startup’s hydrogen storage tech may have the chance to challenge the battery business and the trillions of dollars sunk into it worldwide.
Hydrogen (H2) is most often produced by natural gas steam reformation and electrolysis of water. “Green” hydrogen is produced when wind and solar power provide electricity for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. The hydrogen produced by these processes must be compressed or liquefied to achieve a small enough size for practical storage.
10 Questions With the Solid-State Battery Guru Hydrogen gas is commonly compressed to more than 2,000 psi, and in the case of fuel-cell cars like the Toyota Mirai, to as much as 10,000 psi. Multiple stages of compression and cooling are required to achieve these high pressures. Plasma Kinetics claims its process provides the same storage density as 5,000 psi compressed hydrogen gas but without compression—eliminating pumps, compressors, and chillers.
The company uses a light-sensitive, film-like “nano-photonic” material to absorb hydrogen, wound in thousands of layers inside a large canister. Each extremely thin layer has a lattice structure that binds hydrogen and prevents other elements from interfering with its absorption. The company’s process begins by connecting a hydrogen production “buffer tank” (into which electrolyzed or steam-reformed gas initially goes) to a hood with input and output pipes sitting atop a 20-foot container, which holds 70 canisters of its nano-photonic film.
On command, H2 is released from the buffer tank through the hood into the main container holding the 70 canisters. When a canister recognizes the presence of hydrogen gas, a valve inside opens, allowing gas to flow inside. The negatively charged nano-photonic film has a strong affinity for positively charged H2, absorbing it in minutes at simple atmospheric pressure.
“If you can provide 10 kilotons of hydrogen per hour to a Plasma Kinetics system, it can absorb all 10 kilotons,” Smith says. “It’s just a matter of how much you want to scale.”
Regardless of the source, the result is H2 stored in a solid state, according to Smith. The company anticipates 28 kg of H2 per cubic meter in 2023 without the need for pressure or energy to store the hydrogen. That could be useful in challenging batteries, a relatively dirty technology: Plasma Kinetics claims that its storage film and housings require no rare-earth elements. ---SNIP
I like your plan.
For the past 30 years or more these over-unity cons show up like clockwork, i.e Hydrolysis using some secret resonant frequency or similar.
What internet sez>>>
80%
· Very roughly, a new electrolysis plant today delivers energy efficiency of around 80%. That is, the energy value of the hydrogen produced is about 80% of the electricity used to split the water molecule. Steam reforming is around 65% efficient.
It’s an 8-track!
Rebooting the 70s, bruh!
Looks like a hydrogen 8-track tape cartridge.
That's true and it will always be more economical to use natural gas. But there will be more and more renewable power used electrolysis or other forms of energy storage. Renewables simply won't work without storage.
True, there will eventually be giant solar farms for that infrastructure. Chances are they will be solar hydrocarbon rather than solar hydrogen, easier to move and store. I think they will end up being built in the third world and look like crap, but they will work.
They could put their supply runs off until winter.
LP is highly flammable yet millions of homes have a tank sitting close to a house.
With LP being pushed into the house under pressure.
Exactly, but charging a battery is also a net energy loss. The question is whether this technology can be made “more efficient” (cheaper? more energy-dense?) than a battery.
I always believed that there would be an alternative medium to Lithium-6 and that the government would NEVER commercialize L6.
No NOx if you burn it in a fuel cell, only if you burn it in an ICE or similar.
And where does the Hydrogen come from?
Electrolysis...you need energy to do it.
Cracking natural gas...you need energy to do it.
Also since H2 molecules are so small, leaks are very common and hard to fix.
All the easy stuff has already been invented.
“What if we run out of hydrogen?”
Don’t mention this to Al Gore. We’ll have a brand new movement on our hands. They’ll be chaining themselves to the ocean. Hmmm.
8-track players make a comeback!
It is not the motor or the drive train of EVs that is the problem. Both of those are relatively simple and better than the IC. It is the energy source that is the barrier to true success.
IC in the conversion of fuel to power is between 17 and less than 25% efficient. More energy is required to produce, refine and transport petroleum fuel.
EVs are somewhere around 75% efficient. Steam plants to make the electricity from coal are about 40% efficient and power lines take another bite out of the primary fuel to deliver the electricity to where it is used.
Each time you convert fuel to energy or power you destroy some part of it as waste heat.
I have been wondering what the full-cycle efficiency of any fuel is from resource to tractive effort? I bet it would shock us how bad it is even for solar or wind. There is always transmission loss. Energy to make the stuff and the power lines and install them has to come from somewhere. On and on the expense of energy goes with lots of contributory waste elements through each process.
Batteries have been against the wall in progressing the necessary qualifications for success of EVs for quite some time now. What is available is heavy, requires unacceptable charge times, degrades with time, can be unreliable, is expensive, uses what appear to be finite resources, has limited storage capacity generally providing enough 300 mile range under ideal conditions to get to somewhere short of your destination. It is the Achilles heel of the idea. I doubt hydrogen is the key as the net energy production process for it is negative. Breaking the hydorgen-oxygen bond requires a lot of energy as any successful entry level thermochemistry student should know.
If it were not for the batteries EVs would probably be a good idea but the range limitations and charging duration are unacceptable to me for all but local travel within 100 miles. Driving your battery powered car out to a mainline express thoroughfare and latching onto an electrified rail might be one way to cope with the range problem of batteries and charge them while underway. It would be one heck of an electrified rail and the construction and management of such a system would be phenomenally difficult.
Precisely.
See my musing post below wondering what the full conversion efficiency is for various sources of tractive force.
I wish him well and fully support the market creating new sources of energy.
Yet I still don’t see how producing, processing, and storing hydrogen will ever produce more energy than it took to get it in a useable state.
I assume it is reacted already to keep it in a “solid state” and the laser releases the bonds.
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