2194 Hydrogen On Demand - Improvements And A Possible Conspiracy

[Music] hi everybody so this stuff aluminium it's an amazing material it truly is I mean we're a bit blaz about it because we use it for stuff like this cooking F and um drink scans we're so used to it we probably don't think about it much but it was actually only discovered in the mid 19 Century by H Christian Ard who separated it from Alum which is incidentally where it gets its name from using mercury salts and it was so expensive when it was first found that it was used as jewelry Napoleon had a set of Cutlery that he used to take with him on campaign made of aluminium just to impress everybody these days of course we Mass manufacture it using electrolisis and it's made in the Megaton it's one of the cheapest Metals there is aluminums have about a do a pound as is zinc copper is about $3 a pound and lithium somewhere like $26 a pound so it's one of the cheapest Metals it's one of the most used and it's one of the most abundant and the price of aluminium of course is um really factors in the energy cost of producing it so when people say it's a bit expensive and energy intensive well yes it is but then lots of things are and the price is already factored in in the price of the aluminium it's so cheap because we produce so much of it and it's usually produced pretty near where the electricity Supply is also produced like at nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams but the fact remains it is an astonishing material and it's one of those metals that is incredibly reactive we don't really appreciate it because it's so reactive it almost immediately forms an aluminium oxide coat over the top of it which is unreactive and that protects the the rest of the metal but if you can remove the oxide coating of course it's very dramatic and I'm sure everybody seen this where you put a piece of aluminium in some sodium hydroxide and say hey look the sodium hydroxide is attacking the aluminium well sort of what it's actually doing is attacking the aluminium oxide coating and that strips it bare so the aluminium can react with the water and of course as it reacts with the water what it does is gives off a tremendous amount of heat and more interestingly a tremendous amount of hydrogen because aluminium react with water to form hydrogen not only do we get the production of the chemicals there and the hydrogen we might want in order to burn something off there is also a current formed and heat now let me demonstrate that current to you okay so what I've got here is a stainless steel pot with the same pottassium hydroxide solution in it and a little piece of aluminium the aluminium is clipped to a motor and the other side of the pot is clipped to the motor as well so the two electrodes are the sides of the pot and the aluminium now if I dip that aluminium in my potassium hydroxide solution and give that a chance to get going there we go we are now producing electrical energy and it produces a fair amount of power actually depending on the amount of surface area of aluminium that's exposed the thickness of aluminium will give its duration and of course the surface area of the corresponding electrode at the same time is producing the electrical energy it's also producing the hydrogen and it produces a considerable amount of heat of course sodium hydroxide isn't the only thing that will do that acids will do it as Ed found Mercury will do it though not many people want to muck around with Mercury these days and gallium will also do it and putting electric charge to blow the oxide off the surface will all do it and they all do the same thing they rid of the oxide coating so the aluminum is nice and bare and the water can reach it and react with it and of course that's of huge interest because when the water reacts with the aluminium to form aluminium oxide it also releases hydrogen and hydrogen is what everybody's after aluminium can form the basis of a hydrogen on demand system now if I were able to do that and I just burnt the hydrogen in a normal internal combustion engine took a 350 m round trip it would cost me more or less $60 in the price of the aluminum at current Metals prices if I had to do that using a normal fuel then here in the UK that would cost me in the region of $56 to take exactly the same trip now of course there would be differences because aluminium isn't as energy dense as fuel so the aluminum I would weigh more about the same as another passenger so nowhere near what an electric car battery would cost but it would take up about the same space as the fuel tank in order to do that journey of course as I said we fed this straight into an internal combustion engine and internal combustion engines at the best around about 30 35% efficient on current road cars if we changed and Ed the fuel cell well fuel cells are sort of between 40 and 60% efficient with expectations of them getting up to 80% efficient and we also said we just burnt the hydrogen we threw away the electricity that generates which is not inconsiderable and the heat that it generates all of this is why the drive to hydrogen is so attractive to people what's holding it back are the problems this generating hydrogen currently which is done through cracking hydrocarbons and then the storage and transportation of hydrogen and using the hydrogen on board because it has to be pressurized and cooled and of course hydrogen has a terrible habit of exploding as things like the Hindenburg disaster show us and that's why hydrogen on demand systems that is where you generate the hydrogen in the car are so attractive because they solve so many problems that is the generation Transportation storage and refueling of a hydrogen car and it brings the hydrogen vehicle very much nearer to a cheap and cost effective realization now there are a few ways of doing this that is creating a hydrogen ond demand system but there are two really interesting wayes that I'm aware of the first one's very well known and the second one for some reason is almost completely forgotten now the first one uses that gallium aluminium interaction that we looked at earlier in this video and I think the first paper on this came out in something like 1976 but it was picked up by pero University and brought out in 2007 as a very serious proposal and they actually f a company called Al Galco to push this technology forward as far as I know the company actually didn't do that much with it and it's still kind of lurking in the background and finally it was picked up by Santa Cruz University in California in 2022 when they proposed the same system but using nanop particles of the same alloy now the beauty of it is the gallium isn't actually used up you can reclaim the gallium and reuse it and reuse it and reuse it it's only the aluminium and the water that are used up the second way relies on a patent by a chap called franois corish this was actually tested by BMW in 1981 and found to work exactly as the inventor said it would from a 14 Vol Supply now for some reason after that the whole thing lapsed the patent was unpaid and of course it's now out of date and the inventor well he disappeared off the face of the earth now conspiracy theorists will love this one and for sure my thoughts about it are a little more prosaic that it is tremendously difficult to get a patent into production people think you have a patent it's a doorway to Millions it's not 95% of patent never see the light of day and the 5% that do getting from prototypes to Market is such an uphill struggle the bulk of patents never appear for really simple prosaic reasons not a conspiracy however there was one attempt at replication as far as I know of and that was in South Africa where the device was built exactly in accordance with the patent specifications and again was supposed to be shown to work and it's a very simple device it's a coil of aluminium wire that's fed into a water tank at a steady rate the high voltage is then passed down it which causes the end to spark off exposing the aluminium and the aluminium then reacts with the water delivering hydrogen and aluminium oxide as the worst product at the bottom of course aluminium oxide is what the refiners use to make aluminum so you can ship that right back to the refinery now it's a truly inventive system that I think deserves a great do more looking at of course all of this has got everybody very much more excited and it's become an intense area of research over the past couple of years with different Alloys being suggested including indium and tin and even bisou to create Alloys with exactly the same effect and just this month a new paper came out where the aluminium is being activated by the addition of nitrogen that is showing an improvement over previous systems now to a degree of course it's arguable whether this is an aluminum energy source or a water energy source because the water also gets used up to produce the hydrogen whichever it is though it does bring the whole idea of a hydrogen car very much closer and it's very exciting but I don't think we should lose sight of the patent that we looked at here that could Well Be A Way Forward for people investigating their own systems anyway I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and please do remember to like And subscribe

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 82,413

Keywords: gallium, aluminium, cornish, hydrogen, robert, fwg, tnt

Id: Ef79fV-jEW0

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024