Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogen
Australian scientists say they’ve made a “eureka moment” breakthrough in gas separation and storage that could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport in a powder.
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Tau.Neutrino said:
Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogenAustralian scientists say they’ve made a “eureka moment” breakthrough in gas separation and storage that could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport in a powder.
more…
“powdered hydrogen”, I have to read this one.
> the mechanical force is supplied by ball milling – a low-energy grinding process in which a cylinder containing steel balls is rotated such that the balls roll up the side, then drop back down again, crushing and rolling over the material inside.
I participated a little bit in CSIRO looking at that. Part of our “granular flow” work.
> The team has demonstrated that grinding certain amounts of certain powders with precise pressure levels of certain gases can trigger a mechanochemical reaction that absorbs the gas into the powder and stores it there, giving you what’s essentially a solid-state storage medium that can hold the gases safely at room temperature until they’re needed. The gases can be released as required, by heating the powder up to a certain point.
That’s new.
> boron nitride powder used in the first experiments only loses “about a couple of percent” of its absorption capability each storage and release cycle. “Boron nitride is very stable,” he tells us, “and graphene too.
I like it. Low storage density of course, but very easy to regenerate. It doesn’t need 100% regeneration.
> The results are absolutely remarkable from a numbers standpoint. This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that’s needed today.
Wow.
> “Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process,” says Chen. “Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that’s how they separate them out.”
Yes. That’s how it’s done.
I see potential here for even separating CO2 out from atmospheric gases.
And at a pinch for separating out uranium isotopes.
Separation of gases in the gas phase is usually something of a total pain. Anything which lowers the energy cost of separation is worthwhile.
Here’s another development along similar lines.