New Generation of Hydrogen Fuel Cells Powers Up

An anonymous reader writes "A safer and more practical way of storing and releasing hydrogen, discovered by two Arizona State University researchers, could lead to a new type of fuel cell capable of packing 10 times more energy. The key is apparently using the alkaline compound borohydride — 'a 30% solution of borohydride in water actually contains one-third more hydrogen than the same volume of liquid hydrogen.'"

In other news

[192939495969798999]

curiously all research lost in a massive fire when a gasoline tanker truck collided with the research building, Big Oil was unavailable for comment.

Carbon

[BadAnalogyGuy]

No one ever seems to mention this, but you can get some remarkably high energy capacity and relative stability (it's not going to blow up without a trigger) by using hydrogen-carbon compounds.

Maybe I'm just a kook, but some serious work ought to go towards that sort of research, I think.

Re:Huh? Help out an under educated ignorant, pleas

[OverlordQ]

Water, on the other hand, is solid and fairly dense at room temperature.
Can anyone spot-check this for sanity?

I dont know about you, but room temperature around here is a bit more then 0C, so 'round here our water is in it's liquid form at room temperature.

Energy density

[gr8_phk]

Who cares about how much hydrogen you can get into a given volume. It should be all about energy per volume. It will be great when someone notices the energy density of hydrogen atoms attached to carbon chains - i.e. hydrocarbons. Oh wait...

Re:For the non-fuel cell people.

[bill_kress]

You just described every enegery storage mechanism ever created INCLUDING oil (Oil does not create energy, it simply stores solar energy collected from the sun a while back.).

The act of storing, transporting or using energy in any way involves waste (heat).

Oil & coal happen to be pretty decent storage mechanisms--relatively little waste while in storage, but somewhat difficult to recharge and creating it is quite wasteful.

So, if you are just talking about "Consuming" the energy, hydrogen is much more efficient and clean than oil. If you take into account the production of the energy as well, that's a different story. We'll have to set up some bogs and find some dinasours and wait a while before we can compare.

Re:yawn.....

[Yvan256]

if I can't take bottled water through security, they sure as hell aren't going to allow this.

That's the problem, actually. Your bottled water contains hydrogen combined with oxygen! That's a really dangerous combination and could explode under the right conditions.

Sounds good, but

[Toreo asesino]

...should the day Dell announce another battery recall [theinquirer.net] on their new hydrogen-powered [wikipedia.org] laptops ever arrive, I'll be the first to run for the hills.

Re:For the non-fuel cell people.

[kfg]

We'll have to set up some bogs and find some dinasours and wait a while before we can compare.

Might I suggest looking in our various legislative bodies?

KFG