So, what's the energy per liter and per kilogram? If these are genuinely good, they need to be front and center. Their absence from the front page makes me immediately skeptical.
Seems to be about twice the energy density of lithium ion batteries. Nice for battery-type applications, but nothing spectacular--an order of magnitude or so less than gasoline.
Maybe not that great for battery-type applications. After all, you still need to turn that hydrogen into useful work, and it's much harder to recharge than a battery.
Alane is not a friendly chemical, it's pyrophoric and incompatible with water. It can be produced by hydrogenation of aluminum at 10GPa and 600C, rather hellish conditions, or by electrolysis of sodium-aluminum-hydride using a mercury cathode, two more easily handled chemicals.
They do not quote any details, no numbers, and we are supposed to believe they made this process safe and cheap?
Energy storage technologies are all about nasty chemistry. Nasty chemistry is where the energy is. Commercializing the chemistry isn’t easy or everyone would do it.
But they say they’re developing a patented next generation process to create it efficiently and cheaply so it must be true.
Based on my expert knowledge (As acquired from Wikipedia just now) I agree, it sounds at least as bad as lithium (in terms of exposure to almost anything) and I’m not sure it is more than just a high density hydrogen carrier. It isn’t a “rechargeable” carrier either - so it’s closer to a regular single use battery, with the combustible potential of lithium.
I’m assuming you’re a chemist, so you can tell me how far off the mark I am :)
They built a plant in Malta, NY to prepare pentaborane and higher boranes for use in missiles, or something. The project got nowhere far because the combustion residues are solid. At least alane is only pyrophoric but not neurotoxic.
Putting greek fire or wootz to one side, the truly great thing about scienting is we don't forget how to scient something. So, if Soviet chemists worked something out, and wrote it up, then.. we can carry it on.
So Soviet chemical industry effectively kicked the bucket just means a lot of immigrant soviet chemists are now in other economies, pursuing their ideas.
It looks like it's only going to be useful for replacing primary cells in weight-sensitive applications, as even their own (presumably optimistic) research indicates a per-gram-of-hydrogen cost of more than $1, which would be a maximum 33Wh for a primary cell.
That translates to $30/kWh which I think is considerably cheaper than the (also explosive) LiSO2 batteries it would be replacing.
Of course their costs today are 40x higher or $1200/kWh.
They are claiming current energy densities of 1.1kWh/kg of actual built packs which seems high to me (it would imply it's 3% hydrogen by weight). If accurate that blows-away the lithium primary cells they would be replacing.
Hydrogen's Achilles heel is its crappy volumetric energy density. Even if you get the hydrogen to the point where you literally can't compress it anymore and it liquefies, it takes up 4x the space of the equivalent energy amount of gasoline. This doesn't include added weights from tanks, bigger engines, etc.
So the people behind this are not wrong that if we're going to have a hydrogen economy we have to confront this volumetric density problem for motor fuels. Even if somehow they lived up to their billing, a vehicle designed to run on alane would suffer the same shortcomings as ethanol- still inferior to gasoline in multiple ways.
Are we going to have a hydrogen economy? No. Even if this alane wasn't snake oil and completely lived up to its promises, hydrogen would still be more expensive to fill your car with, and it wouldn't work as well as, gasoline.
"But, but, but.. what about when we run out of oil?" This won't solve that problem either. We can and will make gasoline from natural gas and/or coal if that ever happens, which it won't.
No clue if these guys are viable but the science is solid.
You do understand that the whole point of hydrides is addressing hydrogen’s storage issues (energy density and need to store under pressure). Using hydrides with fuel cells was what everyone expected electric cars to use before lithium ion batteries took off.
While this is largely true (and in fact today natural gas is already cheaper than making gasoline from other sources), sometimes you can't substitute natural gas for gasoline, and some people will still want to buy gasoline (with its commensurate energy density, ease of transport, and worse pollution) and pay a premium to do so.
In fact, I suspect the amount of natural gas burned to produce a gallon of gasoline is already substantial, with electrically-powered catalytic reforming necessary for us to drive around with octane rating numbers over "50", and by and large the cheapest source of that electricity being from burning natural gas.
It is neither explosive nor toxic – the byproducts are a small amount of water vapor and aluminum powder, which can be recycled.
Ardica appears to be ultimately searching for a rechargeable hydrogen storage medium. Fill a cell with aluminum. Add hydrogen to generate alane in situ. (or charge cell with alane to begin with) Discharge to re-form aluminum. Repeat.
There are many technical challenges on the way to this vision.
Alane as fuel would only be practical if it could be economically regenerated from the waste aluminum in situ.
Otherwise the waste aluminum would need to be purged from the system somehow. Waste liquids are easy to work with through pumps, but waste solids (and potentially pyrophoric powders) are very difficult to move.
The company claims that alane does not spontaneously combust. In its alpha form, this is true. But these materials are passivated through the addition of an oxide coating. Doing so could also render the material inert as a fuel.
From Ardica's issued patents, these challenges haven't yet been addressed.
"Aluminium hydride decomposes in air and water. Violent reactions occur with both."
"It is a potential additive to rocket fuel and in explosive and pyrotechnic compositions."
So perhaps not ideal as a battery, and in fact the website doesn't appear to explain how it is used as a battery at all - is it by releasing H2 for a fuel cell?
Running an engine on alane seems like a spectacularly bad idea. USAF experiments with borane didn't go anywhere, I don't expect this idea to fare any better.
Phinergy a startup from Israel has a prototype car running on
Aluminium. So it should be possible to use Aluminum as energy storage.
http://www.phinergy.com/
Perhaps the same principle as why we recycle aluminum cans? It takes lots of energy to melt the aluminum can.
It takes less energy to melt the can than to smelt the bauxite ore and create an electrolyte with lots of electricity. That's why we recycle aluminum cans.
What's the Energy Return on Energy Input? My guess is more energy in than out, making it a a global burden instead of a global asset. Not to mention all the other comments in the thread....
Correct, it is impossible (ye olde laws of thermodynamics).
Generally it’s a question of what the efficiency of the charge/draw process is, and how you can get. The advantage of hydrocarbons isn’t that they’re energy efficient to create, but rather that it’s mostly happened already over millions of years, or it’s from power derived from the sun (plants, etc)
Alane is like electricity in that it's not a primary form of energy, if I understand well. Maybe it could be used to make intermittent energy production controllable.
Sure it might be a great fuel but how much energy is required to make the aluminum "feed stock" a few years ago during the ENRON caused power shortage in California, aluminum smelters were shutting down, paying all their employees full wages and selling the electricity that would have been used make their aluminum to California at a greater profit. Unless there is a new way to produce the aluminum and liquid hydrogen for that matter, I don't see how this will save energy.
