Israeli invention could pave way for hydrogen cars

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDispWho=Articles%5El2013&enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enVersion=0&enZone=Technology

Israeli invention could pave way for hydrogen cars

By David Shamah
March 06, 2008

...

"We can build a 60-liter tank that can travel up to 600 km. and weighs no more than 50 kg.," Stern said, unlike tanks currently used for liquid hydrogen that weigh hundreds of kilos.

"Our company's breakthrough is in accumulating hydrogen in a glass material that is very small, only a few microns," said Stern, who is also president of waste treatment company Environmental Energy Resources (EER). "You don't need to transport hydrogen to fuel stations and you don't need pipelines. The tanks will be like a battery that can be replaced and you can carry a reserve in the car."

When you run out of hydrogen in one tank, all you have to do is pull out the empty cell and put in the fresh one. You'll be good to go for another 600 kilometers.

The cells, in fact, will act just like batteries in electric or hybrid cars and fit right in with the standard internal combustion engine - which means that Detroit or Yokohama don't have to retool their factories or production lines to build cars with the capacity for hydrogen cells. The know how and means of production are in use right now, in fact, as nearly every car manufacturer is already producing hybrids or straight electric cars.

...

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/46720/story.htm
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1805104.html


http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/printWindow.asp?did=1000303044&fid=942

Israeli-Russian-German venture in hydrogen car breakthrough
C.En's 50-kg, 60-liter hydrogen fuel tank provides a range of 600 km.

Globes' correspondent 28 Jan 08 14:52

...

One of the biggest technological and economic challenges delaying the development of cars operated by hydrogen is the problem of safe and lightweight storage of hydrogen in the vehicle. C.En conducted more than 120 experiments over three years, which demonstrate that it is viable to store twice the amount of hydrogen than current solutions, providing a 600-km range with a 60-liter tank that weighs 50 kg, including the hydrogen.

C.En's hydrogen tank is undergoing another series of tests and experiments at the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), after which it will be presented to the US authorities and international carmakers. C.En has written five patents on the basis of the first set of tests.

C.En employs scientists from Israel, Germany, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. Moshe Stern leads the investors group, which includes Shlomo Nehama and Dr. Ya'acov Sheinin, as well as Korean, Japanese, and Russian investors. C.En has raised $10 million to date; the most recent financing round was held at a company value of $50 million.

Stern predicts that if the results the tests scheduled for the next six months at a European laboratory that specializes in hydrogen meet expectations, they will demonstrate that an alternative energy source exists for cars, thereby significantly reducing the world's reliance on Arab oil.

[Greyskye]

1. Nice

However, at 50 kg (110 lbs, empty), they will still need a standardized, automated method of swapping out the hydrogen tanks.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. That 50 kilos includes the hydrogen

I assume it takes a while to refill the tank, otherwise they wouldn't suggest the swap scheme.

[Greyskye]

3. My bad

Still, at 110 lbs, the point is still valid.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Yes. Still a valid point

Even if the empty tank weighs less, putting the full 50kg tank in place would be a "non-trivial exercise."

[tinrobot]

15. Why not have several smaller tanks?

Something a human could lift - perhaps the size of a propane tank or similar.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. INTERVIEW-Israeli-led venture develops auto hydrogen fuel tank

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKL3070572620080131

INTERVIEW-Israeli-led venture develops auto hydrogen fuel tank

Thu Jan 31, 2008 2:11pm GMT

By Tova Cohen

TEL AVIV, Jan 31 (Reuters) - ...

Ilan Riess, a physics professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, said if C.En's technology succeeds it would be breakthrough.

"It will help to achieve a practical solution for the hydrogen era," he said. "When you run out of fossil fuel you need another fuel source and you don't want everything to run on electricity. You also want a mobile source of chemical energy."

Storing hydrogen in the needed quantity has been one of the biggest obstacles to using it as a fuel source, as it has to be in a limited volume and weight, he said.

"It seems that they succeeded. Their tank is roughly the size and weight of a normal fuel tank," Riess said, noting that hydrogen fuel tanks currently in use are too heavy and therefore limited in how much they can store.

...

[wtmusic]

6. Nonsense.

A 60-liter tank would have to compress hydrogen to 800 atmospheres to pack a measly 4 kg of hydrogen. 1 kg H2 is roughly equal to a gallon of gas energy-wise, so Moshe's car would have to be getting 93 miles/gallon, not to mention holding 800 bars in a "thin but leak proof glass container".

You should vet this stuff before you throw it out there because this is really piss poor (it makes cold fusion look like good investment).

"Some notes about compressed hydrogen

The laws of thermodynamics dictate the amount of energy it takes to compress a gas. The physical properties of hydrogen make it the most difficult of all gasses to compress. At 800 bars, a perfect, single stage compressor consumes energy equal to 16% of the chemical energy in the hydrogen. (This is the energy that gets instantly released in the event of a tank failure.) It is possible to use a multistage compressors with intercoolers to achieve 12%. This is an estimate extrapolated from an actual multistage compressor working at 200 bars. A multistage compressor working at 800 bars does not exist. <7>

It is technologically challenging to compress hydrogen to 800 bars. Higher pressure would not result in much volume reduction. At these pressures, hydrogen acts less like a gas and more like a liquid.

The laws of thermodynamics also dictate that energy losses occur when hydrogen is transferred from a storage tank to a vehicle. The design of the transfer lines and the pressure fittings is critical in keeping energy losses low."

http://www.planetforlife.com/h2/h2swiss.html

The more you know, the more you'll see you're wasting your time.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. It reads as though they are absorbing the H2 in a porous material.

This could greatly decrease the equilibrium pressure, if it works well.

A similar idea is used in storage of acetylene. Liquid acetylene is explosive and shock-sensitive. For that reason, acetylene tanks do not contain liquid acetylene -- rather, they contain porous fibers (originally asbestos) soaked in acetone or DMF. Acetylene happens to be very soluble in acetone, so when acetylene is pumped into the tank, you get acetylene in solution, not liquid acetylene. The overpressure is less than it would be for liquid acetylene (don't have numbers).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylene#Safety_and_handling

I've sort of been wondering if a simlar trick could be done with H2, but remain skeptical. The real problem with H2 absorption schemes is that the absorbent medium is always so much heavier than the H2 itself, just because H2 is the smallest, lightest molecule in Nature. So try whatever clever tricks you may, you're still stuck with not much improvement.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. Here's a different project, but a similar approach (i.e. porous storage of hydrogen)

http://www.enerchem.de/projekte/porous-carbon-materials-for-hydrogen-storage/?c=en

Porous carbon materials for hydrogen storage

2006-10-31

Fuel cells are often seen as the future alternative to combustion engines since they generally avoid the emission of greenhouse gases. However, a crucial point for a rational usage of hydrogen fuel cells is the generation of efficient hydrogen storage materials. These materials should store a high amount of hydrogen, while their own weight and volume should be considerably low. Furthermore, storage and release cycles of hydrogen should occur with significant rate.

For gas-storage (e.g. hydrogen or methane) pressure techniques can be employed, but significant advantages – such as storage under moderate pressure – are achieved with porous systems. Porous systems gain interfacial energy from gas storage, which is expressed in the so called capillary pressure. This pressure can reach values up to 1000 bar, depending on the material and the pore size. For a number of reasons (e.g. accessibility, chemical variety, chemical and mechanical stability) porous carbon is a highly promising target material.

The target being an enhancement of the volume and the rate of hydrogen storage, the EnerChem initiative investigates new, tailored carbon materials with high surface areas and tuneable surface functionalities as well as other porous materials with high surface areas.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. This was one of the very first applications suggested for 'nanotubes'.

I don't have a link, since I didn't think much of the idea myself. (Several heavy carbon atoms to store one hydrogen? Pffftt.)

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. No, it's not several for one (unless you're counting by atomic weight)

http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=4154.php

Posted: January 21, 2008

New carbon nanotube hydrogen storage results surpass Freedom Car requirements

...

Safe, efficient and compact hydrogen storage is a major challenge in order to realize hydrogen powered transport. According to the DOE Freedom CAR program roadmap the on-board hydrogen storage system should provide 6 weight % (wt%) of hydrogen capacity to be considered for the technological implementation.

Currently, the storage of hydrogen in the absorbed form is considered as the most appropriate way to solve this problem. Thus, a media capable of absorbing and releasing large quantities of hydrogen easily and reliably is being actively sought. Since claims by Dillon et al. that single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) can store hydrogen, this material has been considered as a candidate for hydrogen storage media ("Storage of hydrogen in single-walled carbon nanotubes").

Physisorption and chemisorption both have been proposed as possible mechanisms for hydrogen storage in carbon nanotubes. While most of the previous studies have focused on the hydrogen storage through physisorption, recent Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations for single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) indicate the potential for up to 7.5 wt% hydrogen storage capacity for this material through chemisorption by saturating the C-C double bonds in the nanotube walls and forming C-H bonds (see "Generalized Chemical Reactivity of Curved Surfaces: Carbon Nanotubes" and "Theoretical evaluation of hydrogen storage capacity in pure carbon nanostructures"). However, direct experimental evidence of the high values of the hydrogen capacity through chemisorption has not been demonstrated yet.

...

The present results indicate that for certain types of SWCNT the hydrogen chemisorption can provide more than 7 wt% of hydrogen storage capacity and the optimal C-H bond energetics can be tuned by the choice of the nanotube curvature range to minimize the energy losses of the hydrogen desorption/adsorption process.

...

http://www.als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/129nanotube.html

Hydrogen Storage in Carbon Nanotubes Through Formation of C–H Bonds

...

[eppur_se_muova]

13. "has not been demonstrated yet." Most important sentence in that article.

The 7.5% is *calculated* directly from the ratio of atomic weights, ASSUMING they can get a 1:1 H:C ratio. There are good reasons for believing that won't happen.

I had only heard about 'physisorption' earlier, which promised a low H/C ratio. These guys are suggesting actually chemically reacting every carbon in the nanotube, converting all those sp2-hybridized, trigonal carbons into sp3-hybridized, tetrahedral carbons. That's trying to fight geometry. My money says geometry will win. If they realize 3% storage experimentally, I will be reasonably impressed. If the last 1% is absorbed enormously more slowly than the first 1%, I will not be even slightly surprised.

[pscot]

7. I thought maybe they were planning

to cover Gaza with asphalt. Bah-dah-boom!

[kristopher]

8. Additional information from the patent app.

TANK AND MATERIAL FOR STORAGE OF HYDROGEN GAS
Document Type and Number:
European Patent EP1805104
Kind Code:
A1
Link to this page:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1805104A1.html
Abstract:
Abstract not available for EP1805104
Abstract of corresponding document: WO2006046248
A hydrogen accumulation and storage material and a method of forming thereof are provided. The material comprises a plurality of various-sized and at least partially permeable to hydrogen microspheres bound together to form a rigid structure in which a diameter of the microspheres is reduced from a center of the structure towards edges of the structure. An outer surface of the rigid structure can be enveloped by a sealing layer, thereby closing interspherical spaces.


What I want to know is overall system efficiency. So far, nothing in the H realm has been very impressive.

[speedbird]

14. the electric car is coming, when it arrives, all this H2 rubbish ...

just floats away.

[tinrobot]

16. The electric car is coming to Israel, at least.

Renault & Nissan have agreed to make electric cars specifically for the Israeli market. Israel is also planning to give tax incentives as well as start buying up the older petrol cars to get them off the road.

Here's the article:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jan2008/gb20080125_533039.htm

[avi339]

17. Website of C.En

Hi

Does anyone has or know the website for Clean Energy ( C.En ) ?


Regards

Avinash