All Cars, All the Time

Microspheres to be a Vessel for Hydrogen?




Could tiny glass microspheres that contain small amounts of palladium be the “killer app” that allows cars to be fueled by hydrogen? Palladium has the ability to absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen at room temperatures. The glass spheres would be placed in a tank and hydrogen would be forced into the spheres under pressure. Heat or a vacuum would then be used to extract the hydrogen back out again. The hydrogen would theoretically be so tightly encapsulated inside the spheres that there would be little chance of an explosion. The small spheres could be pumped like liquid. Of course, this doesn’t answer the question of how hydrogen would be produced.

Science can become quite dizzying, no? Certainly it’s great to see new technologies like this being pursued, but I think that internal combustion engines still have a lot of promise left. Tricks such as the recapture of waste heat back into energy and improved battery technology are on the table (among many other developments).

Newscientist.com (via Slashdot) article here.