Feb 29th, 2008
Creation Science
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) — Environmentally friendly hydrogen gas fueled vehicles can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lessen the country’s dependence on sources of fossil fuel. Though several hydrogen vehicles exist on the market today, there is still much room for improvement in the way that hydrogen is stored on-board the vehicle. With current technologies, hydrogen gas storage tanks have to be as large as or larger than the trunk of a car to carry enough gas to travel only one to two hundred miles.
While liquid hydrogen is denser and takes up less space, it is very expensive and difficult to produce. It also reduces the environmental benefits of hydrogen vehicles. Widespread commercial acceptance of these vehicles will require finding the right material that can store hydrogen gas at high volumetric and gravimetric densities in reasonably sized light-weight fuel tanks.
Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, with the use of molecular dynamics simulations, have solved a decade old mystery that could one day lead to commercially practical designs of storage materials for use in hydrogen gas fueled vehicles.
In 1997, it was discovered that adding a small amount of titanium to a well-known metal hydride, sodium alanate, not only lowers the temperature of hydrogen release from the material but also allows for an easy refueling and storage of high density hydrogen at reasonable pressures and temperatures. In fact, the weight percent of stored hydrogen was instantly doubled in comparison with other inexpensive materials.
"Nobody really understood what the titanium did. The chemical processes and the mechanisms were really a mystery," said Vidvuds Ozolins, associate professor of material science and engineering, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute, and lead author of the study.*
With computers and the power of basic physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics, Ozolins’ group decided to take a step back and analyze the sodium alanate in its pure form, without added titanium. The group analyzed the atomic processes occurring in the material and what happens to the chemical bond between the hydrogen and the material at the temperatures of hydrogen release. The computation gave the researchers information that would have been very difficult to obtain experimentally.
The computation suggested a reaction mechanism that is essential for the extraction of hydrogen from the material which involves diffusion of aluminum ions within the bulk of the hydride. By comparing the calculated activation energies to the experimentally determined values, Ozolins’ group found that aluminum diffusion is the key rate limiting process in materials catalyzed with titanium. Thus, titanium facilitates processes in the material that are essential for turning on this mechanism and extracting hydrogen at lower temperatures.
"This method and this knowledge can now be used to analyze other materials that would make for better storage systems than sodium alanate. We are still on the fundamental end of the study. But if we can figure this out computationally, the people with the technology in engineering can figure out the rest," said Hakan Gunaydin, a UCLA graduate student in Ozolins’ lab and another one of the study’s authors.
"Sodium alanate in itself is a prototypical complex hydride with a reasonable storage density and very good kinetics. Hydrogen goes in and comes out quickly but it wouldn’t be practical for a car simply because it doesn’t contain enough hydrogen. So that’s why we are so interested in understanding how the hydrogen comes out, what happens exactly and how we can take this to other materials," said Ozolins.
What Ozolins’ group, along with UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor Kendall Houk, also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute, hopes to do now is to apply the methods and lessons learned to those materials that would make for a commercially practical hydrogen gas storage system. They hope their findings will one day facilitate the design and creation of an affordable and environmentally friendly hydrogen vehicle.
*The study appears on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences web site on February 27.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Tags: creation, science
14 Responses to “Creation Science”
…and all this time I thought the culprit was the rays that emanate from heaven…
When it comes to science and mathematics Texas is in there like a thong.
Why, oh why, do so many people believe Evolution? I guess, the same believe there were WMD in Iraq. As Einstein said “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Albert Einstein. Has anyone heard of “Spontaneous Generation” and the Theories associated with that? Do you know that Evolution has ‘never’ been proven as a fact? And if you think it has, then your programming went well. Now, Adaption has been proven, but it’s a far cry from Evolution. Those railing against the Redneck Texans, your sound just as pig headed with the Redneck Evolution war cry. But go and find ‘facts’ of Evolution, they are not there.
hmm…that looks like the same textbook that is used to teach students of naturopathic/holistic medicine. I hear it is a good book……to use as kindling
Am I the only one who has always thought that shooting fish in a barrel sounds really hard? I mean, sure, a Tuna maybe, but most fish are pretty small and swim pretty quickly, and most barrels are relatively large. Add in water resistance and the optical distortion and it sounds pretty difficult to me.
Thank you for taking the time and care to explain it. I am amazed at my own lapse of judgment in supposing that such doctrine hadn’t been thought through. I realize that of course every word of every verse of every chapter of every book has been subject to the most exhaustive possible scrutiny, and in no small part with open hearts and minds.Please accept that in the following, I mean no disrespect, but rather to express my current state of understanding, which may be some distance removed from yours.When you explain Church doctrine, one of the first steps I need to take in assimilating what is being said is to get a handle on what is meant by doctrine. I myself do not understand the various levels of doctrine, but am given to understand that the current Pope has taken many issues out of the realm of the discussable and created what might be called an authoritarian interpretation as to whether it is tolerable for anyone to question it.I hold lightly my assumption that for a person such as yourself, official doctrine is to be understood and not to be questioned. What I mean by “lightly” is that it will not surprise me greatly to be informed that I am wrong about that, but that is currently what I suppose. And I suppose also that the doctrine was agreed upon by wise men who were elected based on their competence in such matters. In other words, the doctrines issue from well intentioned people. And certainly we know that what was doctrine in one century became anathema in the next. It was on doctrine, or some such concept (for I do not understand the distinction between those teachings that change every 50 years from those that take 500 years to change) that people were murdered by the Church while everyone at every level who was not a victim was complicit. I guess my heart is taking the lead here. I hear ‘doctrine’ and I see such unfathomable cruelty that I cannot help but conclude that the entire enterprise is so vulnerable to corruption and being so powerful as to rule over people’s lives and dictate to them how they may live, that I right now at my best can only beg that in the name of all that is good and merciful that doctrine be thrown upon the ground and crushed when has arisen from those lofty heights of people in beautiful attire deciding who should live and who should die for questioning the doctrine. If you say that was a long time ago I say it was one beat of the human heart. One tear ago. One scream of pain. One blow.
i’m not sure if you’re being facetious or not, but this was actualy tested on mythbustersthey determined even if the bullet doesn’t hit the fish, the shockwave alone is enough to kill any fish in the barrel
My mom actually believes that tsunamis and global warming are caused by sinners. Le sigh.
Thank you for the clarification, and especially for your dignified and respectful tone, despite my lack of same. It appears to be our most difficult challenge, to maintain not only civility but also empathy and mutual respect across differences in how to know the truth, and in our understandings of where we came from and what the ultimate nature of our experience is here, and what we are called upon to be and to do.I assume you are referring to the one about the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception, when you say .. the comic .. being such an incredible example of ignorance itselfI presume that you mean that the author/artist misunderstood the doctrine he or she was ridiculing.I’m afraid that I still do not understand the doctrine you describe. If it is fitting for Mary to be without sin, why was it not fitting for her mother and father to be without sin?
dude im crying into my keyboard as we type
Everything changes. Everything evolves. It is the nature of the universe. Small minded people felt threatened by the notion of the the earth going around the sun. Warlike people used religion to fight the crusades. None of this was inspired by the God of love.We have all been hurt by people. We could all do with counseling. It’s easy for us to confuse the sin with the sinner is all I was trying to say.If that bowler over there always treats me like crap then bowling must be a crappy sort of sport. That sort of thing.Thanks for taking the time to set me straight on where you were coming from and not lashing back at me. I’m sorry for being so arrogant. I felt attacked by your first comment. probably because I really do hate to see people of faith misrepresented and used as I feel our current administration has been doing with their “supply side Jesus”.
I know. The “no-no zone?!”
It’s frustrating to see the ignorance and hypocrisy present in a thread here like this. Creationism is a scientific theory that has merit, just the same as Evolutionism. There are tons of people that make a living out of studying sciences that have been disputed. Some search for extraterrestrial life, some study Freudian psychology, others explore theoretical physics. Does this mean that these people aren’t scientists, that they’re the “laughing stock” of the scientific community? Hardly. Evolution fails to account for how life came about to exist here on Earth in the first place, yet many people study and believe the theory anyway. Neither evolutionism nor creationism has been proven or disproven yet, so if somebody wants to dedicate their studies to researching one of the theories, then I say let them.Remember, people laughed when somebody said the Earth was round, or that the Earth revolved around the Sun, or that we could land on the Moon.