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What's not clear to me from the article is, if the cheap easy catalyst makes oxygen gas from water, what's left over before we get the platinum involved, perhap
by danteembermage 18y ago
What's not clear to me from the article is, if the cheap easy catalyst makes oxygen gas from water, what's left over before we get the platinum involved, perhaps a bunch of hydrogen ions in solution? Something like 6xH20 -> O2 + 2xH30 or 2xH20 -> O2 + 2H+
- michaelneale 18y agoAcidic water?
- ars 18y agoWhat? You can't make oxygen gas and hydrogen ions at the same time. If you make oxygen gas you also make hydrogen gas. Which is not a big deal, electrolysis is not new. Not sure what the platinum has to do with it though.
- orib 18y agoWho says you're making necessarily making oxygen gas? I don't know the details of current industrial processes, but you can easily free hydrogen by displacing it with something that binds more tightly (eg, Sodium: 2H2O + 2Na => H2 + 2NaOH) and produce free hydrogen gas with sodium hydroxide waste. I suspect that a similar sort of process is happening currently when water is hydrolyzed with a "catalyst" in current processes. Platinum is often used in catalysts. It works by providing an alternative reaction pathway that takes less energy to fuel the reaction. An analogy is that instead of rolling a rock up a hill to get it from point A to point B, the catalyst provides access to a tunnel through the hill.
- ars 18y agoIf you're reacting sodium to water to get hydrogen you're not exactly electrolyzing water now are you? The same is true with current processes, if your catalyst is being used up to bind oxygen then a: it's not a catalyst it's a reactant, and b: well don't, and c: you're not electrolyzing water, you're doing some more complicated reaction. So emitting O2 from electrolysis is not even the slightest bit new. That part of the article was basically nonsense.