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Plasma Kinetics May Revolutionize Hydrogen Storage for EVs

41 points by mardiyah 5y ago

SigmundA 5y ago
Definitely skeptical, how does shining a laser on a material allow it to store vast quantities of hydrogen at high density? How much does the storage media weigh per kg of hydrogen stored? Why would the US government block this in 2008? Sounds very conspiracy theorist. Minimum even if it has the storage density, it says 150 cycles before it soaks with deuterium, which means it's losing hydrogen to the "Cassette" and the whole thing has to be recycled. Still doesn't solve the efficiency issues of creating hydrogen with electricity and using in a fuel cell vs just charging a battery, but could definitely have applications if it truly can store at that density.
ThomPete 5y ago
“may” yet another speculative newsmaking article.
kiba 5y ago
As another comment said, lab scale prototype is easy, manufacturing is hard. Assuming that the tech is good enough to compete with BEV, that is.
guerby 5y ago
Interview with Paul Smith from Plasmakinetics link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns "This BANNED Technology Could Push Hydrogen Cars Over BEVs" by E for Electric A few links: https://plasmakinetics.com/ https://plasmakinetics.com/ https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-activated-hydrides.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-... I'm skeptical too, could not find any data on this stuff.
xoa 5y ago
Even if this was true (and as comments are already saying skepticism is clearly warranted here) frankly I just don't see it mattering. Hydrogen in vehicles is a complete dead end. Maybe, maybe if the industry had seriously pursued it decades earlier it could have gained traction. But at this point any theoretical benefits look exactly like the theoretical benefits of so many other technologies and designs that got crushed by raw economics. As classic HN-related example would be x86 vs all the other various ISAs in the 80s and 90s. x86 wasn't the best, and as we've seen from ARM I don't think it can be said that's entirely meaningless, in theory the same investment in another ISA might have yielded better results. But it simply didn't matter, because there wasn't the same investment and would never have been given the platform effects involved. And "good enough" plus enough capital expenditure was plenty to power through everything else until a complete environment shift disrupted it. By the same token, the main issue with batteries is range. But BEVs are coming that will push 500 miles, and from basic theory and lab work batteries have plenty ceiling. The difference between the perfect theoretical lithium based design and present ones is something like an order of magnitude, so even if we never do more than a fraction of that we could still see BEVs pushing 1000 miles at the high end. So that factor just isn't going to be a deciding issue vs all the supporting infrastructure needed. And it is there that BEVs obliterate any other solution by riding on the same core energy infrastructure as nearly every single other piece of mass market advanced human technology which has long since gone electric. There are something on the order of 150000 fueling stations in the US. Converting all of those and all the infra supporting them to hydrogen would cost hundreds of billions if not trillion+. But with BEVs, almost all of that can be sunk into the grid instead. With that kind of investment not just local improvements but buried HVDC backbones or even super conducting continental, potentially even intercontinental backbones is on the table. And the thing is that all that investment, and all the opportunities opened up by everyone having enormous distributed energy packs that they can lean on in a variety of ways beyond just driving, benefits and can be amortized across pretty much the entire economy directly. That's an economic steam roller if ever we've seen one. So any advantages hydrogen might in principle have alongside the many, many nasty difficulties of dealing with it will end up the same was as advantages Alpha or POWER might have had. Electrification, which abstracts and in turn offers enormous flexibility for power generation, distribution, and usage, is just too economically compelling the instant it becomes minimally feasible. The ultimate network effect.
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  I'm a happy BEV owner but I'm usually in the camp that hydrogen fuel cells (HFC) probably make sense in some circumstances (ships, cargo, large plane, etc). But your argument of network effects for BEV is one I hadn't considered and really strengthens BEV's case and pushes HFC use cases, in my brain, into further usually-unpragmatic-territory.
- libertine 5y ago
  Just a heads up, I don't have an horse on this race, or better yet, if I had to place my bet I'd go for BEVs at least for the common car. With that said, I wonder if there will be room for two or more standards (like you have diesel, petrol GPL) - despite the technology being similar on the current standards (with internal combustion engine of some sort)? I'm asking this because for example the EU is pushing for Hydrogen with an emphasis of it's application for transportation (for cars, but probably more for airplanes and ships). It's not like they aren't investing in BEVs since they are also pushing for a network of charging stations.
  - GravitasFailure 5y ago
    That's a good question. Diesel was kept around because diesel engines are better suited to hauling heavy loads than gasoline engines are, but I'm not seeing an equivalent niche for hydrogen unless the bulk and weight of the storage systems can be dropped to a point where they're viable for aircraft.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      You also get Diesel "for free" when producing gasoline in refineries.
    - walshemj 5y ago
      It was /is massively less taxed in Europe and UK ie Farmers don pay duty in the UK on Diesel
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
taneq 5y ago
Leaving only the other issues with hydrogen (inefficiency of generation, awkwardness of transport compared with electricity, so-so generation efficiency, low power output.)
smiley1437 5y ago
More than 95% of hydrogen is produced by steam reforming fossil fuel. Articles hyping it for EVs are likely funded by the fossil fuel industry or traditional ICE vehicle manufacturers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
- _huayra_ 5y ago
  It's too bad because I think this tech could be a great way for hydrogen to be used in many of these applications. However, this definitely has the stench of "big oil company trying to pretend they're going green by hyping / buying companies that actually boost fossil fuel usage, even though they could be carbon neutral" :(
NoblePublius 5y ago
There is no naturally occurring source of Hydrogen. It can only be produced at industrial scale by cracking it from carbon fuel (usually CNG). If a viable pathway was created to produce it via electrolysis with sustainable energy, you’d be 10x better off (in terms of overall efficiency and carbon footprint) by putting that energy in a battery. STOP TRYING TO MAKE HFCS HAPPEN. They’re a carbon scam!
- DennisP 5y ago
  We're not going to have battery-powered long-haul jetliners for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile: > The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy. I agree that we need scalable electrolysis, but there are people working on that too.
  - summm 5y ago
    Doesn't matter if people are working on it: Efficieny of the H2 cycle is limited by physics, not engineering.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Efficiency of a production electrolysis plant today is about 80%, which really doesn't seem that bad. https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made-by-the-electrolysis-of-water-is-now-cost-competitive-and-gives-us-another-building-block-for-the-low-carbon-economy https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made...
      - NoblePublius 5y ago
        Ok cool now compress and store and transport it after you spend $10 trillion on the infrastructure to do that at planet scale. Or, send electricity into batteries over wires which already exist. Like, come on. You have to choose which energy innovator to back and you go with Tesla or the people pushing hydrogen (Shell, Exxon)?
causality0 5y ago
Hydrogen storage may have always been a problem, but it has never been the problem. Efficiency of conversion is. Until someone either comes up with a much better way to generate hydrogen or lithium becomes a thousand times more expensive, BEVs are superior to hydrogen vehicles and they're getting more superior every day. https://i.imgur.com/4YQfNgQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4YQfNgQ.jpg
- tener 5y ago
  Great graph. The proposed tech is aiming to replace non critical part which is already 90% efficient, but takes extra volume in the car.
  - upofadown 5y ago
    Compression/liquefaction doesn't really have an efficiency. It is just a dead loss of energy. So you really need to know the assumptions to know what the 90%/65% is of. I suspect it is the same for the other percentages thrown around on that diagram. ... and why doesn't the H2 vehicle do regenerative braking?
    - shaded-enmity 5y ago
      Probably because you'd need a battery to store the energy generated via braking thus eliminating much of the environmental benefit.
    - SigmundA 5y ago
      Any loss means efficiency below 100%. If it takes 1kwh of electricity to compress 10 kWh of hydrogen (assuming 100% conversion back into electricity in the fuel cell, which its not) then your efficiency is 90%. This is applied to all steps, electrolysis, compression, transport, and fuel cell conversion back to electricity. Current fuel cells cannot put out enough burst power to acceleration nor can they accept electricity in reverse to generate hydrogen so all current fuel cell vehicles use a traction battery that is charged by the fuel cell, they are basically series hybrids. They also typically have lower acceleration because the small traction battery + fuel cell cannot supply as much power as a much larger full EV battery.
gus_massa 5y ago
I couldn't find any technical description of the material they are using, and this sentence is very weird. > The material deteriorates due to the formation of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. When the light shines in the material, it does not release deuterium, and the material gets “soaked” with it as time goes by. Are they saying that the device transform normal Hydrogen into Deuterium? My guess is that they don't want to say it, the problem is that the small amount of Deuterium mixed with normal Hydrogen accumulates and cause problem. Anyway, it's a sloppy weird sentence. Also, it is possible that the system somehow acts differently on Deuterium and normal Hydrogen, but it would be very strange. They have very similar properties, and that makes the separation difficult. It would be nice to read more technical details, because it feels like the tech fluff added to make the project more impressive.
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  I'm guessing that whatever mechanism is trapping the hydrogen needs more energy to kick deuterium loose because of the mass difference. It'd be interesting to get a closer look at the technology.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    That's a possible explanation, but the difference of energy to break the bonds is probably small, so a small increase of the frequency of the light in the laser should fix it. I suspect they are using some usual high power laser that is available on shelf, so it's not easy to choose the frequency arbitrarily. It's very unlikely that the usual on shelf available laser has the right frequency to remove normal Hydrogen but not Deuterium.
    - GravitasFailure 5y ago
      Yeah, bond energy itself is going to be the same regardless of isotope (or at least a negligibly small difference), so my guess is whatever mechanism that is kicking the hydrogen free is relying something more like a kinetic recoil from the photon where the mass is far more relevant. Of course, without being able to take a proper look under the hood at how they're actually storing the hydrogen, this is all rank speculation.
whatshisface 5y ago
>At first, the discs helped the company to explain the technology: hydrogen would be released when the laser hit it as a compact disc would “release music” when the laser reader hit it. This is in the running for the least apt analogy I have ever heard.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
Why not just combust hydrogen to power an ICE? The Soviet Union had an experimental airliner that did this so it is definitely feasible technologically. Seems much simpler than using fuel cells, which will get expensive if they need to be mass produced because they require expensive catalysts.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  The first issue is that you have to make a trade-off between power and producing nitrogen oxides if you're using air. You can get around that with a cat, but then you're back to using expensive catalysts. The engines also can't be as reliable long term as conventional ICEs because hydrogen embrittles and corrodes all metals given enough time. The best you can do is delay things a bit with good alloys and engine design. Knocking/predetonation is also a much difficult problem to solve.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Decades ago, there was some effort to use ceramics for ICE. Fill the forms, sinter it, machine finish the details. It'd be neat to revisit some of those ideas.
  - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    Catalytic converters last longer than the catalysts used in fuel cells (fuel cell catalyst is a powder so it is harder to contain). Hydrogen does embrittle most metals, but it does not affect aluminum at moderate temperatures and pressures. Obviously a piston and cylinder head experience high temperatures and pressures but it would in theory be possible to develop ceramic pistons and heads that can mitigate the embrittlement problem, as a sibling comment mentioned.
- specialist 5y ago
  Ya. Two more possible "hydrogen" paths are ammonia and methane. One future perfect scenario, say year 2040, is to generate fuels with the anticipated excess electricity. Colocate some kind of carbon capture next to every wind and solar farm. Use some for fuel. Pump the rest back into the ground.

41 points by mardiyah 5y ago

Definitely skeptical, how does shining a laser on a material allow it to store vast quantities of hydrogen at high density? How much does the storage media weigh per kg of hydrogen stored? Why would the US government block this in 2008? Sounds very conspiracy theorist. Minimum even if it has the storage density, it says 150 cycles before it soaks with deuterium, which means it's losing hydrogen to the "Cassette" and the whole thing has to be recycled. Still doesn't solve the efficiency issues of creating hydrogen with electricity and using in a fuel cell vs just charging a battery, but could definitely have applications if it truly can store at that density.

ThomPete 5y ago

“may” yet another speculative newsmaking article.

kiba 5y ago

As another comment said, lab scale prototype is easy, manufacturing is hard. Assuming that the tech is good enough to compete with BEV, that is.

guerby 5y ago

Interview with Paul Smith from Plasmakinetics link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns "This BANNED Technology Could Push Hydrogen Cars Over BEVs" by E for Electric A few links: https://plasmakinetics.com/ https://plasmakinetics.com/ https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-activated-hydrides.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-... I'm skeptical too, could not find any data on this stuff.

xoa 5y ago

Even if this was true (and as comments are already saying skepticism is clearly warranted here) frankly I just don't see it mattering. Hydrogen in vehicles is a complete dead end. Maybe, maybe if the industry had seriously pursued it decades earlier it could have gained traction. But at this point any theoretical benefits look exactly like the theoretical benefits of so many other technologies and designs that got crushed by raw economics. As classic HN-related example would be x86 vs all the other various ISAs in the 80s and 90s. x86 wasn't the best, and as we've seen from ARM I don't think it can be said that's entirely meaningless, in theory the same investment in another ISA might have yielded better results. But it simply didn't matter, because there wasn't the same investment and would never have been given the platform effects involved. And "good enough" plus enough capital expenditure was plenty to power through everything else until a complete environment shift disrupted it. By the same token, the main issue with batteries is range. But BEVs are coming that will push 500 miles, and from basic theory and lab work batteries have plenty ceiling. The difference between the perfect theoretical lithium based design and present ones is something like an order of magnitude, so even if we never do more than a fraction of that we could still see BEVs pushing 1000 miles at the high end. So that factor just isn't going to be a deciding issue vs all the supporting infrastructure needed. And it is there that BEVs obliterate any other solution by riding on the same core energy infrastructure as nearly every single other piece of mass market advanced human technology which has long since gone electric. There are something on the order of 150000 fueling stations in the US. Converting all of those and all the infra supporting them to hydrogen would cost hundreds of billions if not trillion+. But with BEVs, almost all of that can be sunk into the grid instead. With that kind of investment not just local improvements but buried HVDC backbones or even super conducting continental, potentially even intercontinental backbones is on the table. And the thing is that all that investment, and all the opportunities opened up by everyone having enormous distributed energy packs that they can lean on in a variety of ways beyond just driving, benefits and can be amortized across pretty much the entire economy directly. That's an economic steam roller if ever we've seen one. So any advantages hydrogen might in principle have alongside the many, many nasty difficulties of dealing with it will end up the same was as advantages Alpha or POWER might have had. Electrification, which abstracts and in turn offers enormous flexibility for power generation, distribution, and usage, is just too economically compelling the instant it becomes minimally feasible. The ultimate network effect.

AYBABTME 5y ago
I'm a happy BEV owner but I'm usually in the camp that hydrogen fuel cells (HFC) probably make sense in some circumstances (ships, cargo, large plane, etc). But your argument of network effects for BEV is one I hadn't considered and really strengthens BEV's case and pushes HFC use cases, in my brain, into further usually-unpragmatic-territory.
libertine 5y ago
Just a heads up, I don't have an horse on this race, or better yet, if I had to place my bet I'd go for BEVs at least for the common car. With that said, I wonder if there will be room for two or more standards (like you have diesel, petrol GPL) - despite the technology being similar on the current standards (with internal combustion engine of some sort)? I'm asking this because for example the EU is pushing for Hydrogen with an emphasis of it's application for transportation (for cars, but probably more for airplanes and ships). It's not like they aren't investing in BEVs since they are also pushing for a network of charging stations.
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  That's a good question. Diesel was kept around because diesel engines are better suited to hauling heavy loads than gasoline engines are, but I'm not seeing an equivalent niche for hydrogen unless the bulk and weight of the storage systems can be dropped to a point where they're viable for aircraft.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    You also get Diesel "for free" when producing gasoline in refineries.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    It was /is massively less taxed in Europe and UK ie Farmers don pay duty in the UK on Diesel
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

taneq 5y ago

Leaving only the other issues with hydrogen (inefficiency of generation, awkwardness of transport compared with electricity, so-so generation efficiency, low power output.)

smiley1437 5y ago

More than 95% of hydrogen is produced by steam reforming fossil fuel. Articles hyping it for EVs are likely funded by the fossil fuel industry or traditional ICE vehicle manufacturers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

_huayra_ 5y ago
It's too bad because I think this tech could be a great way for hydrogen to be used in many of these applications. However, this definitely has the stench of "big oil company trying to pretend they're going green by hyping / buying companies that actually boost fossil fuel usage, even though they could be carbon neutral" :(

NoblePublius 5y ago

There is no naturally occurring source of Hydrogen. It can only be produced at industrial scale by cracking it from carbon fuel (usually CNG). If a viable pathway was created to produce it via electrolysis with sustainable energy, you’d be 10x better off (in terms of overall efficiency and carbon footprint) by putting that energy in a battery. STOP TRYING TO MAKE HFCS HAPPEN. They’re a carbon scam!

DennisP 5y ago
We're not going to have battery-powered long-haul jetliners for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile: > The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy. I agree that we need scalable electrolysis, but there are people working on that too.
- summm 5y ago
  Doesn't matter if people are working on it: Efficieny of the H2 cycle is limited by physics, not engineering.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Efficiency of a production electrolysis plant today is about 80%, which really doesn't seem that bad. https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made-by-the-electrolysis-of-water-is-now-cost-competitive-and-gives-us-another-building-block-for-the-low-carbon-economy https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made...
    - NoblePublius 5y ago
      Ok cool now compress and store and transport it after you spend $10 trillion on the infrastructure to do that at planet scale. Or, send electricity into batteries over wires which already exist. Like, come on. You have to choose which energy innovator to back and you go with Tesla or the people pushing hydrogen (Shell, Exxon)?

causality0 5y ago

Hydrogen storage may have always been a problem, but it has never been the problem. Efficiency of conversion is. Until someone either comes up with a much better way to generate hydrogen or lithium becomes a thousand times more expensive, BEVs are superior to hydrogen vehicles and they're getting more superior every day. https://i.imgur.com/4YQfNgQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4YQfNgQ.jpg

tener 5y ago
Great graph. The proposed tech is aiming to replace non critical part which is already 90% efficient, but takes extra volume in the car.
- upofadown 5y ago
  Compression/liquefaction doesn't really have an efficiency. It is just a dead loss of energy. So you really need to know the assumptions to know what the 90%/65% is of. I suspect it is the same for the other percentages thrown around on that diagram. ... and why doesn't the H2 vehicle do regenerative braking?
  - shaded-enmity 5y ago
    Probably because you'd need a battery to store the energy generated via braking thus eliminating much of the environmental benefit.
  - SigmundA 5y ago
    Any loss means efficiency below 100%. If it takes 1kwh of electricity to compress 10 kWh of hydrogen (assuming 100% conversion back into electricity in the fuel cell, which its not) then your efficiency is 90%. This is applied to all steps, electrolysis, compression, transport, and fuel cell conversion back to electricity. Current fuel cells cannot put out enough burst power to acceleration nor can they accept electricity in reverse to generate hydrogen so all current fuel cell vehicles use a traction battery that is charged by the fuel cell, they are basically series hybrids. They also typically have lower acceleration because the small traction battery + fuel cell cannot supply as much power as a much larger full EV battery.

gus_massa 5y ago

I couldn't find any technical description of the material they are using, and this sentence is very weird. > The material deteriorates due to the formation of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. When the light shines in the material, it does not release deuterium, and the material gets “soaked” with it as time goes by. Are they saying that the device transform normal Hydrogen into Deuterium? My guess is that they don't want to say it, the problem is that the small amount of Deuterium mixed with normal Hydrogen accumulates and cause problem. Anyway, it's a sloppy weird sentence. Also, it is possible that the system somehow acts differently on Deuterium and normal Hydrogen, but it would be very strange. They have very similar properties, and that makes the separation difficult. It would be nice to read more technical details, because it feels like the tech fluff added to make the project more impressive.

GravitasFailure 5y ago
I'm guessing that whatever mechanism is trapping the hydrogen needs more energy to kick deuterium loose because of the mass difference. It'd be interesting to get a closer look at the technology.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  That's a possible explanation, but the difference of energy to break the bonds is probably small, so a small increase of the frequency of the light in the laser should fix it. I suspect they are using some usual high power laser that is available on shelf, so it's not easy to choose the frequency arbitrarily. It's very unlikely that the usual on shelf available laser has the right frequency to remove normal Hydrogen but not Deuterium.
  - GravitasFailure 5y ago
    Yeah, bond energy itself is going to be the same regardless of isotope (or at least a negligibly small difference), so my guess is whatever mechanism that is kicking the hydrogen free is relying something more like a kinetic recoil from the photon where the mass is far more relevant. Of course, without being able to take a proper look under the hood at how they're actually storing the hydrogen, this is all rank speculation.

whatshisface 5y ago

>At first, the discs helped the company to explain the technology: hydrogen would be released when the laser hit it as a compact disc would “release music” when the laser reader hit it. This is in the running for the least apt analogy I have ever heard.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

Why not just combust hydrogen to power an ICE? The Soviet Union had an experimental airliner that did this so it is definitely feasible technologically. Seems much simpler than using fuel cells, which will get expensive if they need to be mass produced because they require expensive catalysts.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
The first issue is that you have to make a trade-off between power and producing nitrogen oxides if you're using air. You can get around that with a cat, but then you're back to using expensive catalysts. The engines also can't be as reliable long term as conventional ICEs because hydrogen embrittles and corrodes all metals given enough time. The best you can do is delay things a bit with good alloys and engine design. Knocking/predetonation is also a much difficult problem to solve.
- specialist 5y ago
  Decades ago, there was some effort to use ceramics for ICE. Fill the forms, sinter it, machine finish the details. It'd be neat to revisit some of those ideas.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  Catalytic converters last longer than the catalysts used in fuel cells (fuel cell catalyst is a powder so it is harder to contain). Hydrogen does embrittle most metals, but it does not affect aluminum at moderate temperatures and pressures. Obviously a piston and cylinder head experience high temperatures and pressures but it would in theory be possible to develop ceramic pistons and heads that can mitigate the embrittlement problem, as a sibling comment mentioned.
specialist 5y ago
Ya. Two more possible "hydrogen" paths are ammonia and methane. One future perfect scenario, say year 2040, is to generate fuels with the anticipated excess electricity. Colocate some kind of carbon capture next to every wind and solar farm. Use some for fuel. Pump the rest back into the ground.