Sodium Fuel Cell: Water Into Fuel? Actually its very simple

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Silver_Meteor
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30 May 2009, 10:06 pm

This is a rough prototype of a sodium fuel cell I made to turn water into fuel. Far from being complicated. It involved nothing more than 25 cents worth of sheet copper, a piece of sodium metal and nothing but ordinary tap water. No high technology, no sophisticated chemistry knowledge, no chemicals need to be added to the water.

Simply put, a piece of sodium is tightly enclosed in a copper shell with a few little pin pricks that let the sodium react slowly with the water producing hydrogen gas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIxbXIRi1iY


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30 May 2009, 10:17 pm

The next step is to collect the hydrogen gas and burn it.

A major issue in this having any practical use would be the cost of sodium.


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pakled
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30 May 2009, 10:29 pm

or if the surface area increases as the sodium reacts with the water. Not sure how that works, but eventually I think you'd have pressure on the holes from the inside.



ruveyn
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31 May 2009, 2:33 pm

Orwell wrote:
The next step is to collect the hydrogen gas and burn it.

A major issue in this having any practical use would be the cost of sodium.


Making pure metalic sodium is expensive. Most of the sodium on the planet is locked up in salts and other compounds.

ruveyn



TheKingsRaven
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31 May 2009, 4:06 pm

And if you plan to power something by sodium & water rather than hydrogen gas tanks the rate of reaction matters. Is it fast enough?



pbcoll
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31 May 2009, 4:29 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Orwell wrote:
The next step is to collect the hydrogen gas and burn it.

A major issue in this having any practical use would be the cost of sodium.


Making pure metalic sodium is expensive. Most of the sodium on the planet is locked up in salts and other compounds.

ruveyn


Make that all, sodium is too reactive to be found in elemental form in nature. It's not just expensive to produce, it's also energy-intensive. Another problem is storage, as air humidity and atmospheric oxygen oxidise it easily - you can store it in oil or under an inert atmosphere, but this adds expense and inconvenience.


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MattShizzle
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31 May 2009, 7:25 pm

Free energy just isn't going to happen. Just like the people trying to convince us they can convert water to hydrogen - it takes more energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen than the hydrogen will produce.



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31 May 2009, 10:59 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Orwell wrote:
The next step is to collect the hydrogen gas and burn it.

A major issue in this having any practical use would be the cost of sodium.


Making pure metalic sodium is expensive. Most of the sodium on the planet is locked up in salts and other compounds.


And the most of this metallic sodium is produced by melting ordinary salt (sodium chloride) and an electrolytic process: Both melting and the electrolytic process needs enormous amounts of energy. I would not call this "energy efficient".



Dussel
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31 May 2009, 11:11 pm

MattShizzle wrote:
Free energy just isn't going to happen.


It is much more intelligent to use in a first step energy more effective. It starts with transportation (a decent public transport system based on railways is here very helpful), goes further via insulation of houses (here in Britain some of the best insulted houses were build during the Tudor reign), the way to heath housing (electricity is here really a waste), and some clever concepts, which are not really new.

Such concepts exist since decades, build up on well tested and well known technology concepts of e.g. a heating pump running on a stationary diesel motor which does reuse the extra heat of the motor and does produce some extra electrical energy - nothing really new, build since decades, but so long energy is still relative cheap and people prefer to live in suburbs with their long distances (where you even can't buy some milk without using a car), such concepts will not come into reality.