14 DAY TRIAL // Hydrogen-powered cars seem to be the best solution to the problem of fossil fuels pollution. The ever increasing concerns about global warming and the future shortage of natural fuel sources have given the automotive industry and researchers from other field alike a new impulse in developing new technologies.
David S. Sholl, a professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University is conducting a new research to identify a new class of materials to be used in making hydrogen engines more efficient than ever.
The best thing about using hydrogen as a fuel is the fact that the cars would run on fuel cells that combine hydrogen and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, so the only waste of this product is water.
Many people are beginning to realize that global warming is not going to go away by itself, as engines that burn gasoline emit pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, that cause global warming.
Moreover, fossil fuels that took millions of years to form are rapidly depleting and can't regenerate overnight. For example, U.S. vehicles consume 383 million gallons of gasoline a day, or about 140 billion gallons annually, around two-thirds of the total national oil consumption, half of which is imported from areas like the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
"We are currently studying the use of metal hydrides, such as alanates and borohydrides, to find materials that could ultimately improve the efficiency of hydrogen cars and curb pollution," said Sholl.
They're trying to create new materials that are able to store large amounts of hydrogen in a compressed gas tank and then release it to power the fuel cells of the future cars.
"Hydrogen can potentially be produced from domestic resources without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is an attractive vision for a future fuel source," said Sholl, but unfortunately today's transport and storage applications are still problematic.
Benefiting from funding supplied by the Department of Energy, Sholl's research used computational methods to screen a large number of possible storage materials, leapfrogging what could have been a decade of work to test the same materials in the lab.