Greg's here yay!!! he came this morning, I picked him up and we went to gma's. I did some sweet sweet work today- something finally worked out! When it gets uploaded (it's FTP-ing as I type) you can find it here: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~mlligget/AlGal/ but for now it'll just say "loading" over and over again until all the files are up there.
We went to a bbq my faculty advisor had for our group + families, which was glorious. I was the designated driver. And I told Greg all about this dream I had with a walrus with FOUR EYES!! it was scary. walruses (walri?) are hella scary looking don't believe otherwise.
5 comments:
First:
Bravo
Second: Questions
What I want to know is, how does the finally energy balance work out in the end? You start with water, get hydrogen, use the hydrogen to make water. So the starting state and ending state are the same and hence have the same energy. So where, exactly does the energy come from? Is it in coming in with the Al? If Gallium is a catalyst, it must not contribute?
The energy does come in the Aluminum. When the Hydrogen is produced, I think 4.4 kW of energy are produced per mole, and about half of that is in heat (very exothermic, not that I've burned myself a little bit or anything... oh wait yes I have).
I don't talk very much about the Hall Process, but that's where most of the energy has to go back into the process (and also produce Carbon Dioxide... but I think some people are working on refining Al2O3 using solar farms in which case no/little CO2!)
Does that make sense? The starting and ending states are not the same for the Aluminum
After being awake for more than 10 minutes I thought of a better way to think about it.
water is the hydrogen carrier
aluminum is the energy carrier
yes? go specifically back to the 3rd page I think, about why Oxygen prefers Aluminum (internal energy of formation).
that's totally what I was going to say.
Hey,
Good job on the question. I kind of already new the answer, but felt like I should ask.
The reason I chose to ask that was because when you started there I went out and read some stuff on this and I found that this little connection was poorly made in most of what I read. To a scientist it is sort of obvious, but in some of the press release stuff I read, I found that the information allowed a reader to believe that this was some fountain of energy. It really is a storage method.
By the time you go through the Hall process, lose half of the energy to heat in the H2 producing reaction how efficient can you be? The plant running the Hall process is probably still using some form of fossil fuel or hydro. Right?
Trey
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