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| A Bath University researcher |
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Tucked away among the scientific papers that from time to time arrive in my mail box, I’ve come across one explaining a discovery that has the right to be called a ‘breakthrough’.
Researchers at Bath University have discovered a method of storing and releasing hydrogen at room temperature, thus addressing one of the major stumbling blocks to the rapid introduction of hydrogen-powered cars – namely how to store the stuff in a convenient manner and make its use in cars a viable proposition.
I have driven fuel-cell cars and know from first-hand experience how tricky hydrogen can be. You either have to store it in liquid form in pressurised tanks at minus 250 degrees centigrade, or impregnate the gas in metal-hybride lattices at plus 300 degrees centigrade. The latter is preferable but it takes time for the lattices to reach their working temperature.
The boffins are at present working only at the atomic level, but believe that, within two to three years, they may be able to fabricate a storage device that will store and release sufficient ‘on-demand’ hydrogen at room temperature to enable the engine to be run before the main metal-hybride source is firing on all cylinders, so to speak.
Inch by inch, we move closer realising Jules Verne’s prediction that “…water will one day be used as fuel, that the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is constituted will be used, simultaneously or in isolation, to furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, more powerful than coal can ever be”.
