Aluminium fuel cell - Interview With Trevor Jackson

[Bongo]

Aluminium Fuel Cell

It works by consuming aluminium and turning it into energy. The aluminium can then be recycled. It was first developed in the 60's and ticks all the boxes for green energy but yet governments are not backing this technology. surprise surprise.

There is a demonstration at about 9 min powering a small fan.



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Brian Gerrish interviews Trevor Jackson who has developed an Aluminium fuel cell which he intends to use in electric cars, but which has many other applications. A fascinating story of a great idea blocked by vested interests.

[ExomatrixTV]

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[Tesseract]

ticks all the boxes for green energy

I haven't watched the video yet due to the length. I would like to comment that an Al fuel cell in itself does not qualify as green energy. Al metal is produced by a high temperature, high pressure electrolytic process that consumes outrageous amounts of electricity - generally fossil fuel provided. The real green breakthrough would be the discovery of a better way to reduce Al3+ to Al - although even at theoretical efficiency it is an energy demanding process.

Mg, or any reactive metal, can also be incorporated into fuel cell design. I bought and read this book about Mg - here the author solves the Mg supply problem by using solar lasers to directly convert MgO to Mg metal, and this is actually the key technology descried in the book. Mg has the advantage of being easily extracted from sea water. Of course, there are still issues about the economics of doing the solar smelting on a large scale - but I hadn't heard of the process before.

21060

[Bongo]

ticks all the boxes for green energy

I haven't watched the video yet due to the length. I would like to comment that an Al fuel cell in itself does not qualify as green energy. Al metal is produced by a high temperature, high pressure electrolytic process that consumes outrageous amounts of electricity - generally fossil fuel provided. The real green breakthrough would be the discovery of a better way to reduce Al3+ to Al - although even at theoretical efficiency it is an energy demanding process.

Mg, or any reactive metal, can also be incorporated into fuel cell design. I bought and read this book about Mg - here the author solves the Mg supply problem by using solar lasers to directly convert MgO to Mg metal, and this is actually the key technology descried in the book. Mg has the advantage of being easily extracted from sea water. Of course, there are still issues about the economics of doing the solar smelting on a large scale - but I hadn't heard of the process before.

21060

Hi Tesseract

I am in no way an expert about this subject as I only just found out about the technology, but the way is is described in the video is that aluminium is consumed (turned in to aluminium hydroxide) then that is used to power whatever you want to power. It is not toxic, barely generates any heat and doesn't give of any pollutants... I think this is the reason he said it ticks all the green boxes. This sounds like a great idea, but obviously if you can't make enough power to create more aluminium it doesn't sound self sustainable. The energy consumption for creating aluminium is at 6.5 Kwh per lb so oil would need to be used but this used together with oil would reduce the amount of oil being used every day, if oil was being used to make aluminium (or any other metal for that matter, whatever one works best) then we were using it to power our cars and other machinery the benefits start to mount up. The cost of running machinery goes down 10 fold, no gas pollution and you can recycle it so there is no materials you need to dispose of.

Again it sounds like a great idea and a good start to using less oil.

[buckminster fuller]

ticks all the boxes for green energy

I haven't watched the video yet due to the length. I would like to comment that an Al fuel cell in itself does not qualify as green energy. Al metal is produced by a high temperature, high pressure electrolytic process that consumes outrageous amounts of electricity - generally fossil fuel provided. The real green breakthrough would be the discovery of a better way to reduce Al3+ to Al - although even at theoretical efficiency it is an energy demanding process.

Mg, or any reactive metal, can also be incorporated into fuel cell design. I bought and read this book about Mg - here the author solves the Mg supply problem by using solar lasers to directly convert MgO to Mg metal, and this is actually the key technology descried in the book. Mg has the advantage of being easily extracted from sea water. Of course, there are still issues about the economics of doing the solar smelting on a large scale - but I hadn't heard of the process before.

21060

It seems that at the nano level, chemical reactions and bonds happen in an exotic manner. This came out recently, which shows through experimentation that after all, matter IS energy and can exist in either form.
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-nanosilicon-rapidly-electricity.html

This one goes along the same lines with different materials :
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130320094856.htm