
Alane: Using Aluminum Hydride as Fuel - peter_d_sherman
http://ardica.com/fuel/
======
jimrandomh
So, what's the energy per liter and per kilogram? If these are genuinely good,
they need to be front and center. Their absence from the front page makes me
immediately skeptical.

~~~
pdonis
Seems to be about twice the energy density of lithium ion batteries. Nice for
battery-type applications, but nothing spectacular--an order of magnitude or
so less than gasoline.

~~~
samcheng
Maybe not that great for battery-type applications. After all, you still need
to turn that hydrogen into useful work, and it's much harder to recharge than
a battery.

~~~
xori
And to boot it requires heating up the alane to +80C so you're going to need
some sort of priming battery in addition to the tank.

~~~
Tloewald
It doesn’t lose energy density in cold weather. Batteries have all kinds fo
thermal issues too.

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08-15
Sounds like a scam.

Alane is not a friendly chemical, it's pyrophoric and incompatible with water.
It can be produced by hydrogenation of aluminum at 10GPa and 600C, rather
hellish conditions, or by electrolysis of sodium-aluminum-hydride using a
mercury cathode, two more easily handled chemicals.

They do not quote any details, no numbers, and we are supposed to believe they
made this process safe and cheap?

~~~
Tloewald
Energy storage technologies are all about nasty chemistry. Nasty chemistry is
where the energy is. Commercializing the chemistry isn’t easy or everyone
would do it.

~~~
amelius
What is nasty about the way the human body stores its energy?

~~~
Tloewald
A healthy human diet is 8700 kJ/ day. A gallon of gasoline has 120,000 kJ.

So, we are very energy efficient. But no so awesome in terms of energy storage
density.

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HarryHirsch
The US government tried something similar in the 1950s:
[https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0841218579](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0841218579)

They built a plant in Malta, NY to prepare pentaborane and higher boranes for
use in missiles, or something. The project got nowhere far because the
combustion residues are solid. At least alane is only pyrophoric but not
neurotoxic.

~~~
al2o3cr
There's a ton of coverage of the borane work in John D. Clark's "Ignition!":

[https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...](https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)

~~~
busterarm
Finally back in print after 40 years!

[https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-
Univers...](https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-University-
Classics/dp/0813595835/)

~~~
olliej
Oooh I need to buy a hard copy! Do we know how much (if any) goes back to him
or his family?

~~~
busterarm
I'm uncertain about any relatives, but it is published by Rutgers University
Press, which is a non-profit publisher.

Get the softcover one though, the hardcover version is a complete ripoff.

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baybal2
Alane has a rude habit of going boom.

Soviets had it made in few dozen tons per year for use in ICBMs motors

Ammonium dinitramide + energetic binder + alane

Such fuel lasted for around 7 to 8 years in cold storage, and had to be
discarded afterwards as alane decomposition embrittles the grain.

And closer to second half of eighties, Soviet chemical industry effectively
kicked the bucket

~~~
ggm
Putting _greek fire_ or _wootz_ to one side, the truly great thing about
scienting is we don't forget how to scient something. So, if Soviet chemists
worked something out, and wrote it up, then.. we can carry it on.

So _Soviet chemical industry effectively kicked the bucket_ just means a lot
of immigrant soviet chemists are now in other economies, pursuing their ideas.

Keep scienting. It works.

~~~
roryisok
For scient!

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maerF0x0
The skeptic in me says "Yeah and the by products of burning hydrocarbons are
just water and co2" .

Aluminum dust sounds like it would be a disaster if in the air we breathe.

None of this is an educated position, just thoughts of a software engineer.

~~~
Tloewald
Um, CO2 is the problem. Also, no actual fuel you can buy just produces water
and CO2.

~~~
bronson
That's exactly the OP's point.

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kwhitefoot
No numbers. So they are trying to fool someone.

~~~
aidenn0
[https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1398788](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1398788)

It looks like it's only going to be useful for replacing primary cells in
weight-sensitive applications, as even their own (presumably optimistic)
research indicates a per-gram-of-hydrogen cost of more than $1, which would be
a maximum 33Wh for a primary cell.

That translates to $30/kWh which I think is considerably cheaper than the
(also explosive) LiSO2 batteries it would be replacing.

Of course their costs today are 40x higher or $1200/kWh.

They are claiming current energy densities of 1.1kWh/kg of actual built packs
which seems high to me (it would imply it's 3% hydrogen by weight). If
accurate that blows-away the lithium primary cells they would be replacing.

They predict up to 1.8kWh/kg for larger packs.

------
mchannon
Hydrogen's Achilles heel is its crappy volumetric energy density. Even if you
get the hydrogen to the point where you literally can't compress it anymore
and it liquefies, it takes up 4x the space of the equivalent energy amount of
gasoline. This doesn't include added weights from tanks, bigger engines, etc.

So the people behind this are not wrong that if we're going to have a hydrogen
economy we have to confront this volumetric density problem for motor fuels.
Even if somehow they lived up to their billing, a vehicle designed to run on
alane would suffer the same shortcomings as ethanol- still inferior to
gasoline in multiple ways.

Are we going to have a hydrogen economy? No. Even if this alane wasn't snake
oil and completely lived up to its promises, hydrogen would still be more
expensive to fill your car with, and it wouldn't work as well as, gasoline.

"But, but, but.. what about when we run out of oil?" This won't solve that
problem either. We can and will make gasoline from natural gas and/or coal if
that ever happens, which it won't.

~~~
shmerl
Better just use natural gas (like methane) straight in such case. It's cheaper
than making gasoline from it.

~~~
mchannon
While this is largely true (and in fact today natural gas is already cheaper
than making gasoline from other sources), sometimes you can't substitute
natural gas for gasoline, and some people will still want to buy gasoline
(with its commensurate energy density, ease of transport, and worse pollution)
and pay a premium to do so.

In fact, I suspect the amount of natural gas burned to produce a gallon of
gasoline is already substantial, with electrically-powered catalytic reforming
necessary for us to drive around with octane rating numbers over "50", and by
and large the cheapest source of that electricity being from burning natural
gas.

------
apo
_It is neither explosive nor toxic – the byproducts are a small amount of
water vapor and aluminum powder, which can be recycled._

Ardica appears to be ultimately searching for a rechargeable hydrogen storage
medium. Fill a cell with aluminum. Add hydrogen to generate alane in situ. (or
charge cell with alane to begin with) Discharge to re-form aluminum. Repeat.

There are many technical challenges on the way to this vision.

Alane as fuel would only be practical if it could be economically regenerated
from the waste aluminum in situ.

Otherwise the waste aluminum would need to be purged from the system somehow.
Waste liquids are easy to work with through pumps, but waste solids (and
potentially pyrophoric powders) are very difficult to move.

The company claims that alane does not spontaneously combust. In its alpha
form, this is true. But these materials are passivated through the addition of
an oxide coating. Doing so could also render the material inert as a fuel.

From Ardica's issued patents, these challenges haven't yet been addressed.

------
jacknews
From wikipedia:

"Aluminium hydride decomposes in air and water. Violent reactions occur with
both."

"It is a potential additive to rocket fuel and in explosive and pyrotechnic
compositions."

So perhaps not ideal as a battery, and in fact the website doesn't appear to
explain how it is used as a battery at all - is it by releasing H2 for a fuel
cell?

------
black6
Where is the marketing page for chemists? The reaction

    
    
      Feedstocks + Green Energy --> Reaction --> Large Quantities of Alane
    

is lacking in detail.

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M_Bakhtiari
Running an engine on alane seems like a spectacularly bad idea. USAF
experiments with borane didn't go anywhere, I don't expect this idea to fare
any better.

Here's a good video on the experiments for those who are unfamiliar:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeybNPLpZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeybNPLpZU)

------
acd
Phinergy a startup from Israel has a prototype car running on Aluminium. So it
should be possible to use Aluminum as energy storage.
[http://www.phinergy.com/](http://www.phinergy.com/)

Perhaps the same principle as why we recycle aluminum cans? It takes lots of
energy to melt the aluminum can.

~~~
jacobush
It takes less energy to melt the can than to smelt the bauxite ore and create
an electrolyte with lots of electricity. That's why we recycle aluminum cans.

------
fbn79
"It is neither explosive nor toxic – the byproducts are a small amount of
water vapor and aluminum powder, which can be recycled.".

Well. I think aluminium power is cancerogen if enter human body. I hope the
solution prevent alumium to be dumped on air.

~~~
PaulAJ
There is a mention of cartridges, so presumably the intention is that the Al
never gets out.

------
boringg
What's the Energy Return on Energy Input? My guess is more energy in than out,
making it a a global burden instead of a global asset. Not to mention all the
other comments in the thread....

~~~
RobertRoberts
Does any storage medium have an equal in->out balance? I think that is
impossible...

~~~
olliej
Correct, it is impossible (ye olde laws of thermodynamics).

Generally it’s a question of what the efficiency of the charge/draw process
is, and how you can get. The advantage of hydrocarbons isn’t that they’re
energy efficient to create, but rather that it’s mostly happened already over
millions of years, or it’s from power derived from the sun (plants, etc)

------
aidenn0
Anyone know if Daniel Braithwaite has any relation to Reginald?

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igarnier
Alane is like electricity in that it's not a primary form of energy, if I
understand well. Maybe it could be used to make intermittent energy production
controllable.

------
eleitl
It's solid pellets, and can't be recharged as easily as a battery or (flow)
fuel cell.

Aluminium (air) batteries are potentially very promising though.

------
sigmaprimus
Sure it might be a great fuel but how much energy is required to make the
aluminum "feed stock" a few years ago during the ENRON caused power shortage
in California, aluminum smelters were shutting down, paying all their
employees full wages and selling the electricity that would have been used
make their aluminum to California at a greater profit. Unless there is a new
way to produce the aluminum and liquid hydrogen for that matter, I don't see
how this will save energy.

~~~
sigmaprimus
[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/alcan-
bc-...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/alcan-bc-hydro-at-
odds-over-ruling/article22393259/)

Incase you don't believe it happened

------
rexreed
This is Theranos level quackery. Come back in one year and tell me I'm wrong.

~~~
olliej
Right? I can’t tell if it’s a deliberate scam or simply self delusion.

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mdimec4
How does its production impact enviorement?

