Breakthrough Material Purifies Water While Generating Electricity

[link to www.innovationnewsdaily.com]


At last, little chunks of aluminum everywhere can be something greater then a soda can or a baseball bat. Thanks to a special reactive alloy, some of those lucky little nuggets could solve the world’s energy crisis.

Jerry Woodall, an engineer at Purdue University, has created an aluminum alloy that reacts with water to create hydrogen and heat. He is encouraging venture capitalists to design a system that uses both — capturing the hydrogen as fuel and using the heat to pull clean water out of the air. The greatest benefit of using aluminum is its abundance.

"There is enough aluminum on the Earth’s crust to supply the whole world’s energy needs," Woodall told InnovationNewsDaily.

To make use of this aluminum, Woodall melts it and combines it with gallium, indium and tin. In room temperature, these last three ingredients coarse through the metal as a liquid dissolving the grains of aluminum around it. In this state, water can react freely with all the material. As pellets of the alloy drop into water, they spontaneously split the water into heat and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be used to power devices, or it could feed into a fuel cell to produce electricity.