Water Powered Car

Reuters are running a story on a car which is powered by water alone.

Lots of interesting information at wikipedia regarding this and previous claims.

The company says it “cannot [reveal] the core part of this invention,” yet, but it has disclosed that the system uses an onboard energy generator (a “membrane electrode assembly”) to extract the hydrogen using a “mechanism which is similar to the method in which hydrogen is produced by a reaction of metal hydride and water”. The hydrogen is then used to generate energy to run the car. This has led to speculation that the metal hydride is consumed in the process and is the ultimate source of the car’s energy, making the car hydride-, rather than water-fuelled.

On Genepax’s english website the company has only revealed that the process uses “a chemical reaction”. The by-line of the website is “Conversion of a glass of water into earth saving energy.”

The Tech-On website seems to have the best technical information about what the company is actually claiming.

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said.

Once the hydrogen is produced it is used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Storing the energy in the form of metal-hydride can be useful if a sufficient efficiency and energy density can be achieved to preform better than batteries or safely storing hydrogen.

View crystal structures

There is a very nice java package which lets you view crystal structures on any computer platform that supports java (Linux, Mac, etc).

Jmol can be downloaded from sourceforge here. Download the latest binary or full package, unpack it and you are good to go.

Either cd into the directory and run ./jmol or add the directory to your $PATH environment and run jmol.

I have a feeling I have referred to Jmol in a previous post but I think I’d only used it as an applet then.

The full version alloys export of the images to graphics formats, as well as lots of options that I don’t understand. You can view molecules in 3D if you have the proper pair of glasses, and you can load crystal structures in the xyz format from sites such as Crystal Lattice*Structures at the U.S. naval research laboratory (note this is very different to navel research). I’m particularly impressed by the ability to change the background colour to white, which is particularly useful if you ever want to print something.

Tin Pest Observation

The transformation of tin from it’s metallic state into a powdered state is increasing important due to the use of lead-free solders, which are almost pure tin.

The transformation involves two naturally occurring forms (allotropes) of tin, the semi-conducting powder form is labeled the alpha-tin and the metallic form is a beta-tin. The transformation usually occurs at low temperatures, it’s auto-catalytic, and has been observed in church organs in cold northern European countries and the buttons of Napoleon’s army when invading Russia. The auto-catalytic nature of the transformation lead to the name ‘tin pest’ because the reaction looks to eat into the metal.

The reaction can usually take several months but Davide Di Maio and Chris Hunt at the National Physics Laboratory, accelerated the transformation by seeding the tin with a cadmium-telluride powder. Cadmium-telluride has the same (diamond cubic) crystal structure as the powdered form and can therefore act to nucleate alpha-tin from the (tetragonal structured) metal.

The results of the acceleration were captured using time lapse photography in a microscope.

There results are published Time-lapse photography of the β-Sn/α-Sn allotropic transformation in the Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, doi: 10.1007/s10854-008-9739-5. Seems to currently be published ‘online first’.

Manually created links…
Newscientist report on the new results
Wikipedia page describing Tin Pest
Technical report on Tin Pest in solders
Tin Pest page in Hitch Hikers Guide too the Galaxy (H2G2)

Metallurgy and Materials Science Album

Here are a few ideas I had for the contents of “The Best Metallurgy and Materials Science Album in the World… EVER”.

What a Feeling – Irene Cara – from the Movie FlashDance “A world of STEEL and stone”
Material Girl – Madonna – “I am living in a materials world and I am a materials scientist?”
Race for the prize – Flaming lips – “Two scientists were racing For the good of all mankind … “
???? – We are scientists
Galvanise – Chemical Brothers
????? – Iron Maiden
Iron Man – Ozzie Osbourne
Temper Temper – Goldie
Atomic – Blondie
Fistful Of Steel – Rage Against The Machine
??? – Led Zepplin
Creep – Radiohead
My Iron Lung – Radiohead
Polyethylene – Radiohead
Life in A Glass House – Radiohead
Chemical World – Blur
Metal Mickey – Suede
Beam – Freddie Mercury
Carbon Monoxide — Mercury Rev
Polythene Pam – The Beatles
Maxwells Silver Hammer – The Beatles
Fools Gold – The Stone Roses
Going for Gold – Shed Seven
Goldfinger – Ash
Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) – Neil Young (Weld Album)
Lithium – Nirvana
Steeler – Judas Priest – British Steel Album
??? – Pantera – any track from the album ‘Reinventing the Steel’.
Ion Lion Zion – Bob Marley
Aluminum – Jack White
Aluminum – Bare Naked Ladies
Uranium – Kraftwerk
Metal on Metal – Kraftwerk (also from Minium-Maximum live album)
Titanium – Kraftwerk

Any more suggestions will be gratefully appreciated.

FFT for micrographs

After my supervisor jokingly meantioned that I could clean up some micrographs using fourier transform, I thought I might give it a quick go, knowing that this was possible using gimp plugins, and after having some past experience in installing other plugins for the gimp. This is something that is made easier after the stable release of debian now includes gimp 2 rather than gimp 1.3.

A search for ‘gimp plugin fft debian’ lead me to a useful blog postFFT on images, and The GIMP by kstars. Following kstars advice I downloaded from here, i’m not sure I successfully compiled the binaries in the source package, however it seems to already include the necessary binaries.

There is also detailed description of how to remove coherent noise using GIMP in the The GIMP wikibook.

The image before processing.

The fourier transform of the image, after manual blurring, position indicated by arrows.

The image after processing, periodic lines removed, cracking is more clearly shown.

Larger versions of the images can be seen at the followingLink. So as we can see, a Professor knows that is it OK if he leaves periodic scratches after polishing, because his students can remove them by image processing.