Live data from Hacker News

New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

sciencedaily.com

141–150 of 153 posts

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#141
post #126
post #54

Very interesting. Highly corrosion resistant "unconventional" steels have become somewhat popular in cutlery, with steels like LC200N, H1/H2, and MagnaCut. LC200N and H1/H2 in particular can be left in body of water uncoated/unpainted and come back in a year and they'll be fine. Obviously that's a different setting than electrified seawater for hydrogen production, though. So much cool materials science happening!

I'm not at all convinced that the highly corrosion resistant knife/tool steels you mention are actually especially high on the corrosion resistance scale -- I think they may just be excellent for a tool steel . If you look at the knifesteelnerds article on H1 ( https://knifesteelnerds.com/2019/06/24/h1-steel-how-it-works... ), you'll find that it's an austentitic alloy (which is highly unusual for any sort of tool st…

Yes. For example, nitrogen alloyed steels like Vanax or LC200N (both of which are more corrosion resistant than the other alloys mentioned by GP) aren't particularly corrosion resistant in the total space of stainless steels, they are just very corrosion resistant as compared to how hard (and/or tough) they are.

[edit]

I should also point out that the two alloys I mentioned are not particularly hard or tough for a knife steel.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 10mm bolts failing simultaneously after two decades (on direct it seems) is unexpected! If it were an installation problem, I can’t imagine it would take that long and that they’d all go at the same time. Ditto for corrosion… people take victory whips all the time.

All three bolts at critical level. A massive strain happens along. They pop: one, two, three! It's not that unexpected.

It is absolutely unexpected in climbing. Even a single bolt failing is highly unusual.

Additionally, the rope length extends quite a bit of an anchor fails (and it partially recovers it’s elasticity before the other anchors engage). Later anchors would not get forces exceeding a normal ‘healthy’ bolts limits.

So there is some systemic failure involved in this scenario.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure. How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure. HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subs…

> How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure. BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days. > How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure. HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you. > Also, if you have extreme…

> can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.

A battery can definitely store power for three months. What do you mean? Say it loses 10-15% charge in 3 months, that still sounds more efficient than electrolysis (and storing hydrogen will have a nonzero amount of loss too, compounding its lower efficiency.)

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#144
Is there any progress being made on cars so they are less susceptible to rust? In my country that's the main reason why vehicles are scrapped, engines can be repaired easily enough, but when various suspension parts are corroded and need replacing it's not worth fixing anymore.

As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, but most new cars today are written off - rather than being repaired - after even minor accidents, so that doesn't really seem like it's a realistic concern.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#145

Is there any progress being made on cars so they are less susceptible to rust? In my country that's the main reason why vehicles are scrapped, engines can be repaired easily enough, but when various suspension parts are corroded and need replacing it's not worth fixing anymore. As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, b…

[deleted]

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#146

Is there any progress being made on cars so they are less susceptible to rust? In my country that's the main reason why vehicles are scrapped, engines can be repaired easily enough, but when various suspension parts are corroded and need replacing it's not worth fixing anymore. As I understand one of the reasons against using materials like stainless steel or other alloys for cars is that is is harder to work with, b…

This is basically a solved problem. Saturn used plastic body panels on cars for a while. These cars had some painted metal parts that were protected by the plastic, and would never rust, because painted metal only rusts after the paint is compromised. Saturn went bankrupt and no one has been doing this. I suspect that it is really bad for a car company's bottom line because it lets people keep their car instead of buying a new one.

Also, you can coat your car underbody in an oil based coating 1-2x a year, and it won't rust. Its just an annoying chore that most people don't want to even think about.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#147
post #111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't rely completely on received wisdom. The training process works in a higher dimensional space so some data points that might seem unrelated to humans end up being clustered close together if there is a hidden or unrecognized relationship.

True, but the clusters do come from somewhere—namely the training set and the input. The more technical the literature, the sparser the prior work; the more answers depend on labwork, the less the bottleneck is purely symbolic reasoning or data-retrieval-at-scale. To hear it from the researchers, this feels like the sort of finding that, even in retrospect, is non-obvious from existing literature. I remember hearing…

Yes, that's only if AI would ask you to validate all prior assumptions to avoid being led by a false premise. I don't see AI or humans bothering to do that.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#148
post #111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't rely completely on received wisdom. The training process works in a higher dimensional space so some data points that might seem unrelated to humans end up being clustered close together if there is a hidden or unrecognized relationship.

True, but the clusters do come from somewhere—namely the training set and the input. The more technical the literature, the sparser the prior work; the more answers depend on labwork, the less the bottleneck is purely symbolic reasoning or data-retrieval-at-scale. To hear it from the researchers, this feels like the sort of finding that, even in retrospect, is non-obvious from existing literature. I remember hearing…

> But I have a hard time thinking about how the AI techniques could produce novel, surprising outcomes like this one

The comparison is not equivalent as a human isolated from the environment and unable to perform experiments would fair the same.

It is through conducting experiments that we make discoveries.

Once AI can hypothesize and run experiments from start to finish I see no reason why novel discoveries won't be made this way.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure. BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days. > How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure. HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you. > Also, if you have extreme…

> can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months. A battery can definitely store power for three months. What do you mean? Say it loses 10-15% charge in 3 months, that still sounds more efficient than electrolysis (and storing hydrogen will have a nonzero amount of loss too, compounding its lower efficiency.)

Not just charge a small battery and discharge it 3 months later, but to store 3 months worth of production.

And using batteries, the cost of that is currently bonkers.

The lowest cost large-scale BESS projects that have been completed are in China, with the record-holder currently being ~$51k/MHh.

As a comparison, OL3, the most expensive nuclear plant in the world, and which is generally held up as an example of nuclear plants being too expensive to be worth it, cost a total of €11B. It produces net 1600MW electric. That is, if you have the lowest construction, labor and battery costs in the world for the battery project, if you want to store more than ~6.5 days of production, it makes more sense to instead build the world's most expensive nuclear power plant and idle it when you don't need the power.

> sounds more efficient than electrolysis

NOBODY CARES ABOUT EFFICIENCY. Nobody should care about efficiency. If you care about efficiency, you do not understand the problem. If you can get capital costs low enough, your competition for that power is curtailment. The cost of input electricity can be assumed to be zero.

BESS is useful and important for stabilizing the grid, and for leveling production/consumption over a day. Hydrogen solves a different problem, namely, how to run your entire grid on renewables without using coal or nuclear as baseload, and without natural gas as peakers, when your production varies greatly over time.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#150
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In its defense, hydrogen cars would use fuel cells, not the IC engine of CNG cars. So there's at least a theoretical case that could be made for them. In practice it didn't work well at all. The case for BEVs becomes even more clear when you look at complexity. BEVs are just simpler, even simpler than today's IC engine cars. IC engines have become baroque and expensive. The tooling needed to make these engines has be…

> In its defense, hydrogen cars would use fuel cells, not the IC engine of CNG cars. Looking at a CNG car and thinking the reason they didn't get adopted is ICE and not gaseous fuel is pretty silly. Fuel cells are cool, but they don't solve the problem of tank expiration, and hydrogen storage is harder than CNG storage. ICE may be complex, but most of the complexity comes from emissions controls / efficiency mandates…

Indeed, the theoretical argument for hydrogen vehicles did end up being silly. But it's important to understand what it was, if only to help one avoid mistakes like that in the future.
Post reply on HN