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New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

sciencedaily.com

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

#51

Post by pjc50 »

pfdietz wrote: post #45
whizzter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one case, rural areas often have abundant energy sources (hydro, wind,etc) but few consumers, in Northern Sweden f.ex. a lot is produced but there's a lot of losses in transporting the energy south. Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap ev…

If solar continues to plummet in cost we may see distributed industry in rural areas, to take advantage of energy that is essentially stranded by transmission cost. Storage becomes even more important in this scenario.

Well, unless all the planned datacentres get built, using more electricity than some small countries.

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

#52

Post by bell-cot »

londons_explore wrote: post #11
pjc50 wrote: post #5

So apart from the clickbait, the reason why this is interesting is because it's a limiter for the often cited idea of clean green hydrogen from electrolyis. The current use of titanium and precious metals is, obviously, really expensive, so it's uneconomical to build something that only runs on "spare" electricity.

I don't think the efficiency or longevity of electrolysis equipment is the limiting factor... The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen. At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and rese…

> The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to ...

Another, or perhaps related, limiting factor is just how difficult hydrogen is to handle safely - compared to natural gas, batteries, or other alternatives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety. And it does not take many surprise explosions & fires to give a technology a bad rep. Especially when people feel there are obviously-safer alternatives.

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

#53

Post by boppo1 »

voxadam wrote: post #13

You just know that engineers and management in Toyota's delusional hydrogen division are salivating.

Can anyone give me a semi-technical reason on why the hydrogen division are delusional? I'm actually convinced of it "osmotically", but I just don't know enough about it. I've got chem 101 behind me but otherwise I'm a finance & tech guy. It would be nice to actually understand why it can't be done though.

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

#54

Post by asa400 »

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!

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

#55

Post by voakbasda »

pfdietz wrote: post #45
whizzter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one case, rural areas often have abundant energy sources (hydro, wind,etc) but few consumers, in Northern Sweden f.ex. a lot is produced but there's a lot of losses in transporting the energy south. Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap ev…

If solar continues to plummet in cost we may see distributed industry in rural areas, to take advantage of energy that is essentially stranded by transmission cost. Storage becomes even more important in this scenario.

In the US, this will never happen due to NIMBY zoning laws.

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

#56

Post by janderson215 »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29
smusamashah wrote: post #3

> That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it. > "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current know…

> which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science The three stooges effect I see. Too many corrosive elements, they stop each other from getting through the door.

This is great. Any other dynamics in which The Stooges Effect is present?

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

#57

Post by nyeah »

pfdietz wrote: post #50

A problem I'd have with seawater electrolysis is production of undesirable chlorine compounds: hypochlorite or elemental chlorine. Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.

Unfortunately, some products of methane-chlorine reaction are much less desirable than methane.

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

#59

Post by m4rtink »

pfdietz wrote: post #50

A problem I'd have with seawater electrolysis is production of undesirable chlorine compounds: hypochlorite or elemental chlorine. Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.

Don't they also react also with about anything else ? I would be a bit worried what else "gets eaten" if something as reactive as chlorine is released into the atmosphere on a wider scale.

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

#60

Post by PowerElectronix »

janderson215 wrote: post #56
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science The three stooges effect I see. Too many corrosive elements, they stop each other from getting through the door.

This is great. Any other dynamics in which The Stooges Effect is present?

High entropy alloys come to mind. There are so many possible metallic combinations when you mix 5 o 6 metals in equal proportions that they all end up being in a single, homogeneous combinantion with about one atom of each per crystal molecule.
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