MIT Researchers Produce Hydrogen from Scrap Aluminum and Water

Hydrogen could be a great source of energy that could help reduce pollution in the environment. But the production — or extraction — of helium itself often results in solution. But a team at MIT has found a new place to get hydrogen in an environmentally safe way: scrap aluminum. Here’s more from MIT News:

Using the aluminum-water reaction to generate hydrogen doesn’t produce any greenhouse gas emissions, and it promises to solve the transportation problem for any location with available water. Simply move the aluminum and then react it with water on-site. “Fundamentally, the aluminum becomes a mechanism for storing hydrogen — and a very effective one,” says Douglas P. Hart, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Using aluminum as our source, we can ‘store’ hydrogen at a density that’s 10 times greater than if we just store it as a compressed gas.”

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“If we’re going to use scrap aluminum for hydrogen generation in a practical application, we need to be able to better predict what hydrogen generation characteristics we’re going to observe from the aluminum-water reaction,” says Laureen Meroueh PhD ’20, who earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering.

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