ghotifish.net

Now I feel so betrayed.

It looks like some of those widely read and inspirational Gospel authors may have embellished certain details. Will Oprah kick Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John off the book list?

During Becky’s birthday celebration at the incredibly busy Bryant Lake Bowl I had an interesting conversation with one of her classmates who is working on a method for producing hydrogen using zinc nanoparticles. My understanding of the details is fuzzy, but it basically chops up water molecules in two steps:

1. React water with zinc to form zinc oxide and hydrogen gas
2. Do something (this is the fuzzy part) to the zinc oxide to form zinc and oxygen gas

You can then reuse the zinc, which is nice. But one tricky part, assuming that I understood it correctly, is that to get a good reaction rate in step 1 you want the zinc to have a high surface area/volume ratio — that’s where the nanoparticles come in. This means that to reuse the zinc you have to continually re-nanoparticulate it, or whatever the word would be. And right now there’s not a good way to do that. But anyway, that’s not really my point.

We also talked the storage and use of hydrogen gas in cars, and Rob (Ron?) pointed out that hydrogen is potentially safer than gasoline because hydrogen gas is lighter than air — so in the event of a crash hydrogen would disperse into the atmosphere when gasoline would sit around and burn. Ok, but when I use my stove I’m just dispersing methane into the atmosphere… it seems to burn rather nicely. But that’s not really my point, either.

This morning, while discussing oatmeal¹, I realized that because hydrogen gas is less dense (aka “lighter”) than air, filling up your car with hydrogen would increase its mass while decreasing its weight. (This is assuming that the hydrogen is stored as a gas rather than a liquid.) As hydrogen is consumed, the car’s mass would decrease while its weight increased. (Please let me know if I’m missing something here.) I guess that’s my point.

UPDATE: Hmm… the more I think about it, the more I think I’m missing something. Density is mass/volume, and hydrogen gas for use in a car would be stored at very high pressures — several thousand psi, apparently — which would decrease its volume and therefore increase its density. Since 1 atm = 14.7 psi, I’m guessing that an increase of pressure to thousands of psi would push the density up to something denser than air.

¹The oatmeal really has nothing to do with anything.