Johnny Slokum aluminum-water hydrogen generation

It turns out there's a student defending his thesis over in mechanical engineering on Friday, who has been taking aluminum — because everyone knew aluminum was way up here in energy density — and the aluminum can generate hydrogen. He takes little aluminum spheres, ball bearings, and treats them with a gallium alloy at about two or three tenths of a percent. He treats them a certain way and drops them in water, and within ten or twenty seconds they all convert to hydrogen and oxygen, just by very rapid corrosion.

Johnny Slocum (mechanical engineering grad student, son of MIT ME faculty). Tin- and gallium-treated 5mm aluminum spheres consume themselves in water in 15 seconds producing hydrogen at ~87% efficiency. Used as the "you can go the other way" answer in the energy-content discussion.

Oh, we go the other direction — it's called corrosion. And it's actually cost us a lot. But we're not trying to go the other way. Well, you can. If aluminum's canned electricity, you can get almost 250 megajoules per kilogram. There's a student who took this class a couple years ago, Johnny Slocum. His dad's a faculty member in mechanical engineering. Johnny's a graduate student in mechanical, but when he was an undergraduate he found a way to take treated little aluminum spheres and drop them in water. You treat them with tin and gallium — people have been doing this for years, but Johnny found a way to do it reproducibly and quickly. He brings it into my office and he drops it in, and within 15 seconds the entire 5-millimeter sphere of aluminum has consumed itself and generated all kinds of hydrogen.