Lung-Like Device Transforms Water Into a Clean Source of Fuel

Time and Place Get water in your lungs, and you’re in for a very bad time. But when water enters a new type of “lung” created by researchers at Stanford University, the result is hydrogen fuel — a clean source of energy that could one day power everything from our cars to our smartphones. Though this isn’t the first device to produce hydrogen fuel, the unique design could be the first step along the path to an efficient method of generating hydrogen fuel. Looking to Nature The Stanford team describes its device in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Joule . When air enters a human lung, it passes through a thin membrane. This membrane extracts the oxygen from the air and send it into the bloodstream. The unique structure of the organ makes this gas exchange highly efficient. Combine hydrogen with oxygen, and you get electricity — and unlike the burning of fossil fuels, the only byproduct is water. For that reason, researchers have been looking into hydrogen fuel for decades, but they simply haven’t found a way to produce it that is efficient enough to be worthwhile. This is mainly because hydrogen doesn’t often exist […]

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