Magnesium will hydride easily. Aluminium not so much. I have at times put aluminium foil inside fuel tubes as an oxygen getter but never seen anything odd as a result. Considering I am standing next to a reactor with 4 kilos of aluminium dust in it at times I hope there's nothing I have missed.

Admirable use of free materials, trouble is the bisphenol lacquer on the cans gives off toxic mutagens. Just the thing for that baby to breathe.

Nice article in the UK Guardian newspaper.

Hydrogen has been the next big thing for longer than its advocates would care to remember. Before Elon Musk, Tesla and electric battery technology, it was commonly assumed that we might all, one day, be driving hydrogen cars. The traditional drawback for investors has been the expensive complexity of actually producing the stuff. But in an era of net zero carbon emissions targets, the green utility of the most common chemical element in the universe is turning it into one of the most fashionable products on earth.

“Blue” hydrogen – the kind Equinor hopes to produce in Hull – can be made almost carbon-free from natural gas, by using the capture and storage technology. For groups such as Friends of the Earth, “almost” is not good enough, and the enormous cost of capture and storage has also generated scepticism.

Green hydrogen, on the other hand, which is made from renewable sources, bypasses fossil fuels altogether.

https://www.theguardian.com/en…reen-recovery-for-britain

ETA- I think some smart people have been telling the government that our grid infrastructure cannot handle 20 million electric vehicles, so they see hydrogen as a way out of rewiring the entire nation.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art…-green-hydrogen-j7v6wnn6q

Fossil fuel companies ‘misleading’ Boris Johnson on green hydrogen

Oliver Wright, Policy Editor

Thursday September 24 2020, 12.01am, The Times Creating truly green hydrogen fuel from water is energy intensive and expensive, experts say Boris Johnson is being misled by Britain’s multibillion-pound fossil fuel lobby into backing climate change policies that risk unnecessarily pushing up energy bills and undermining carbon targets, leading scientists warn today.

My work on hydrogen generation continues, but now the emphasis is shifting to post-treatment of aluminium hydroxide and other by-products. It's a messy business. Also I have been getting through a lot of distilled water - since my local water supply is very high in calcium which confuses the analysis. Fed up with paying through the nose for it, I found this very inexpensive fan-cooled electric still. This has reduced the cost of my DW from around $1/litre to 20c.

As I said -this can be a messy business. Oops!

It also involves a lot of microscope and particle size/morphology measurement

Dark-field microscopy - these clusters are clumps of smaller crystals approx 5 microns in size.

I am looking at the effect of different reactor pressures and temperatures on the morphology of the hydroxide, and also at various pre-and post treatments on purity. of both the hydrogen and the hydroxide. I stumbled- quite by chance on a very effective -and very green -purification method for the hydroxide -when this batch of samples go for spectroscopic analysis I will see if it is good as it looks.

Right now though the discovery phase is done and it's a question of ticking all the boxes. Meanwhile my engineering partners are working on plant schematics. A busy life- but the lab is like my own train-set, and I get to play with it whenever I like.

On the topic of stills, many decades ago I helped to build an all-glass (quickfit) fully automatic triple still, the water was used to prepare culture media for human tissue culture. That was a fun task for somebody not long out of school.

Price depends on purity. If I can get 3 9's (99.9%) purity the hydroxide has a good market value- better than $500/ton since it also has a 'green premium' being made from waste. Five 9's (99.999%) purity is around $1-2000 per ton.

Top impurities (not in order) are Iron, vanadium, magnesium, silicon, copper, sodium.

Quote from LeBob

The impurities have potential utilization too!

They do. I have plans to recover these materials as soluble salts with a low decomposition temperature to oxides. There are a number of companies who specialise in fractionating and recovering this kind of material.

Quote from Cydonia

I should try to share again the Italian event, because you should know it will be back "open restaurant" at this date, we hope

I had a chat with Bill Collis today. Bookings are good, and the Umbria region is pretty much 'open everywhere'. I would suggest that anybody who is thinking of going should book soon.

Above is a picture of one of the purified hydroxide samples.

Here for comparison, at the same magnification, is a 100 mesh wire screen.

The strange thing is that the particles pack so tightly that attempting to vacuum filter even a 'low solids' slurry through the screen results in the formation of a packed 'cake' on top of the mesh, after only a small amount of fluid has passed through it.