Carbon monoxide has always been a clumsy player in the world of energy-producing fuel cells. Not only a health hazard, carbon monoxide is a hallmark of engine inefficiency since it results from the incomplete processing of gasoline.
\You want engines to burn [fuel] completely,"" said Teri Larson, tutor at the UW-Madison chemistry learning center. When gasoline burns completely, it produces carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide, she said.
Now a team of UW-Madison researchers has found a way to redress the carbon monoxide molecule and even befriend it, which could hasten alternative fuel sources.
""Whereas current processes hate carbon monoxide, our process loves it,"" James Dumesic said. Dumesic, UW-Madison professor of chemical and biological engineering, headed a team of researchers whose work was published in the Aug. 27 edition of Science. The team pioneered a method that converts carbon monoxide directly into an energy source.
Dumesic and his four colleagues were trying to produce hydrogen gas at room temperature. In fuel cells, hydrogen, a proton, drags an electron through a crucial stage where the electron breaks away from the hydrogen to produce current along a more attractive, positively charged outlet.
Generating hydrogen gas typically requires 500-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures, an inefficient step in energy production. As the team searched for room-temperature methods of producing hydrogen gas, it tinkered with small metal particles, polyoxometalates, in water. The scientists found a reactive environment that welcomed carbon monoxide and actually led to a hydrogen-electron solution to be used as fuel in a different way.
""What our process does is allow the polyoxometalates to react primarily with carbon monoxide and allow the hydrogen to go through,"" Dumesic said. ""[In the process] we've created a new solution with electrons and protons to transfer to another free cell and extract [energy].""
The efficiency of this method, according to Tony Jacob, UW-Madison doctoral-level chemist, is much lower than that of other optimized fuel cells.
""[The system] produced a factor of ten less energy. So even though their system is better in some ways, it may not be feasible because of the lower efficiency,"" he said in an e-mail.
The team is currently researching environmentally friendly fuel sources such as sugar water.
""If they can optimize their system so it is as efficient or rather more cost-effective, then they've got a whopping big discovery,"" Jacob said.
