Metal: The fuel of the future

* 22 October 2005
* Kurt Kleiner
* Magazine issue 2522

The clean, green car of the future will cruise the highway on a tankful of powdered metal - welcome to the new Iron Age

IF smog-choked streets test our love for petrol and diesel engines, then rocketing fuel prices and global warming could end that relationship once and for all. But before you start saving for the fuel-cell-powered electric car that industry experts keep promising, there's something you should know. The car of the future will run on metal.

So reckons Dave Beach, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who has come up with a plan to transform the way we fuel our engines. Chunks of metal such as iron, aluminium or boron are the thing, he believes. Turn them into powder with grains just nanometres across and the stuff becomes highly reactive. Ignite it, and it releases copious quantities of energy. With a modified engine and a tankful of metal, Beach calculates that an average saloon car could travel three times as far as the equivalent petrol-powered vehicle. Better still, ...

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