 Imagine a squad of future soldiers on a long-range patrol far from base with dead batteries and a desperate need to fire up their radio. One of the soldiers reaches for a metal tablet and drops it into a container and adds water. Immediately, the tablet starts to dissolve and hydrogen is released into a fuel cell. And just like that, the radio has power. This is not science fiction. This is something scientists at the Army Research Laboratory have figured out how to do. It's a disruptive discovery that could change everything. Hi, I'm Dave McNally with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. Welcome to ARL What We Learned Today, a podcast where we talk with Army scientists and engineers about science and technology that will modernize the United States Army and make our soldiers stronger and safer. Today we've got two incredible Army scientists in studio with us, Dr. Chris Darling and Dr. Anit Geary, both materials scientists at our Weapons and Materials Research Directorate at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Please tell me a little bit about yourselves and what you do here at the lab. This is Chris. I'm a materials research scientist. I've spent most of my career looking at nanostructured metals and alloys and the mechanical properties that emerge at these small link scales. I'm talking about nanocrystalline materials. I'm talking about materials that have a cellular structure just like plants and animals. However, in these materials, the cells are very, very small. So you can imagine them being 1,000 to 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair. And when the cellular structure gets that small, it imparts them with some amazing and unique properties. Okay. And Anit, please tell me about yourself. I am also a materials engineer. I work in the group of Chris Darling on development of nanocrystalline materials. So I understand that in 2017, you had a eureka moment. You added water while you were polishing, and then you noticed bubbles. And the bubbles were something that you did not expect to see. And it turns out that these bubbles are hydrogen. So you made a discovery that water plus this aluminum alloy will violently react without the use of any catalyst or anything else to create large amounts of hydrogen. Hydrogen is something that can be used as a fuel, right? So what was going through your mind at that time when you said, wow, there's hydrogen? There's been a lot of work on making hydrogen from nanoparticulate materials. And these are particles that are in the nanometer link scale. So they're 10 to 20 nanometers in diameter, that being something like 20 to 60 atoms wide. And they're so very violent to react. What we're working with is a powder that's macro scale. It's hundreds of microns in diameter. And then we consolidate those into a full, fully dense piece. Because we're dealing with macro particles, it's a nanostructure, meaning the internal microstructure link scale is in the nanometer range. And this is a combination of aluminum and tin. And you can visualize this as almost like a big chocolate chip cookie. You got my attention here. The chocolate chips now would be in the nanometer link scale. And so as Anit was saying, dispersion of the chocolate chips in the cookie really are the interface between it is a galvanic couple. And that galvanic couple operates like a little battery. And we have a very, very large, high density because the particles are so small embedded into the aluminum material that it becomes very high energy and very violent reacting with water. Yeah. You had me there at the cookie. But then when you started getting all sciency stuff, my eyes glazed over a little bit. I just to get this back down to where somebody like me could understand. Yes. Because this reaction, as you mentioned, it was very fast. And a lot of hydrogen gas was coming out very quickly. That is the exciting part. People know for a long time that aluminum can react with water in presence of acid, base or other catalyst to produce hydrogen. But here it was just the powder and water producing hydrogen gas and rapidly. That was the exciting part. You gave me a demonstration earlier where you dumped a little bit of the powder into water and you had a balloon and it immediately filled up with hydrogen. You've also shown where you had a little miniature tank that had a hydrogen fuel cell. You put the powder in and then reacted with the water and then this little tank is going all around the room. So immediately you have these applications that can be made where you had just powder and water and all of a sudden you have energy. What was the next step? Once you had that in mind, it's like, wow, we've got this discovery. What can we do with this? So this is an on-demand hydrogen production. Utilizing this hydrogen, you can generate power on demand, which is very important for the soldiers. So that was the first application we thought about. That's why we built that RC tank because that is an example how we can generate power on demand. This would be another example, say the soldier is out in the field and he needs power for his radio. His battery is dead. Here you could take out a metal tablet and put it in the water or some fluid that contains water such as urine and rapidly generate hydrogen that could then power and he would then have use of his radio. It really does sound like science fiction that you would have power from a tablet and you could use anything that has water in it to make this react. So about a year ago, the Army Research Laboratory put out a news release saying that it was going to license your discovery of the nanogalvanic aluminum powder for hydrogen generation. And here we are a year later and I understand that the Army has awarded one license and is in talks to do more. Yes, sir. When our tech transfer office released that federal register announcement, they were inviting companies to submit their plan for commercialization. So numerous companies contacted us. We were working with many, many companies. We sent them samples. They're evaluating their samples. Now, one company has been given the license to use in a particular field of use. But several other companies are also under negotiation in negotiating with our tech transfer office to apply this technology to generate power for other field of use. Okay. And I understand that the reason that the Army is pursuing this licensing of the technology is that you're attempting to build a base, a manufacturing base, because this discovery is something that can be scaled up, right? Correct. So this material is a unique material. It was discovered in the way to process it was discovered just a few years ago. And so there doesn't exist a manufacturing base currently. And so that's something that we've been working with heavily along with the people who are going to be licensing this technology, is working with them directly so they can rapidly build the infrastructure and gain the manufacturing science and engineering to be able to rapidly scale this. And so having that manufacturing base is important because then it opens it up for commercial applications as well as DOD applications. And so therefore the Army can then benefit from this product being produced. Yeah, it doesn't sound like it would be something that would be limited just to military uses that the commercial world may be able to see an advantage of having energy on demand as well. In fact, most of the companies, if not all of the companies, are primarily looking for, in addition to the DOD, is these commercial applications. So you've got energy and power source, a stable alloy powder. This is important. This is environmentally friendly because it's non-toxic, right? There's nothing toxic in this whole process. Yes, this is an absolutely, completely non-toxic material. The by-product are also non-toxic and the by-products could be disposed of anywhere because this is completely non-toxic. You're just basically taking water and ripping it apart, right? The hydrogen goes off on one end and the oxygen goes off on the other. And that's that the water has been turned into energy. The reaction is aluminum plus water. The by-product is aluminum hydroxide or aluminum oxide and hydrogen gas. So all of them are non-toxic. It emits the hydrogen. It can be manufactured to scale and it's something that could be easily transported. It's not something that... And even something that could be used in additive manufacturing, correct? This material is, as Chris mentioned, this is a nanostructure material. So this material is extremely stable in air. This material is extremely stable under high temperature. So we used a propane torch and exposed the material in the flame and nothing happened. By that we mean that we can reuse that powder. It did not catch on fire or it did not ignite. I was going to mention, too, along the lines that aluminum is a very energy-dense per unit volume material. And so the transportation of this material becomes easy. It's robust. It's not like JP-8 that has to be transported in bladders. It's not cendiary. So a lot of the deaths that occurred overseas during war times were assaults on the caravans of fuel lines. Because this material is non-cendiary, it doesn't burn. That it's basically a solid. It can be airdropped very easily. And because it carries so much energy in such a small volume, a lot of people have been very interested in this and the ability to deliver using drones to very remote locations where it's very difficult to carry fuel, liquid-based fuels, like up the side of a mountain, or in very, very dispersed remote locations. Yeah, I think you said before that it's easy to transport and store via tablets or vacuum sealed pouches and it doesn't have an inhalation... No inhalation hazard. I believe you've also said that it's a versatile hydrogen source with direct combustion for vehicular power to use in fuel cells to power any electronic device. How does it make you feel to be able to go from discovery to a viable product that has been scaled up and maybe in the hands of soldiers within a couple of years? How does that make you feel? This does make us very excited. This is not an area of research that we normally even think about doing. So this is a true discovery for us. And to take something based on our processing, that's a discovery in our lab, to take it within just a matter of a few years and get it to a commercial viability, and it is indeed a very rare and special thing. We have other discoveries in our group as well. We work on a copper-based material and an iron-based material and both of these materials are being sought after for licensing as well. But we've been working on those materials for six, seven, eight years. For something to transition so rapidly within a matter of a year, really, year, year and a half is indeed very special. And it makes us excited. What's been the reaction of Army leadership when you've been able to demonstrate this? I understand that the generals are very interested in this type of potential. As we demonstrate this technology to senior Army leaders and they understood and they realized that this will be a way to provide power to the soldiers, to re-burden the soldiers of carrying large amounts of batteries. So they were very supportive of our effort. And I would say, you know, getting this upward-level interest is what really springboarded a lot of the moving forward on an industrial base. So this research, this findings, this discovery, this highlights the importance of fundamental research. As Chris mentioned, we work on developing new materials, nano-crystalline materials for Army applications. So this is a byproduct of that fundamental research which we're trying to do. And we came up with this discovery. So we did do fundamental research, then we did the innovation, and finally we transitioned it for commercial application. That is what Army Research Laboratory is supposed to do and we did it. Where do we go from here? What's next? So ultimately, yes. You know, we're setting up the manufacturing base. We're going to be working with these companies directly to streamline how quickly they can come online with manufacturing these materials. And the idea then would be is that not only will the DOD, but also the commercial sectors will have access to these new materials for energy on demand. Our group led by Chris Darling, we work on developing new materials, as I mentioned. So we do most fundamental research and then publish the papers in journals like Nature. So we do the fundamental research of the quality which results in publishing papers in Nature. Which is a very high impact journal in scientific fields. That is the journal for the science, one of the couple of journals which are very important journals in the science. So basically you're saying you have a little bit of credibility in the scientific community? Yes, extreme credibility. And then we do, we develop the innovation that finally resulted in transition of this technology. But this is not the only thing which we have done in the last few years. I was gonna mention too, along with just the innovation and getting it to commercialization, we've developed a lot of processes and methods and even equipment that are now being licensed by industrial partners. So it was just not only a discovery, but a discovery into the manufacturing process. In addition to that, as Anit was getting ready to say that we do work on a lot of other material systems, these copper and iron-based systems. And we've made a lot of really big fundamental discoveries in those systems as well, such as creep resistance and nanocrystalline materials. And a lot of other unique properties and these materials are now being highly sought after by industrial partners for commercialization as well. I'm not a scientist, but I understand that that type of technology would make it to so you could have a metal that could operate in a higher temperature environment like the inside of an engine or something that has extreme heat, right? Correct, so for the last 50 or 60 years, the main idea of how to develop those types of materials were from what they call single crystals. And these are very expensive and difficult to make. And so it goes against conventional wisdom that you could take something that has a very small cellular structure, not being single crystalline and have the same properties. And in fact, nanocrystalline metals have always been perceived to be having the worst type of properties for these applications. And we recently published a paper in Nature that shows that they can be on par with these single crystals. And that's a major, major scientific discovery. Again, it just shows that our group is very efficient and I kind of aligned to this gold mining operation that you have to go through all these yards and yards of dirt to find these nuggets. But because our group is very special and we're very efficient at doing these things, we're able to find these discoveries at a higher probability, I think, than in a lot of other places. So a lot of job satisfaction? A lot of job satisfaction. And I would go on to say too, the reason that I work here at the Army, I've had opportunities to go be a professor at top of your tier universities and people have been searching me out for senior faculty positions. But the infrastructure and the support that I have here at the Army would not be something that it would be very easily or even possible to reproduce in a university setting per se. Anit, you're happy you work at the Army Research Laboratory? I look forward to coming to work every morning because we know that we can discover something every day. Okay. Well, thanks for joining us for ARL, what we learned today. In upcoming episodes, we'll continue the discussion about the underpinning research that will build the Army of the future. Please consider liking and subscribing. Science is a journey of discovery and we're glad you're along for the ride. For the Army Research Lab, I'm Dave McNally.