Harvard researchers created solid metallic hydrogen in the lab

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Linguofreak

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I doubt that it will be that good as a superconductor or a structural material if it does remain a metallic solid when returned to STP. Sure, it may look great on paper in either of those roles, but, given that the normal state of hydrogen at STP is gas, the metallic state will only be metastable, not actually stable. This makes it useful as a rocket fuel (by triggering it to return to the gaseous state more typical at low pressure you release the energy used to compress it), but consider the energy densities quoted in the first article linked. This makes for really great ISP, but also has implications for use as a structural material, or as part of the electrical grid. Give it a good jolt, or heat a bit of it up, and the whole mass will likely explode. Oh, and hydrogen and oxygen react exothermically, so it wouldn't be hard to heat a bit of it up.

Lets say that the World Trade Center had been built with metallic hydrogen. Now from that first article, the density of metallic hydrogen is about 1/8th that of steel. So the structural metal in the two buildings now weighs 1/8th of what it used to, or about 25000 tons. It is also composed of rocket fuel with an energy density of around 216 MJ/kg.

9/11 happens, and the first tower hit goes off with a yield around half a megaton, taking the second tower with it for a combined yield of a megaton and change. This levels Manhattan. If other buildings in the area are also built with metallic hydrogen, they cook off too, and NYC is gone. If the electric grid is built with superconducting metallic hydrogen, and other cities have buildings built with metallic hydrogen, the inhabited parts of North America are obliterated.

From this cautionary tale, we can see that metastable metallic hydrogen, if it can exist, will make a great rocket fuel and a great explosive. It will *not* be used in structural or electrical applications, however tempting its properties might make that.
 

MaverickSawyer

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I, for one, just want to see what happens when they take the pressure off. If it stays in one piece, cool. If it decomposes back to hydrogen gas, then it's a nifty lab trick, but rather impractical.
 

Artlav

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I'm really surprised they published before trying to release the pressure...
 

Urwumpe

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I, for one, just want to see what happens when they take the pressure off. If it stays in one piece, cool. If it decomposes back to hydrogen gas, then it's a nifty lab trick, but rather impractical.

It should decompose, according to what we already know about it. The problem is creating enough of it and have it stable enough to study its properties.
 

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Admittedly physics education remembered from high school here, and after thinking about this, I'm trying to keep an open mind on this. I however am having trouble seeing how this could become man-rated approved for any kind of rocketry application any time soon.

My understanding so far:

1. The fuel is meta-stable which means it won't blow up it's less likely to blow up spectacularly provided the right conditions are met and maintained.

1a. Great fuel, great ISP, sounds like it's powerful enough to launch an office building into the thermosphere, but you're looking at a very powerful crater-making bomb sitting on the pad/runway/launching implements should anything go wrong.

1b. Because it's not in a gaseous state, however, I could see this being an asset as a metallic-state element does not turn into a sphere in microgravity (and thus vacate itself from the outflow ports of a tank, for example).

1c. Again, because of its non-gaseous and meta-stable state it won't boil off. Hooray for propellant endurance.

2. What kind of hardware and software would be required to establish, maintain, and correct for the type of cryogenic environment that would be required to a) establish, b) maintain, and c) controllably discharge the propellant as expected?

2a. How much weight / how would it affect the CoG of / how much of an engineering nightmare would this be to employ on a spacecraft?

Am I off base here? :shrug:
 

RisingFury

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Can we wait for the science to actually come in before we start speculating on how NYC will be destroyed and how great rockets will be?
 

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This is clickbait science. They probably went 100% way and found it reverted. Because why stop?
 

RisingFury

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Admittedly physics education remembered from high school here...

You're off to a great start...


Am I off base here? :shrug:

Yes.

The discussion in the paper isn't about the use of SMH as rocket propellant. It's just mentioned in passing.

The paper describes why the scientists think they observed a phase transition from LMH to SMH. They talk about how they determined the pressure (because you can't just stick a pressure gauge in there and hope for the best) and describe certain properties they measured that make them think this is a metal and not a liquid.

They measure stuff like reflectivity of the surface and electron density of the sample. They say absolutely nothing about rocket construction... of floating sky cities.


Personally I'm not convinced yet. They gave some interesting measurements which would indicate that this is solid state, but at the same time we're dealing with a regime that is experimentally beyond anything we've dealt with so far. What appears to be this amazing might just be ordinary.

Let's wait for some more data to come in and for some other labs to replicate the results. Then we can talk about rockets, sky cities and NYC exploding.



OH! And by the way... mountains are meta-stable. Just saying.
 

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OH! And by the way... mountains are meta-stable. Just saying.

Well, so far we've failed to create any of those, even under lab conditions, so I consider this a great start! :lol:
 

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Fair enough -- when I'm not grinding away at life (which is what I spend most of my time doing these days) I do seem to spend a significant amount of my brain otherwise in conjecture.

I clearly misunderstood quite a bit here -- thanks for setting me straight on this.
 
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Urwumpe

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Well, so far we've failed to create any of those, even under lab conditions, so I consider this a great start! :lol:

Lu-Tze might object and tell you, your lack of glaciers and volcanism is simply a matter of your impatience...
 

jedidia

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Lu-Tze might object and tell you, your lack of glaciers and volcanism is simply a matter of your impatience...

Big words from a man that was in such a hurry that he tried outrunning a lightning! :lol:
 

Linguofreak

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Let's wait for some more data to come in and for some other labs to replicate the results. Then we can talk about rockets, sky cities and NYC exploding.

Well, the bit about NYC exploding is mostly just to point out that all of the pie-in-the-sky talk about it being a complete panacea for the future can't be true at once. *If* it can actually exist, and *if* it is in fact a good rocket fuel (which is probably the most likely of the things mentioned to be true, if it can exist at STP at all), using it for structural or electrical applications will be unwise.
 
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