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  • Hacker News
  • Stayed a few times in a place exposed to constant breeze from a tropical Pacific coast beach, and learned that stainless steel doesn't really last very long there. Everything stainless steel-based (fixtures, fridges, handles) rusts in a few years. I'd bet there's a market for upscale alloys
    by inasio
  • Making hydrogen from seawater is not an actual problem that needs solving.

    The problem with hydrogen electrolysis is its energy requirements to split water. The energy requirements for the desalination of water before that is a rounding error. It's not worth the hassle to develop electrolyzers that can deal with seawater.

    by hannob
  • I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries.

    I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

    by briandw
  • The "cannot be explained" headline is a bit much, but the underlying result is genuinely interesting
    by SwtCyber
  • So apart from the clickbait, the reason why this is interesting is because it's a limiter for the often cited idea of clean green hydrogen from electrolyis. The current use of titanium and precious metals is, obviously, really expensive, so it's uneconomical to build something that only runs on "spare" electricity.
    by pjc50
  • This would be great for other use cases too like climbing bolts and anchors in coastal areas. Lots of areas are switching to titanium glue-ins which are expensive, but I wonder if this could enable more affordable option. A climber recently died in Greece after multiple bolts failed: https://gripped.com/news/rock-climber-dies-in-kalymnos-after...
    by lukeinator42
  • Very interesting. Highly corrosion resistant "unconventional" steels have become somewhat popular in cutlery, with steels like LC200N, H1/H2, and MagnaCut. LC200N and H1/H2 in particular can be left in body of water uncoated/unpainted and come back in a year and they'll be fine. Obviously that's a different setting than electrified seawater for hydrogen production, though. So much cool materials science happening!
    by asa400
  • > That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it.

    > "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.

    This is the Cannot be explained bit

    by smusamashah

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