Uses for aluminum oxide/nickel oxide- fuel cell catalyst????

[Inferno42]

I work at a place that makes industrial fuel cells. They use a catalyst made of finely powdered aluminum oxide/nickel oxide and a few other metal powders. I have access to pounds of it.

I was wondering if anyone can think of a use for this mix, whether pyrotechnic or explosive.

Thanks

[FUTI]

Damn you have a good stuff at your hands. I would prefer to use it for what it is made for. That powder I think is used at electrode that reduce atmospheric oxygen (cathode?).

But if we go along those line and take into acount pyrotechnic as posible use...let's see I remember that in the old days USA and other countries were developing the rocket engines that used kerosine/H2O2 fuel/oxidant combination. They use silver catalyst to decompose H2O2...try will your powder can do the same. Have in mind that powders itself can decompose H2O2 and make a paralel test with similar grained powder talc or whatever.

H2O2 is a bitchy oxidant and usable as such only at very high concentrations (at the same one it becomes unpredictable). Attempt to achieve heterogenous catalysis for that oxidation process are abandoned as to costly I think, and at this moment only Russians use kerosine as fuel in rocket compositions (they had a couple nasty incidents with H2O2 and use LOX instead).

Russians also switched to homogenous catalysis using NOx I think/hope/guess/stub in the dark...and closed cycle engines. That is reasonable choise as it can be enginereed much easier that heterogenous system. Even that isn't improved things to the point they would be satisfied so they experimented for years with making of sintetic kerosine with exact compositions and precise cetane/octane numbers...what they achieved...who knows...but I know for sure the most of the rocket launches today goes up with their rockets whatever they put inside as fuel/oxidant in it.

[akinrog]

I work at a place that makes industrial fuel cells. They use a catalyst made of finely powdered aluminum oxide/nickel oxide and a few other metal powders. I have access to pounds of it.

I was wondering if anyone can think of a use for this mix, whether pyrotechnic or explosive.

Thanks

What kind of Fuel Cell? Molten Carbonate, Phosphoric Acid, Solid State, PEM, Direct Methanol? This issue can be useful for the original purposes as FUTI indicated. Regards

[Bert]

Nickel oxide by itself would enhance a pyronol torch cutting tool by the additional heat released when the Nickel alloyed with the Iron, IIRC

If you have it pre-mixed with the Aluminum oxide only, not worth trying.