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Are Nitrogen Powered Cars The Future?
_Chainsaw writes: "The local paper ran this story about a retired engineer who has come up with the concept of nitrogen powered cars. The idea is that the pressure generated when liquid nitrogen is changed into a gas state via a heat exchanger could power a car. What are the pros and cons of this idea versus conventional gas-powered cars and the ideas of battery powered and fuel cell powered cars? Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid? What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?" I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too. It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans? Will Nitrogen-fueled trains zip from city to European city?
You'd notice something. "Nitrogen(N2) is inert." Not just "N." Nitrogen (N) is indeed not a noble gas, and thus lacks a full outer octet, and will react to gain electrons and become more stable. However, this whole system uses N2, where each atom has a full outer shell, and when you have a full outer shell, you don't react much. It is a very very stable compound. Furthermore, N2 is the primary form of nitrogen found in the atmosphere - if it is going to react to kill us all, it would have done it already, because it's 70% of the stuff flying and colliding all around us!
mingthing is totally right... the earth's atmosphere is about 80% nitrogen! sure... filler up! this is just about our one limitless resource... the only other question is where does the energy to liquify that nitrogen come from??? just like the rest of our supposed fossil fuel "replacement" plans, this one will probably just juggle the problem from our highways out to the existing coal plants and other horrendously pollutive sources of most of the world's energy
I don't know why everyone assumes that all of our electricy has to come from fossil fuel burning power plants. Why don't we start building and using nuclear power again? The fuel is not only pretty abundant, but it is also non-polluting (only emission is steam and you get that from a fossil fuel/solar power plants...and of course nuclear waste but I think the Simpsons taught us that could just be swept under the rug...). Its not renewable but just about nothing renewable is really economically or practically worthwhile. Just an idea.
Ah well, that's why I'm in computers, not chemistry. I WAS going to look it up, but I didn't even bother keeping those texts. Anyway, does it really matter, if the curve was different, wouldn't the liquid be under really, really high pressure at those temperatures anyway? Or is it a difference of really really high vs. a couple orders of magnitude higher really really high? Or am I completely wrong? It wouldn't be very effective if you had to refrigerate it; you'd drive your car into the wilderness, go canoe camping for a week, come back and you're 200 km from anywhere and out of gas.
You seem to be under the impression that when LN2 is stored at room temperature, the LN2 itself is at room temperature. This is not the case, because the whole point of having LN2 is usually to make use of the low temperature. LN2 is stored in unsealed Dewar flasks, which are double-walled flasks insulated by a vacuum. As they are unsealed, the LN2 slowly evaporates. This is not a problem because it is dirt cheap. AFAIK, no one actually refrigerates the stuff because that would be much more expensive than the LN2 lost to evaporation. Therefore, if you let your car sit for a long time, you would run out of LN2, at a rate dependent on the quality of the storage in the car.
And the ocean, you'll note, has areas where there's more or less salt, due to greater/lesser amounts of water.
These areas support distinctly different marine life than other parts.
I'll freely admit I'm talking without a lot of actual factual knowledge. What sort of increases of CO and CO2 are found in cities, compared to countryside? Perhaps 5 or 10%?
So we'd have air with 85-90% nitrogen content. Is that healthy? Certainly the 5-10% extra CO/CO2 isn't.
Maybe I'm just making silly-ass comments. It'd be nice if the responses to my poorly informed commentary weren't even less informed...
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Not to mention the problems cause by concentrations of cars. It's not like they're going to instantly dissipate. Our cities will be clogged with cars, while our parks and forests will be abandoned by people who can't out for the weekend.
There are already problems with "jams" of traffic in cities already. I think cars that are 1/3 the price would make it even worse.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Hi
:-)
Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?
What bothers me a little is that you Americans always talk about what things apply to Americans when yer referring to world citizens really. Like America *is* the world. Like we (the rest of the world) don't care about this subject.
Please try to be more global since this (I think) is an international news site, right?
No hard feelings though
Fats
A neat thing about gasses is that they're fairly easy to transport. Hydrogen and Nitrogen will most likely become the fuel of the future, but large quantities will of course not be produced in countries that has to burn fuel to get electricity! They will be produced in countries like Iceland, which has a practically limitless supply of free energy from volcanic activity, and it will be produced and stored by countries that have a surplus in their hydroelectric plants. Transporting gas is a lot easier and more efficient than sending electricity through cables. It is also one of the best ways to store large ammounts of energy. I assume that the nitrogen will be drawn from the air, seems like the best place to get nitrogen, so it would be silly to worry about releasing it ito the atmosphere since that's where it came from in the first place. Liquid nitrogen is already produced in large quantities around the world. For all intents and purposes it is a commodity item. All university labs know how to get some when they need it. And the price? Just short of a buck per litre. For americans this probably sounds horrendous, but in Scandinavia, that's cheaper than gas.
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
All the bubble of nitogen exhaust around a city would produce is a lowering of the oxygen percentage. Maby not the best for us or the internal combustion engines in the area. Seeing that a good liquid nitrogen plant would use it's oxygen dense exhaust air a combustion input to the power plant fueling it one likely wouldn't be able to use it for getting a bit higher O2 supply upwind of cities.
Most of what you're breathing right now is nitrogen gas. I wouldn't worry too much about just spewing it right out the exhaust.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
I think I'd rather just cover the roof of my house with solar panels, that way it's totally free energy, and I think you could get a few kilowatts during the day with current technology, which would probably be enough to charge an electric car and run the appliances. You'd need more efficient appliances to optimize its use, and of course a big bank of batteries to store power for nighttime; or the ability to sell energy to the power companies during the day and buy it back at night. I'm planning to build a small-scale system like that, so that 2 or 3 computers can be "off the grid", to avoid power surges and outages. I've got 2 golf-cart batteries and 2 120-watt solar panels; I just need to get a charge controller, and some 12V PC power supplies, and time to put it all together.
Dry ice in a sealed container is also dangerous
When I was an irresponsible teenager I used to put small chunks of dry ice (maybe a cup's worth) into an empty 2 liter plastic soda bottle, pour in some hot water, screw on the top, and get back. A couple minutes of nervous anticipation, and the thing would blow like a mother fornicator. Those soda bottles can really hold a lot of pressure.
One thing I never tried (but thought would be cool) would be to weigh the bottle down, and toss it in to a body of water after screwing the top on. Shallow water = big splash! Deep water = dunno...
And realistically I can't really see this as happening. Usually freezing a massive ammount of nitrogen would impliment a greater ammount of energy than the energy being produced. Also harsh chemicals and such usually are involved in freezing technology or more ammounts of electricity that is taken from the (largely fossil fuel) power grid.
I doubt this will fly except in some grad student's imagination.
Those are the facts. You have a better chance for nuclear fusion.
Or even better what about harnassing nuclear waste generated from fission reactors and assembling it intoa power source which could then power all sorts of devices. And when it's gone you just have a harmless number of inert elements. Of course a number of these fission wastes usually can degrade into things like lead which open up a whole new can of worms.
Respond to s
I feel cars should be eliminated as soon as possible.
Think about all the stupid places you go
Think about the worlds dependency on gasoline
Think about the air (Thats CO and CFC's folks, Radiation kills. Greenhouse effect is a cycle.)
Think about what is destroyed to make more room for cars<br>
Think harder.
Think about all the fast food you eat because it is convienient to your car lifestyle.
(If you don't understand the environmental effects of the fast food industry Think Rain Forest and Cheap Land for Beef.)
I've read the article. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2000/Aug-13-Sun-2000 /business/14141335.html
It's very vague. A link to some real data about the competition would be useful... (http://www.motortrend.com/ search engine sucks!)
It seems a little embarrasing to think that what is essentially a car that runs on compressed air that blows a fan to turn your wheels what walked away with the award for "Automobiles for the New Millennium" We might as well pedal. The guy even stated that this would not be pratical for 50 years.
What about anti-gravity? What about that 100% automated transit system? What about virtual reality?
(Hey, do you really think we wont have fully immersive VR within 50 years? At least that will save some driving time.)
I'm basically saying Cars are dumb and I hate being dependent on them.
BTW - All homes should be 100% Solar powered. Anything manmade should be 100% bio-degradable and recycled. Hunting for sport should be punishable by death and (amost done) Love your Cats.
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It just works better when that difference is large. You can extrat power when you have even a very small temprature difference. You can't get much power unless the machine is very large, but if you are good, you might be able to build something that has a little mechanical energy left, after it has overcome its internal friction. The current record is something like 0.5 (celsius) difference. But even with that machine, its not a reversable process. Its not a technology issue, its a second law of thermodynamics issue.
While you can use very small temprature differences to run an engine, you hit the thermodynamic wall pretty soon. Its possible for a reasonably skilled metalworker to build an engine that will run off the temperature difference between your hand and the air around you, (the plans are available for under $20, Howel's "Miser" low temp Sterling engine) but the ability for convection to keep that temperature difference, drastically limits the power available. Basically, to get one to generate more than internal friction at that difference takes VERY good machining skills, and some special materials (like graphite pistons). If you build one, and it will start itself from just the heat of your hand, you are a very good machinist. Many have to settle for one that runs off the heat from a coffee cup.
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
Alcohol - plant the entire surface of North America with enough corn to synthesize it, and it won't be enough.
Biodiesel - pollutes just as badly diesel fuel (in terms of particulate matter), and replace the crop requirements in corn for alcohol with the crop soy beans of similar size.
Fuel production turn-around time is also a major factor, as well as the materials required to produce the fuel. It seems that the planet's under surface life is a much better fuel producer than anything we have above ground.
David
Excuse my ignorance (my physics courses are far far away), but since heat is basically the free agitation of molecules, why coulnd't a device get energy from this agitation by slowing down molecules and getting the excess energy somewhere else ?
I agree the priority is to find cleaner ways to generate electricity, at any scale.
As for hydro being bad for the river, I sortof don't buy that... it seems to me that the advantage of clean air outweighs the changes in the river flow. Rivers change course now and then on their own, and nature adapts. It bothers me a lot when people propose to tear down dams that already exist and restore the river to its "natural state", because the natural state has now changed; trees grow further down the banks than they did before, and there are new habitats for animals which would be destroyed by "restoring" the river. It's prudent to take steps to ensure that no extinctions are caused, and also to ensure that the rate of flow out of the dam is somewhere near constant (the large, intermittent gushing when there is too much rain and they have to do something with it now are destructive) but I think hydro power can be managed well.
Pick up a handy can of keyboard dusting spray and imagine it's a can of liquid nitrogen. You don't have to keep it cold, you just have to maintain the pressure in the can to keep the nitrogen as a liquid (the difference between it being a gas or a liquid is a function of pressure and tempature). When the ambient pressure in the can drops (you pull the trigger on the can, opening the valve), the liquid inside the can expands into a gas (you may actually feel it "boiling" inside the can). Now imagine you're pointing this can of dusting spray at a small model windmill. The blades on the windmill turn from the air rushing by. This is what spins the turbines in the car, and makes the wheels go round. You may also notice that the can is by now getting pretty cold. The liquid nitrogen in the can (we're pretending, remember?) is absorbing the ambient heat as it expands (this is how your refrigerator works BTW). As the can gets colder and colder, the rate of the gas coming out will slow. If the can gets cold enough, the liquid nitrogen in the can will be able to remain a liquid at room pressure. So the trick with the car is to carry enough liquid nitrogen to make the trip worthwhile, and to heat it efficiently as it expands into a gas so that the expansion chamber doesn't turn into a giant frosty popsicle and stop working.
You're talking about entropy without mentioning it by name. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is immutable. You can't get around it..
No. The smaller the scale, the less of an effect the 2nd law of thermodynamics has. When you are talking about individual molicules, there is no effect whatsoever. This isn't surprizing, since thermydynamics deals with the movements of large numbers of molicules....
Its like newtons laws, it may be very, very close to the truth, but its still false.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'd laugh if the exhaust was N2O
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
And in some countries like Japan or France, most of electricity is made out of nuclear power plants, which might make very toxic pollution, but in a very small and controlable quantity. It's way easier to get rid of a bunch of radioactive containers than of tons and tons of CO released in the atmosphere...
:)
plus, there are projects like the French Phoenix or another Japanese plant, who make energy out of nuclear waste
I have absolutely no clue if this is related to the above topic, except we are trying to find a cleaner more abundant source of energy http://www.bmwgroup.com/e/index2.shtml?s70&0_0_www _bmwgroup_com/6_veranstaltungen/6_3_expo /intro.shtml
The energy needed will be exactly the same as the energy released (not counting shipping energy).
The LN is just a way to store energy.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actually, in terms of alternative fuels, Ethanol is well ahead of all of the others -- a couple of million cars on the road today are capable of burning 85% ethanol 15% gasoline mix. Ford has a number of cars out which have this capability. Most new ford minivans, and some of their sedans can do this. If it can it says FFV on a little metal plaque on the side. Although it is not 100% ethanol, it is mostly renewable, available at several hundred gas stations, and costs (with government subsidies) about the same as gasoline. Furthermore, the same engine can burn gasoline if Ethanol is not available.
Your user name says Louis Wu, but your website says you are Chris Cantrell. Who are you?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hey thanks for demoderadating the guy because he has an actually reasoned opinion. Actually very little opinion into it.
If you mass produce cars that don't need oil and you have countries that have mass exports of oil Kuait, Venezuela, etc that are transitioning countries that are in potentially politically dangerous areas you are bound to have problems.
Oh and just for your information (don't take this the wrong way) but we do need to actually care about money in fact you do to.
The problem is that here in America we don't have a big cushy net to really soften the blow of loosing ones job.
Hell take my dad who worked in the same job for roughly about ~20 years and then got terminated when the company decided to close in the midwest?
Also from personal knowledge jobs are a lot harder to come by in Europe for many. This is usually because of a tight labor market and the like but also all the benefits that come with a job. Employees are expensive items and therefore hiring new ones is a lot more expensive.
Oh and by the way next to air nothing matters if you don't have food, water, clothing on your back and a back and a place to sleep.
I guess I am an "arrogant American" for wanting my life to go to hell but I believe there are some things worth fighting for.
And if I am comming off as too strong or as a "hot blooded yank" it's because your statement was utter flamebait.
Respond to s
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere? Well, not from the nitrogen exhaust. Isn't our atmosphere about half nitrogen?
From the air.
The typical form of Nitrogen extration, to my knowledge, it to simply ectract it from natural sources. Sources like the air you breath. Remember that most of the Earths atmosphere is actually nitrogen. Unlike the part of atmosphere we humans breath, the nitrogen tends to stay up in the upper heavens of atmosphere. However, nitrogen can, and is, cheaply extracted from the air. Other methods exist to convert different elements to nitrogen, but they are more expensive in the end.
That being said, The question about what would happen to the Earth with all us humans releasing rouge nitrogen molecules into the environment is kinda null/void at this point. We would release only that we have already extracted, thus we never actually polute the environment.
One bad idea is to start haveing Nitrogen around public places. I mean Damn! What a really Stupid idea. Haveing stuff that is supper cold, and that can flow like water in bad. However, you have to decide for yourself what is the more evil of the two evils: Hydro-carbon based fuels(Explosive, and responsible for Ozone depletion) or Nitro based fuels(freeze you before your brain can actually feel your freeze its so cold). I'm certain nobody can disagree on the fact that the vehicle will have to be refuel at some point, and that is the most likely time an accident with liquid nitrogen can occure. Gasoline is safe to to fuel ones vehicle with, unless smoking a cigaret or holding a lit match. You would not be injured by the mear droplet of gas falling upon your skin, unlike liquid nitrogen.
These might seem like two contradicting points, but they both very elegantly lead into my humble opinions that I would like to mention down here. I think that Alternative fuel systems are very cool, but they need to meet certain criteria. The ideal system would be friendly to the environment. It would need to be practical and cheap as well as being safe for society. Does anybody remeber the system used in our space shutle program? We use a method to produce electrical power from hydrogen, and oxygen, thus producing energy, and water as byproducts of the reaction. That is an example of cheap, and bio safe energy. However, there are issues of it being practical to produce in large volumes hydrogen plus oxygen, and not to mention the same drawbacks on the two fuels being cryo cold. (Note: Hydrogen, and Oxygen are very simple to extract from water using electricity and a catalyst, however. That reaction cost more electricity that the end product produces, thus it isn't efficient, unless your electricity is draw from nuclear power plants. Irrelevent since we're talking about something compact enough to fit in a car.)
There are plenty of great ideas already avaiable, and this one is no different. The same arguments keep comeing back in these circles of discusion. Most forms of alternative fuel do not meet the cheap to produce and safe to handle attributes of the above criteria, and thus never really get considered in the first place. But they are still neat ideas, and deserve recognition. However, since this one come much closer to the ideal solution I guess it gets my mark of approval. Anything is better that a battery that will eventually contaminate the environment for thousands of years like todays acid batteries.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
If we wanted to build clean, safe power generation facilities which are not dependent on the sun or wind, with a fuel source which will last for thousands of years, all we need is to start building the (already designed) LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder) reactor. Argonne developed a particularly good design of this, the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor). These types of reactors are much better than current commercial reactors. First, they use fuel much more efficiently because they create more fissile material as they run, i.e. you can burn the U-238 as well as the U-235. The first nice effect of this are that you get much less high-level waste as you typically burn the fuel until it is no longer significantly radioactive. The second is that it means that our Uranium reserves will last for thousands of years even if we used this technology to provide all of our energy. The third very nice feature of the IFR and I believe LMFBRs in general is that it is inherently safe. If there is a cooling problem and the reactor core begins to overheat, the reaction will automatically stop because the coolant won't pass fast neutrons as efficiently at higher temperatures. Therefore if there is a pump failure or other coolant failure, the reactor automatically shuts down without any human or mechanical intervention.
The existence of technology like this, and its lack of political support make me frustrate me greatly. The public has an irrational fear of all things nuclear, and thus there is no political support for setting this up on a commercial basis. More people die every year from coal mining and lung diseases related to the burning of coal than died from the Chernobyl disaster, the largest nuclear power accident ever, yet no one ever talks about the "2000 coal disaster" or the "1999 coal disaster." Write your congressman and tell him that you want funding for the IFR project and that you want one built commercially.
When they make a car that runs on cheese.
Until then, let me sleep.
. at my signal -- unleash hell .
Wow.
- - I'm Johnny Badnote, arch-fiend, villain, slime. The public didn't like my songs and so I turned to crime. - -
hmm letting tons of nitrogren slip into the atmosphere... isn't the atmosphere around 3/4's nitrogen? somehow I don't see leakage as a problem
N2 is only 14 times as heavy as H2, and either is a pretty small fraction of its containment. eg: I have a tank of 50# CO2 (22 times heavier than H2); the empty tank is close to 150#, and that's not even liquified.
Most discussion of BLEVE's talk about flammable liquids because they are geared towards firefighters. However, the impulse of the explosion is an issue with any liquid which instantly vaporizes.
I first studied it with CO2. The nuke plants consider with regards to water.
It's even more dangerous with flamable liquids because of the post explosion burn or post explosion explosion.
God forbid someone should like capitalism. Oil is what runs the world, its not going away any time soon. Everyone here was such a negative view on the "evil" capitalist bastards. Well thats whats keeping the economy running. See what happens when they disappear.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I beg to differ. Use heat to boil water which creates steam to drive a turbine. BTW that's a very old idea.
yeah sure. Nuclear power plants are really safe. You are probably one of those hypocrytes that calls environmentally concerned people "tree-huggers", laughs at the "greenie-weenies" and then becomes complete incensed when a huge new landfill in your neighborhood is proposed. Care about our environment now, while we still have one.
Agreed totally. It's in fact, theoretically impossible to achieve 100% efficiency. Still 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Now, we're still at the question of where the energy is going to come from, and how much we actually need.
What's going to be the main source of electricity production in 50 yrs time? Nuclear? Solar? Wind? The only viable means for large scale production of electricity in the present, besides petroleum, and other fossil fuel, is nuclear, which has been deemed environmentally unfriendly, and is facing resistance in some countries. Solar can't produce enough to satisfy the amount we need in the present. So, what's left?
Well, besides in our combustion engines, the only other time nature produces nitrogen dioxide is during lightning. Otherwise, nitrogen is pretty much inert.
The energy to get it that cold in the first place has to come from somewhere. Most likely coal, nuclear, or natural gas powerplants. In the long run, this is probably more efficient than internal combustion engines (which are really bad on the environment) -- but it's not a panacea as some people on this forum are making it out to be.
heh...
FUD!
sometimes its justified, in the united states there are laws dictating how nuke plants are to be constructed, they were written in the fiftys and are so completely obsolete its astounding.
nuke plants are potentialy just as safe as any other fuel source but we have failed to wade through our own leagl system and arive at a point where the tech can advance.... the military being exempt from these laws has very nice, clean and safe nuke plants powering all sorts of stuff, (lets forgett about the russian sub for a moment)
aircraft cariers go for about 20 years before needing to be refueled.... the question is what are they doing with the leftovers? and what are they going to do when they have used all the urainium?
one of the most amazing sources of energy has yet to be harvested: wave and tidal motion in the ocean, the current between Keywest and Flemming Key just south of florida (for example)are going about 5-8 knots
and they NEVER stop! at the southern tip of flemming key there is a sewer treatment plant so nobody wants to live or hang out their anyway, so why not drop in a series of turbines and make electricty? ecologicly it would be almost totaly impactless, perhaps a bit of mud and silt would get kicked up but it would be minamal compaired to the amount of crap spewed into the air and ocean
by the current power station.
ecologicly it would do squat, fish would swim right past it, the current wouldent diminish much, not that that would matter, keywest has allready killed just about everything in that area already, and the only thing that would have to be replaced is the moving parts of the turbines themselves...
ok, ok, I will get to the point:
if we use the tides etc, to generate electrisity, we can use that power to make hydrogen, freeze nitrogen, power citys and still have lots left over for what ever we need it for... ooooh! electric cars, busses, trains, hell, motercycles!
hmmm you could make electric foundrys for building turbines, electric trucks and boats for getting them where you need them.
oh... one last thing, is it hydrogen or alchol that produces water as its byproduct? I seem to be confused on that point....
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While reading your comment I noticed you said ""free" energy". I wonder how long it will take Jon Katz to start a ten part series on the evils of closed, proprietary energy as opposed to the open, free as in speech energy that makes us all better people. I think that open energy is important, especially in this post-Columbine era of geek persecution.
Note to moderators: If you're looking at this post and asking yourself if you should moderate this as off topic or save your points for a penis bird, I reccomend moderating me down. After all, it wouldn't be fair to deprive one of those birdies of an audience. Thank you for your time. I'm sorry.
No, it still holds even if you could manipulate individuals molecules.
e.g. see Maxwell's demon.
Obviously Chainsaw a thing or two to learn about the environemnt. Nitrogen practically IS the atmosphere at 78% of the atmosphere's total contents. Sheesh...
Combine cool Nitrogen with burning Hydrogen and you will get an even more efficient engine, and probably a lot of NH3 and NOx as a by-effect.
"What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?" dosen't he know where we get the niotrogen? our atmoshphere is about 78% nitrogen (i think)
i have no sig
Bill, off down the patent office.
The economic concerns would not be a problem. I read an article similar to this in the economist that talked about the rising MRC (marginal resource cost) of collecting the oil as they went deeper and eventually there would still be oil left but it would be very costly to extract it. At this point in time the world as a whole would accept the technology of fuel cells or any other non-petroleum based fuel. The countries would realize the problem before the technologies ever caught on.
Plus the new zeolites that can be developed in space allow for countries such as the United States to use a higher percentage of internally generated oil since the usable amount per drum is higher.
Well since you are going to use all sorts of far flung heat sources to do this perhaps the human body could work.
Take the flow of air (which at least has some power) and stray a little wind turbine onto the front of your mouth. Then you could take the power generated and store it into some little device perhaps like a watch or maybe as a backup for something like a CMOS battery or maybe a component in the car.
Respond to s
I can think of two ways to get mechanical energy out of LN. One is, just use the pressure generated as it warms up and expands (i.e. a compressed-air engine.)
The other is to use the LN to cool one side of a sterling-cycle engine. The greater the temperature difference, the more power you get.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I can vouch for liquid nitrogen being dangerous in an enclosed container, such as a glass jar with a tightly closed lid. I spent a week picking up glass shards from my bedroom years ago. Liquified gasses can really pack a lot of energy, but that didn't stop me until...
Dry ice in a sealed container is also dangerous, but kind of cool when it starts liquifying and bubbling just before hell breaks lose. The reason why I say dangerous, because it was violent enough to rip apart a metal filing cabinet it was placed upon. Luckly, I was not injured.
If memory serves me correctly (it probably doesn't), NH4OH (ammonia) + 2 O2 (oxygen gas) + catalyst(copper?) = HNO3 (nitric acid) + 2 H20 (water)...or is it NH03, oxydized copper and hydrogen gas? That pungent gas is the vaporous form of HNO3 and it's not so much toxic as it is highly corrosive. I believe the sensation of pungent-ness is the inside of the nose being eaten away.
:)
Nitrogen gas (N2) and nitrous oxide (N2O3) aren't even part of the reaction, and I doubt most people could coax them to react so easily as ammonia to produce nitric acid.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Heard of maxwell's equation or something it's a bit blurry though
Respond to s
if nitrogen was inert, there would never be Nitrous Oxide, in inert element is one that does not chemicaly react, like Xenon.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This sounds like a version of Maxwell's demon, who, like Dracula, gets killed by a brave scientist every time someone tries to resurrect him.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
>Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid?
You couldn't possibly be flash frozen by liquid nitrogen if a tank ruptured in an accident. Liquid N2 is kept under pressure to be kept liquidous. If a tank ruptures, the Luiquid N2 will spill out and vaporize immeadiately. it's very unlikely, but still possible, that a small portion of your skin might get frostbite if exposed to the liquid N2 just after the tank ruptures, though, but not a big deal, really.
>What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
Where do you think they get the Liquid N2 from? The air is composed of about 70%(I think, dont quote me on that) nitrogen, and liquid N2 is made by compressing air and seperating the liquid O2 from the liquid N2. The Nitrogen just returns to where it came from.
-=The Rimstalker=-
-=The Rimstalker=-
I understand the difficulty the American Working Man has putting food
BTW, in case my point above was not completely clear, I used the landfill analogy to express this:
Nuclear power plants sound like a nice thing to advocate. "They are clean! They are safe!"
But the question you need to ask yourself is:
"would I want one built a block from me? Do _I_ want to live in the shadow of one of these?"
Ask the people who lived near Three Mile Island, or people in most of Eastern Europe and Asia, not to mention Chernobyl itself whether they think Nukes are the solution.
The answer is most likely NO. So rather than deriding the "tree-huggers" let's come up with less potentially risky methods of producing power. Hell, we have had photovoltaic processes for quite a while now, why aren't we concentrating on making them more and more efficient? Something with little or no cost to the world we live in?
Tin has a phase change at very low temp.
Some of us are far too ugly to have children. Screw you pretty people and screw your pretty children. You can't hurt the planet. It isn't alive. Also, it doesn't really matter if the environment changes drastically and lots of things die. Even if every animal can feel, none will have to experience the pain of death more than once. They have to die anyway. In answer to the obvious hypocrisy that some may see in this post: Yes I do think murder is wrong, but the effects of my driving around are completely unpredictable. Maybe one of the poeple who dies of cancer from my pollution would have been the next Hitler. It's not the same as murder. This post is not flaimbait or a troll. I'm sure other people feel the same way. Either way, feel free to moderate me down. I have like -49 karma anyway. Fight the pretty people! Run your air conditioner and heater at the same time.
But, of course, gas and oil company lobyists will have something to say about that, as will and manufacturing lobyists, because the research into nanotechnology would render normal methods of industry obsolete and make everything now produced in big factories cost 10% of what it does now. Senators will be bought in great enough numbers to ensure research grants dont go anywhere near hydrogen power and nanotechnology. God, we live in a great country.
-=The Rimstalker=-
-=The Rimstalker=-
I understand the difficulty the American Working Man has putting food
you car fails because of nitrogen emmisions???? are you sure its not carbon monoxide? nitrogen isint smog, its air. maybe I am confused.... am I?
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Heeeeeeeell yeah. Everybody go buy a Honda Insight. Those cars is baaaaad-ass. $21,000, 50-70 estimated miles per gallon, but real people get 40-60. The drawback is it's only a two seater, and 0-60 in 11.5. Also it's so light that if an SUV taps you, you'll end up in another zip code, but that's true of any car. At least you can be sure that they will roll over right after they send you into orbit.
Yeah and everyone should live in Southern California too. Up here in parts of Alaska we don't see the sun for months at a time.
Even with those methods, I've heard arguments that with today's efficiencies, the environmental impact of huge solar array fields and massive wind generation sites would be very bad as well.
Seems like we either need to greatly improve solar panel technology, or come up with a new energy generation method.
I'm for the cool stuff like a new 2007 matter/antimatter Audi TT Coupe Quattro.
---
In a hundred-mile march,
I am suprised all the geeks on this forum didn't get that this is just a compressed air car. The basic tech is for sale at Home Depot in the tool corral. Liquid Nitrogen is just really-really compressed.
nothing is real
first off, that you can't use heat to do work is utter crap. ThermoVoltaics for producing electricty directly from heat are in developement now.
You know perfectly well that he meant that heat itself is useless without a temperature differential. Thermovoltaics would, of course, require such a temperature differential.
secondly, sure, NOW our technology requires a useful temperature difference to utilize the heat flow as a viable source of energy. however, is it that hard to conceptualize of a machine of some sort that could utilize the very flow of energy across in in either direction? if such a device was sensitive enough, you could conceivably get power any time, as no two temperatures are ever exactly the same.
I find it hard to conceptualize. Note that it's not actually important for the machine to work in both directions, because you could just produce a bunch of them, and half of the would be operating on average. The problem is making a device that harnesses energy from random temperature fluctuations in a fluid in thermodynic equlibrium, without losing energy when another random fluctuation causes a temperature differential in the other direction. I know of at least one such attempt that failed, and I have every confidence that the Second Law of Thermodynamics will remain inviolate.
Ethan Jewett
E-mail: Now what spa I mean e-mail site does Microsoft run again?
gee wizz! how sad, oil producing countrys going belly up! thats an awefull idea! nitrogen is what most of the atmosphere is made up of allready, I dought that we would do much other than to suck some out and freeze it while slowly putting it back as we go bombing around looking for work after our job at OPEC fizzles out. what I am not sure about is how it would work logisticly: - its not exactly easy to turn nitrogen into a liquid, it requires (cough) energy.... - liquid nitrogen is MUCH smaller then "room" tempture nitrogen, and it requires (ahem, scuse me) more energy to keep it cold which you would have to do in order to store it, basicly as your car sits in the driveway it would be warming up and expanding, so you would need a vent, that makes it a rather perishable fule product... - a good pile up on an LA freeway would be horrendous, car goes smack into another and its fuel tank pops, freezes part of the driver who than shatters into ity bity chunks which than thaw into goo... yuck there are other interesting ideas, like hydrogen fuel cells, where they inject hydrogen into porus blocks of metel which keep it from being explocive.... the byproduct of burning hydrogen (if I remember correctly) is water, the tire industry will LOVE this, tires would be more expencive as the roads would allways be wet! oh... tires are made out of oil.... how ironic...
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The worst thing about hydrogen is that it is a trace gas in the atmosphere. Its concentration is well below 1% in the air. On the other hand, nitrogen makes up nearly 80% of the air. Technically, it is much easier to extract nitrogen from air to make mass production of liquid nitrogen. To make liquid hydrogen, even hydrogen H2 itself requires huge amount of energy source. The conventional way is to electrify water molecule H2O -> H2 + 1/2 O2 to obtain hydrogen. The atomic bond in water molecule is pretty strong, so it takes a lot of energy to split H2O to get H2. I would say without first resolving H2 production problem. Using liquid H2 in automobile is a no-no.
Together, we are strong; Apart, we are stronger.
BTW - All homes should be 100% Solar powered. Anything manmade should be 100% bio-degradable and recycled. Hunting for sport should be punishable by death and (amost done) Love your Cats.
People like me eat people like you.
If you escape that fate, we'll leave you behind with your delicate, fragile, precious, polluted, deforested, stripmined, irradiated planet that you love so dearly, using the wealth we gained in the process of making it so to reach out to the stars.
Enjoy your homespun cloth and befouled oatmeal during your 30 year lifespan after we ascend to the heavens.
The power for the conversion could be supplied by Nuclear power stations. Despite the FUD (and yes, I use the software industry's acronym for it - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt - because that's what it is when Greenie weenies complain about Nuke power stations).
What they don't realize is that fossil fuels are MUCH dirtier than Nuclear power. Nuclear power is dangerous is handled wrongly, but not likely to break down unless something terrible happens because of a mess up. The Nuke stations in South Africa have been going for decades and because of it, South Africa has one of the cheapest electricity rates in the world. And South Africans, after all - they're Africans. Africa isn't a very advanced continent. Imagine what Americans could do if they put their minds to it. There wouldn't be any need for fossil fuel power stations again.no sig
We could reduce urban sprawl, we could build better communitites where people don't have to drive everywhere, we could spend more money on public transportation to make it run more often, and most importantly we could educate people to realize that everytime they get into their car they are causing harm to the planet. It's true most Americans don't care about harming the planet or destroying their chilrens future when it comes time to make a midnight run for Haagen Dazs but you never know maybe we could convince a few of them.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
LN2 working with lots of LN2 all the time is a pretty good way to get a pure nitrogen atmosphere cropping up in a number of enclosed spaces where people are working.
Seastead this.
And shoving the polution into what rural Montana will help things? Nope something called prevailing winds takes care of that idea. Additionally pollution usually only affects those in early childhood, old age, and those with asthma and other simlar problems; at least in the levels that we have in cities from cars industry might be different see Eastern Europe.
And shipping the gas would be a big preformance hit as well as transporting oil or something similar.
This whole discussion seems to be a retreat of the ask slashdot article along similar ideas.
The fact that we are able to live and reproduce in cities that have this kind of polution mean we are survivors of natural selection.
Respond to s
The only problem is that unless someone can obtain the sole rights to bottle and sell the stuff, they won't invest the money and energy into developing the technology to cheaply "harvest" mass quantities, nor the engines to use it as fuel.
:)
Why do you think we're still running our vehicles off fossil fuels? Hell, the amount of energy in fresh animal fats makes hi-octane gasoline look absolutely puny.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
While researching electric cars on the web I came across this interesting refference on a history of electric vehicles at the Electric Car Owners Club site.
"LIQUID AIR CAR COMPANY 1903 This interesting car, while not electric, is unusual since it shows that early vehicle manufacturers were trying every possible technology. This one is powered by liquified air (rather cold!)."
This is about entropy. You cannot lower the "global" entropy. So in order to cool the energy-rich hot molecules (thereby decreasing its entropy) you have to heat up something else. Thermo dynamics calculations will show that you cannot take the energy out of a warm material without turning most of that energy into heat somewhere else (only most: the small difference is the energy you gain by taking back the energy you used in the fridge to seperate hot and cold air). I guess the short answer to your question is that devices are "too clumsy" to make energy out of slowing down the molecules - the atoms of our device would smash into the molecules that we were supposed to slow down.
and I cant spell for the life of me.... sorry....
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Why have so few people mentioned fusion? We will eventually figure out how to control it, harness it for practical use and perhaps make the reactors small enough to replace batteries in portable devices.
Whatever replaces gasoline and the internal combustion engine will have to provide at least the same level of performance. We are not likely to give up our fun for something "better." I wouldn't.
I remember reading somewhere years ago that, given the current rate of use and growth of use of petroleum, our known supplies would be exhausted in 50 years. Has this changed?
No, but I don't see that as the point. The purpose of using N2 should be to use it as a kind of "battery" - as a means of storing the energy in the car until you step on the gas pedal.
I just wonder how effecient this is? How many GJ can you store per liter of N2? I would guess that storing the energy as H2 for later burning is much more efficient (I once heard something about 90% efficiency in the produce-consume cycle of H2!).
Just a minor point: You don't use energy to cool the N2 when bootling it - rather, when putting it under great pressure, it is heated. After compression, this heat (energy) is slowly delivered to the atmosphere until the N2 has atmosphere temperature. And actually, that very same heat energy is taken back "out of the air" when you consume the energy stored in the N2 bottle!
Are you sure hydrogen burns with a colorless flame? I've created small amounts of hydrogen gas via electrolysis and ignited it. It burned with an orangish-red flame. Sort of a HeNe laser orange.
Ryan
So maybe we should have an animal-fat powered vehicle... wait, that's called a horse and buggy.
Please go look up refrigeration in a thermodynamics course text book.
--
My parents live in a hot area, and don't use the air conditioning much due to the cost. They are used to the heat. I'm not.
As I was lying in bed, unable to sleep one night, it occurred to me that air conditioning shouldn't cost energy. There should be a way of reaping net energy from cooling air. After all you are bringing the air down from a high energy state (hot) to a lower energy state (cool)
Would it be possible to set up a compressor system that would use the ambient heat to boil water and drive a turbine, or a thermocouple? Could it be a net usable energy provider?
check out the stirling/sterling engine (i'm not sure of the spelling but you can find their web page) They have a heat exchange engine that runs on the heat from a cup of coffee. They've been around for years. Nobody has shown much interest until recently when GM laid a little money on them.
N2:
:)
density liquid 0.97_kg/l = 34.6_mol/l
density gas 0.00125_kg/l = 22.4_mol/l
Sp Heat 1.04_J/(g*K)
Heat Vap 2790_J/mol
Heating one liter of liquid nitrogen (at 77_K) to 25_C (298_K) requires:
(34.6_mol * 2790_J/mol) + (0.97_kg * 221_K * 1.04_J/(g*K)) = 319000_J
So... A liquid nitrogen engine moves 319kJ of energy aroung for every liter of liquid nitrogen it consumes. A portion of that energy is converted into useful work. The exact fraction depends on your engine cycle. Or maybe you don't use a thermodynamic cycle at all. Energy density looks good though.
One thing to remember folks, this technology will not improve large scale enviromental problems like the greenhouse effect. I would be -shocked- to learn that these nitrogen engines were more than 5% efficient. That is, 5% efficient from the fossil fuel at your coal or gas fired electric plant to the output of you engine (not wheels). People on hydroelectric or nuke power excepted
Ryan
Interesting contradiction, my friend. If you care nothing at all for karma yourself, why post this anonymously? I don't expect that you will even see this, but I think I'll reply anyway.
>Do you people trade it for drugs or something?
If only it were that useful. No, I don't go out of my way to post comments to garner karma. My post history should make that obvious. No, karma is only any good to someone who uses it to keep score for their own ego. I post comments here to enjoy discussion. Look at well-known whores and you'll see a pattern of starting threads soon after a story is posted with a long diatribe that a moderator is likely to mod up if it has enough pro-linux opinions, especially if it is too long-winded to be readable or even make sense.
I don't have that kind of time. Look at my past posts and every one of them is in response to another post where I am trying to add to the discussion.
>Why would one care if they were bitchslapped?
I cared about being bitchslapped because it squelched my voice. All my previous posts were set at -1, and my default for new posts was also -1. If you actually read my page, you might have noticed a couple of things.
I didn't complain about not getting back the karma, all that really bothered me was having my posts all go to -1. That implies that I am a troll. I am not. I asked Taco about that he got it fixed.
I didn't accuse signal ll of being a karma whore. I didn't moderate his posts out of some vengeance because I thought he was whorish. I still feel that I moderated him in good faith. Rob thinks otherwise, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt and removed the -1 default post score. My karma was left at -10.
If you think me a karma whore, fine. Your reason for calling me one, though -- "since you went to all the trouble to restore your karma" -- shows that you didn't really read my page either. The only reason I went out of my way to mail Rob about this was because I felt it was wrong to set all my posts at -1 for alleged moderation abuse. I never got my karma back and I'm fine with that. I switched to a new account at the time because I figured the old one was just screwed.
Since I created this new account, you are the first to call me a KW. Interesting that you did it anonymously.
fishstick@linuxstart.com
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Um...
Dude, all that says is "That can't work beacuse it violates the second law of thermodynamics." It dosn't say, why exactly it can't happen, only that it would beacuse "The second law of thermodynamics is true!"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The problem with liquid air is that the LOX and the LN2 would tend to separate: different densities and different liquification temperatures. So you could potentially wind up with a puddle of significantly concentrated liquid oxygen in your "gas" tank, and that is a fire hazard in a BIG way.
If you don't believe me, check out these images of people BBQing with LOX here and here.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
I used to think you were funny.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
What about leaking thousands of gallons of nitrogen into the ground or water? How much $$ per gallon or liter?
you obviousley do not need to keep it cold to keep it in liquid form you only have to put it under pressure.
True, using X fuels would reduce the emission of any one fuel by X-1/X. However, chances are that the combined emmissions would be more harmful than that of just one. "But the average impact will be lower, because the bad emmissions will be counter-balanced by the less bad emmissions" I hear you cry? Why not make the entire fuel out of the least bad (I need some more descriptive language here) components then? In any case, Solar power would be infinitly cheaper if all houses had Solar Panels installed, so the problem of "electric cars are just as bad as petrol because they get power from the power stations, who pollute". The problem is reducing the weight of the solar panels and cars, or improving the panel's output so that the cars can operate on as little power as possible.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Liquid Nitrogen (LIN) at atmospheric pressure is indeed dangerous for the following reasons.
...
1. It can liquify air.
Air liquefaction is one method of obtaining relatively pure Oxygen or Nitrogen. Unfortunaely, liquid oxygen (condensed from air) can be concentrated be leaving exposed metal at LIN's boiling point. If the material contacting the liquified air is not oxygen-enriched compatible, you could have an explosion. Can you said Ford Pinto?
Proper insulation with proper oxygen-clean materials alleviates this concern.
2. It can displace oxygen. (well dilute, really).
If you have a large amount of LIN boiling off, it could lower the concentration of oxygen in the air - possibly making it not capable of supporting respiration. One full inhalation of nitrogen sans oxygen and you're gone. We're not talking whippets here
The main problem that I see is this: liquid nitrogen is produced via some sort of refridgeration. Refridgeration is produced via a compression/expansion cycle, usually powered by ELECTRICITY. So instead of burning a fossil fuel in the auto engine, the fossil fuel is being burned in a power plant, to produce electricity.
The main reason why I would see it failing is this: to cool down a hose to connect the large tank (filling station) to the car and to cool down the tank + piping requires a relatively large amount of LIN. So much of the finished product is lost in the fueling process.
Another reason for problems is this:
in colder climates, ambient heat exchangers tend to freeze-up, and need to have manual de-icing. Now, an electrical system could include de-icing capabilities, but you must include that as more electricity required in the overall process.
I used to work for one of the few large indutrial gas companies, and spent one morning a month eating donuts, watching safety videos. I also tracked usage of LOX, LIN and LAr (liquid argon) at a research facility in NJ. (Hi Harry).
The point that I would most like to get across is this: instead of selling fuel, it would be selling refridgeration, and boiling off the liquid to generate pressure is the fuel cell.
.
How many times in your life have you heard of a person being bathed by gasoline when they've been in an accident?
What are the odds of them being bathed in liquid nitrogen?
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Greenpeace has presented a modified Twingo the last 2 years in an important car expo in Germany, that spents the half gas-oil than the standard Twingo. It only has a few changes in the engine and the airdynamic. But the industry refuses to build it.
About 50 years ago there was a small car company in Texas that sold marihuana-based cars (really!). It was buyed by a big car company. They didn't seld these cars any more.
There are alternatives to fuel-based cars, but the fuel corporations want us to spend our money in petroleoum. It is also the reason why we don't still have too many electricity-based cars.
The nitrogen-based cars will be sold only if they think they can earn more money with nitrogen than with gas-oil.
I'm sorry about I can't offer more link of what I say. Perhaps anybody can.
Please, forget my bad english.
rupture of tank != explosion.
You see, even if the tank ruptures, the liquid nirtogen still needs heat added to boil the liquid of to vapor. So the liquid wouldn't start to boil until it contacted other matter at ambient temperature, such as the ground - at which point, it would boil off to the atmosphere, not into the car.
An interesting experiment I once saw had a cracker burning in a bowl of liquid oxygen. It did not instantly burn - as liquid oxygen does not support combustion. The oxygen must first be boiled off (requiring heat) for combustion to be possible.
So a flame of several thousand degrees is only millimeters away from pure oxygen in liquid form, yet, no explosion occurs. Fun stuff. Gas phase heat transfer resistances can be quite large.
.
You need energy to cool it down, and you
waste energy heating it up. Think of it as
just a steam engine. Carnot (who developed the
theory of that) is in his state of maximum
entropy for 177 years now, but people still
don't know his name, it seems. The efficiency
of any engine is (best case) limited by 1-Temperature_difference/Final_Temperature,
and that's much closer to 1 for combustion
engines. So, ernegy-wise, it's a clear loser;
the only advantage might be in terms of better
emission control when (centrally) generating the needed energy to cool down the nitrogen.
This is a good Idea but it is not the source of the energy it is just a way of putting storing it like a battery. and just like a battery it will lose it energy over time. the Nitrogen gas unless you have a very strong bottle will slowly boil away and you will have to Fill up again even if you did not use the energy.
I read an article on Wired a few months ago about someone who discovered a way to power cars using the heat in the air. Since the temperature can never reach absolute zero, this could theoretically provide an infinite source of power. I'm too lazy to find the link though, and it may very well be total bullshit.
(To make steel, you need O2. LOTS of O2. You get pure O2 by liquifying air, then fractionally distilling it to get the various pure gases. You use the O2 to make steel, sell off some of the exotics, sell as much N2 as you can, and let the rest evaporate.)
Thus while it does cost energy to make LN2, we're probably going to spend that energy whether we use the LN2 or not. (At least until you have a LOT of cars working this way.)
I can't remember it well, but 2 months ago I read in a spanish newspaper that a group of some spanish university had developed a car that worked with liquid air (why only nitrogen? it's easier with air).
Aside from the obvious environmental benefits, as well as the benefits you've outlined above, there are some benefits that the typical go-fast guy would like. Namely, electric motors can generate a lotof torque at low RPM speeds. Take the Toyota Prius, a hybrid that runs mostly on electricity, as an example. At some low RPM (sorry, can't remember the number), it generates around 240 ft-lbs of torque. That is about as much as the Toyota Camry, and that class of vehicles, but with a drastically smaller engine in a smaller car. As a result, that thing moves at low speed acceleration.
I've heard, however, that it's not quite as eager at higher RPM speeds (eg freeway). I'm sure that could be remedied in future designs, with better technology, but today's Prius is quite a nice little machine. Perfect city vehicle, it gets better MPG (around 55) in city driving than on the highway. It also uses flywheels to store energy garnered from regenerative breaking. Mmm.
Don't be silly .. the atmosphere is nearly 80% nitrogen.
The N2 for the cars will come from the atmosphere and will be released back, the effect will be zero.
I'm pretty sure I never: a) Said the idea was efficient b) Said the idea was feasable c) Said that the idea even existed for sure. The poster to whom I replied said that I had implied a perpetual motion device- an idea that I know is not possible and I also know is not applicable to my first post. I hope this clears up any confusion.
Love, Stu
Well, when the nitrogen goes from liquid to gas, it actually goes into a higher energy state. That is, it consumes energy. I don't see this as practical or even possible.
--
" What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?"
seeing how 21% of the atmosphere is already nitrogen, I don't see how this could cause a huge imbalance. after thousands of years breathing in relatively high quantities of the stuff shouldn't our bodies have adapted to getting rid of it already?
jungle is massive
Perhaps the key question is, how much energy does it take to produce liquid nitrogen; how efficient is the energy chain involved. Sure, the car is clean, but only by dint of moving the pollution back up the chain to the nitrogen liquifier.
A BLEVE is a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. When a liquid tank is punctured of course the pressure drops rapidly. If it is a bad puncture the pressure drops to fast for the mixture to vaporize normally (nonequlibrium). The substance goes past the normal vapor dome properties and reaches a point of mechanical istability called the second spinoidal (I think). I think it was Gibbs who first considered this.
Anyway to make a long story short. If the pressure drops very rapidly (due to a tank rupture) The entire contents of the tank reach the state where the pressure cannot drop anymore in the liquid phase and the entire substance vaporizes instantly and rapidly - you know a bomb.
It would at least be something to consider before we all strap LN2 to our backs.
I wasn't really making any statement regarding electric cars one way or the other, only mentioning the subject as a context in which many people demonstrate their total ignorance of simple thermodynamics.
You make some interesting and valid points, but I'm not convinced that purely electric cars win out over what can be done with the emerging "hybrid" car technology. And keep in mind that the 20% loss in transmission isn't the only loss that you're going to get. Power losses are also incurred in recharging batteries, batteries lose voltage to the atmosphere, batteries degrade over time; etc.
IMHO, I think that one of our biggest problems is just... way too many cars.
so if this happens, i could have a true "nitro burning funny car"...
woohoo!!!
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
This is exactly right. In fact, the maximum efficiency that you can achieve from an engine running off of a difference in heat is
1-(lowtemp/hightemp).This is called the Carnot efficiency. The temperatures are measured in Kelvins (Celsius plus 373 with 0 as absolute zero, I think). As you can see it is damn hard to get even 50% efficiency like this. You would have to have the liquid nitrogen about halfway between the outside temp and absolute zero. Liquid nitrogen is nowhere near this temperature. This is the real trouble with heat engines. Even the theoretical maximum efficiency (which is never achieved) isn't all that efficient.
Ethan Jewett
E-mail: Now what spa I mean e-mail site does Microsoft run again?
The environmental impact is null, since our atmosphere is already about three quarters nitrogen anyway. The problem with this is that liquid nitrogen is expensive. I don't see any way that nitrogen would be a feasable alternative to petroleum. It's the same hydrogen fuel cells, where you gonna get the H2?
The Original Celebrated Curiously Strong GHOST (mentha lemures)
Your point is essentially correct for the technologies that have historically been available. However, don't discount the potential of distributed power generation: new technologies, most notably fuel cells, make it a very real and viable possibility. Even if you backyard fuelcell is 10% less efficient than the power plant, you still win because you save transmission losses (which run in the 20-30% range IIRC).
There are other benefits too, mostly economic: the power generation capacity of an area can scale directly with its power requirements, rather than as a step-function (i.e. every 10-20 years, you build another big generator).
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
The idea does not working from temperature difference, rather pressure difference. The "Heat Exchanger" allows the liquid nitrogen to turn back to pressurized gas.. The pressure from the gas goes through a turbine or piston that in turn pushes the engine.
It seems like a pretty simple idea. Free air conditioning, now you just have to heat the car. And I bet heating a car is a lot simpler than cooling a car...
My 1.95 cents.
I'm sure others will point it out as well, but since the atmosphere is over 70% nitrogen, even if you were cobbling the nitrogen atoms together out of CmdrTaco's old gym socks using Stephenson-esque nanotech, you would have to spit an awful lot of nitrogen into the air to cause a problem (e.g. thinning of available oxygen). I can't imagine that cars and trucks could do it.
On the other hand, since you'll likely be getting the nitrogen from the copious supply that is floating around in our atmosphere, the only problem would be the waste oxygen and CO2 at the separation facilities. I can imagine that that much pure O2 getting thrown around is a dangerous thing....
If there's anything I learned from 10th grade chemistry (which, totaled, isn't much) is that hydrogen burns bright orange. This guy from CMU came to class and ignited a bunch of hydrogen balloons.
Not to dispute the whole Hindenburg thing. The footage showed the blimp burning slowly, which the guys on the Discovery channel said that wouldn't be the hydrogen but the blimp itself.
Wrong evidence, correct conclusion
The Original Celebrated Curiously Strong GHOST (mentha lemures)
The point is that the people with money can't corner the market on biofuels, so they don't invest in the development of engines to run off it.
Nearly every biofuel engine I have ever heard of has been produced by universities&colleges and not major companies, likely for this very reason.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
According to the best estimates, The Earth's oil supply will last another 10 years maybe 15. See http://www.hubbertpeak.com for excellent details.
Given that we're stuck with cars for the time being, nitrogen power really makes sense as a power source. One of the glaring problems that people tend to overlook when gushing about electric cars is that the electricity is almost as environmentally-unfriendly to generate as the original gasoline. Nitrogen isn't a perfect solution, but it could well be a major part of the future of transportation.
Fast Food is not a byproduct of "Car lifestyle" but of the daily rush....
Eliminate cars... for me this isn't even a hypatheical sence I've done it... I walk everywhere... but thats not so easy for most people...
I carry everything in an oversized backpack (Nicknamed The backpack of doom) so I don't lose the carrying capacity of a car..
And.. I eat at a fast food place on my way to work.. Accially I just buy food at a fast food place stuff it in the back pack and eat once I get to work. Still it's a matter of convence. It's not an automotive convence but a general convence...
I must add.. that for most people automobils are not a convence but a nessisty.. People don't usually live walking distence from work (as I do).
Also part of what makes it posable for me to walk everywhere is I can walk a long distence with out getting tired. To find a decent book store I need to walk halfway accrost town (this wasn't the case in the past but the closer B&N closed in favor of being online).
Anyway unless your a health nut with a close job or are in olypic trainning and you have a $100 to $500 backpack (Mine is $100 the $500 is a really nice hiking pack) I don't recomend giving up your car.
PS. I'm nither heath nut nore in Olympic trainning... just one of those nutjobs who go walking to think things out.. in my case coding problems... and I end up 3 citys away... having to walk back....
I don't actually exist.
Well, a small correction, it isn't inert under very high temperatures (like in an engine's combustion chamber), which is why the exhaust contains nitrogen oxides, which I believe are thought to deplete the ozone layer, incidentally.
I havent read the 400 posts before me yet.
but.
i dont get what the big deal is. no one is looking for less polution. they want cheaper gas, and to not put the polution right over the citys and everything where all the people are.
if nitrogen is kept in a sturdy tank, it can be kept liquid at any temperature (within reason.)
Look at nuclear power plants. they have very high temp liquid water runing thru pipes.
nitrogen will expand to turn a turbine (a tesla tubine (highly efficent, and relatively maintenance free)if people are smart) and it will expand because its boiling point is low. its also warm so will have some of the energy it needs to expand.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
It's all about generating energy (somewhere), storing it (in the vehicle), and releasing it so it moves the car in a controlled fashion.
Here's what I propose: install giant flywheels at healthclubs that are tied to the exercise machines. The club doubles as a fuel (spin?) station for your car. Home models available. I think rowing machines are most easily adaptable to this.
Ok, that's obviously bs, but there ought to be a few ways to capture some of the free energy produced by people (descending elevators, regenerative braking for autos, any others?)
great, a lot of stinky cars... the whole world is gonna reek...
You ever seen the waste from gold/platinum mining. That's nasty stuff. I'll stick with ethanol/methanol as soon as some one can come up with a decent lightweight ceramic engine. And when they put it in a decent motorbike. The motorbike's my answer - efficient in road usage and fuel, low emmissions and FAST!
.sig
crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?
It is generally accepted that glitzy summer SFX movies are not the best sources of scientific insight. Metals which are room temperture solids are not going to suddenly change their microstructure upon further chilling. Exploding robots notwithstanding, I have plunged steel, glass, ceramics, aluminum and many other materials into liquid nitrogen many times without mishap. Last time I checked, rockets using cryogenic fuels weren't crystallizing and shattering either.
To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel.
While it is true that it takes energy to make LN2, this is true of any stored energy.
It is a Good Thing(tm) when using dirty energy sources like coal & oil to do so in large optimized fixed sites, where you don't have to drag your pollution remediation equipment along with you.
Releasing any single fuel's by-products into the atmosphere is going to cause a problem. No matter what it is. But why only use one fuel? Why not have a dozen fuels, reducing the emissions of any one fuel by 11/12?
My first reason would be gas stations. Could they feasibly carry a dozen different fuels? Do different fuels have different benefits? Why not have different fuels depending on the type of car, like how some things -still- use diesel?
Also, with a dozen different fuels, there would be competition between fuels. If gas costs 1.60/gallon and rising people will just stop buying gas-powered cars, or if it gets bad enough, have their cars converted to a cheaper source. No more being screwed by gas companies..
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
It could be almost as bad as dumping millions of gallons of Dihydrogen Monoxide into our lakes and rivers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've met the fella that heads up the The Cross Creek Initiative. They are basically a non-profit organization promoting alternative fuels. Hydrogen is what they believe in the most. I've read some of the company reports on hydrogen they have, along with many many letters of support from various universities and scientists world-wide.
Worth checking out if you're interested in options to centralized power/alternative fuels. The fella I mentioned put it to me this way:
20 years ago when you went into a bank and asked to see a computer, they took you down to the basement and showed you the huge mainframe sitting there. At desks were dumb terminals connected to a centralized computer. Now when you go into a bank, you see 10's to 100's of seperate computers. Decentralized. Hydrogen can do the same with powering our houses, vehicles, etc....
searcher
I have some factual and opinon quibles with your post:
;-D
<I>Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.</I>
The cost to transport and obtain gasoline is incredibly low. This is mostly because we are on the "down" side of the infrastructure curve. All of the expensive stuff (eg refineries, storage tanks, oil tankers, etc) are mostly in place and paid off. Now we are in the "repair & replace" side of the curve. The biggest expense for a gallon (or litre) is the taxes on it. Also, it may be possible to create a gasoline substitute using coal tar, natural gas, or even bio-engineering. I would change it to 'Renewable - maybe'.
<I>Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Liquid nitrogen is INCREDIBLY easy to make. All it requires is a rather mundane staged air compressor, cooling coil, and a drip collector. It is simple enough you could set up a windmill to make liquid nitrogen. We don't go out of our way to manufacture liquid nitrogen now, and you can buy it in quantities as much as you can carry at a cost litre for litre that is cheaper than beer (and WAY cheaper than soda). The big hairy expense with liquid nitrogen (or any cryogenic liquid for that matter) is the storage cost. However, if you are planning on using it fast (a few hours), you can store it in styrofoam buckets safely. Liquid nitrogen has the advantage of being the easiest and safest cryogenic to store.
Exactly what is the pollution produced when you make liquid nitrogen? Liquid Oxygen? Heck, that isn't pollution, that's product. You sell that to all the aging baby boomers. I know. Many moons ago, I delivered cryogenic O2 to older folks with respiratory ailments. It was a great college job. You REALLY get treated well when you are literally delivering people the air that they breath.
<I>Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Sorry to burst your bubble, but burning H2 produces lots of nasty nitrate compounds. The problem is that burning H2 is only 'clean' when you: a) burn it ONLY with O2 and b) make absolutely sure that the combustion products are allowed to cool sufficiently prior to release. Live steam will corrode metals, and if hot enough will react with the surrounding air to make those nasty nitrates and carbon compounds again. The Hydrogen Economy zealots would have you believe that Hydrogen burns 'totally clean'. I will grant that it burns much cleaner than gasoline, but about the same as methane or alcohol, and they are MUCH easier to handle.
Cost to transport/obtain is high. Hydrogen is a low density and VERY reactive cryogenic. It embrittles virtually every metal known. We had to learn how to handle it easily in order to put men on the moon. That does not make it cheap, though.
The cost to make as a renewable is high. This is because you have to split it off of its prefered terrestrial mate: water. It takes LOTS of electricity to do this and is very inefficient. The cost as a non-renewable is moderate. You can create hydrogen gas by reducing methane (natural gas). It makes lots of nice pollution in the process. Then you get to compress and cool it to store it as a liquid, more money spent. This is how ALL industrial liquid hydrogen is made.
<I>Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.</I>
The cost to transport electricity is moderate. Those power lines that everyone SO love to have hanging over their heads lose about 1% per mile. (It may be better now, I haven't checked lately). Electricity itself is expensive, so any transport losses drive the cost up rapidly. Add in lots of nice infrastructure (like substations) which requires regular maintenance and you drive the cost up even higher. The other big cost problem is load balancing. If the loads are not balanced well, then it is costing you mucho money as the 'excess' electricity radiates away as heat in the lines. Load balancing a big area is a black art.
The cost to make electricity is high. You are transforming a fundamentally cheap energy source (oil, natural gas, coal) and transforming it into another form. A big commercial plant is lucky if it can turn 60% of the total combustion heat into electricity. This applies even more to 'expensive' electricity generation techniques such as nuclear, tidal, solar, or wind.
Add to this the horror that is battery production and use, and you make electricity very difficult to use efficiently. Perhaps something like very high speed flywheels or polymer catalyst fuel cells will allow us to better use the "electic option" for transportation.
<I>Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable -yes. </I>
The cost to make is medium to high. Both require the transformation of low density sunlight into plant sugars. This requires LOTS of land. Land is expensive and plants are inefficient. Lets not even get into the issue of water availability. No neither of these renewables is cheap.
There is some production of pollutants in the production of both alcohol and bio-diesel. The primary gaseous product is methane, a known green-house gas. You can capture the methane as a secondary fuel source, but it just adds cost with little effective return. The other biproducts are solid wastes. These can be simple things like celluloses. There are usually some nasty stuff leftover that contains lots of ketones and other stuff fairly toxic stuff. Just ask a distiller what he does with his 'mash' when he's done.
One pollution benefit with corn based bio-diesel is that your car smells like fresh popcorn.
<I>Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.</I>
They are certainly a nice supplement. I would love to see them used more. However, they cannot fill more than a fraction of the current demand.
Forget fusion. Thermonuclear fusion has been "20 years from commercial use" for the last 50 years. We aren't really any closer to tokamak fusion than we were in the late 60's. The current research is underfunded and (IMHO) headed in the wrong direction. There are some glimmers: the modest revival of interest in inertial confinement fusion (e-beam, n-beam, p-beam, and laser), muon catalyzed fusion, and He3 fusion. There even seems to be some substantive data still coming out of the so-called "cold fusion" folks. Regardless, most fusion approaches are going to produce lots of hard radiation: neutrons, gamma & x-rays. Don't expect Doc Emmet E. Brown's "Mr. Fusion" any time soon.
Why the bias towards centralized energy sources? That is the exact opposite of what I want. I want off the grid. Pull down those ugly power lines. Clean up our air. I want a cheap, clean, personal power source that I can use for all my home and transportation needs.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy storage. Some possibilities are non-platinum catalyst fuel cells, high speed flywheels, liquid nitrogen, buckytube hydrogen gas storage pods, and 'perfect mirror' light/heat storage units.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy generation. Some possibilitities are 70%+ solar cells which use micron sized dipole antennas (rectennas) or quantum dots, methane cycle fuel cells, low grade thermal-isotopic heaters, magneto-hydrodynamic generators, and maybe even "cold-fusion" power generators.
Mostly I would like someone to develop a form of electrical power storage that would give us the equivalent energy storage capacity of 100 litres of gasoline in about a kilogram of "battery". Power generation we can do (if somewhat badly). Storage and distribution are the key.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
...could probably be considered a non-issue seeing as the atmosphere is made up of roughly 70% nitrogen already.
Nitrogen is also an inert element, so it doesn't go forming nasty things that deplete ozone layers. Every breath you take is mostly nitrogen already.
I doubt you will have a flash freezing problem with these things. I have put my hand into liquid nitrogen during physics pracs (e.g. to retrieve frozen bananas ;) It takes quite a while for a banana to freeze solid.
I suppose if there is a large enough pool of the stuff lying around after an accident and one of the people involved in the accident has part of themselves immersed in it for a few minutes, they might get frost bite, but I should think that is unlikely.
I'd be more worried about battery acid than liquid nitrogen.
-- Wodin
Putting it simply and suscintly; "It ain't gonna happen."
Even propane and CNG (compressed natural gas) have not been able to make many inroads as automotive fuels because the infrastructure isn't there to support these vehicals beyond their local area. Most propane powered fleets are used as local delivery vehicals only, this way they can re-fuel at their motor pool.
I am not saying that a nitrogen powered car is out of the question. I kinda like the idea myself. There are questions that I have though. How do you get past the fuel delivery issue? How do you construct a light-weight storage tank that will resist the release of the liquified gas in an accident? It may be inert but the cold liquid could still pose a real threat (it could freeze ya or deprive ya of o2).
Mileage wise, the "fuel" does not seem that it would be as good. It only expands itself, it does not combine with other gasses to explode and exert the kind of force that a hydrocarbon engine does! I don't know exactly how bad this would hurt the MPG but I'd bet that you couldn't hope for half the miles per gallon you get today.
Fuel taxes pay for our roads. Roads are not cheap. Therefore the taxes we pay on a gallon of gas are important to us. How would you apply tax to nitrogen based fuel if the effiency were much poorer than hydrocarbon products? How would you collect the taxes efficently if the manufacturing (or more accurately extraction) were de-centralized?
The fuel cells being developed for automotive use today are able to use hydrocarbon based fuels. They simply strip the hydrogen from them and use it while they dispose of the carbon (through the exhaust). Their effiency is currently similar to that of the internal combustion engine (however ineffiencies further down the line lead to added loss)and their expense is now falling faster than the designers expected. For these reasons, the fuel cell is the front runner.
The fuel cell is still expensive and can only be found in exparmental settings, best guesses are that it is five years away from being able to be mass produced and perhaps ten years away from acceptance. Its first uses are likely to be in those same places where we see propane used today, in urban fleet vehicals.
Fuel cells that use hydrogen rather than hydrocarbons are easier to produce and more efficient. Like nitrogen hydrogen needs to be stored in a compressed liquid form to be useable as a fuel - this means that the storage vessles and "plumbing" will face the same issues as liquid nitrogen. On top of that hydrogen is explosive (so it could be really nasty in an accident). Hydrogen is plentifull but it is often "locked" with other atoms that makes it difficult to simply "harvest" (like you could with nitrogen). This means that a safe efficient system of transport would need to be setup from some sort of "refinery." to supply the "gas stations." Again, this is an expense that companies will not want to make without being assured that their investment will pay itself back.
Are we stuck with hydrocarbon fuels? For today, yes. For tomorrow, maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the most promising thing would be the development of a hybrid hydrocarbon/hydrogen fuel cell that would deliver more power and effenciy when used with hydrogen alone. This would first allow for common acceptance of fuel cell powered cars and would allow for the gradual transition from gasoline to hydrogen while providing an incentive to drivers to purchase hydrogen when it is available.
There are other issues that I haven't covered here, particularly the fact that batteries remain heavy and expensive, that are also issues in the development of alternitive fuel cars. I remain excited about the concept and can only hope that within my lifetime I will be able to purchase and drive a viable family car that does not contain a conventional internal combustion engine.
There won't be a polutiion problem as our atmosphere is about 79% nitrogen and that's where they will get it from anyway.
It costs more than gasoline or diesel (about the same as beer), requires a dewer (insulated container), evaporates, and can suffocate as it has no odor. It takes energy to produce it, too.
What's the efficiency compared to gasoline?
Nate
No one has ever come up with a good idea like that! http://www.mtsc.unt.edu/CooLN2Car.html
Whereas electric cars still have a lot of room for growth... lithium ion has still not gotten practical for instance, and NiMH are not used enough because they are too expensive. The flywheel storage solutions are looking promising too... they can be designed to directly replace lead-acid batteries (same form factor, same voltage) yet have a higher power density. And there are fuel cells, but that is not as mature a technology. All of these methods are easy to integrate into an electric car platform.
A Nevada company Power Technology Inc., is currently developing a new type of car battery to replace lead-acid battery. The battery is based on technology from inventor Alvin Snaper and uses a Nickel-Iron/Alkaline electrochemistry adapted from electric cars built by Thomas Edison. You can actually drink the fluid directly from the battery, yet because of improvements in the design, and the lack of lead, it only needs half the space, and a quarter of the weight of traditional car batteries.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I don't think so.
:).
By doing what you suggest you just cancel out the torque, but not the main gyroscopic effect.
You'll have to mount the flywheels on gimbals or similar stuff, so that the car can go up hills or negotiate tilted roads. If not you'll find the car trying stay horizontal as it tries to go up a hill
If you want to look far enough into the future to the point where gasoline isn't the primary source of fuel for vehicles, I just can't see nitrogen as being a fuel source. The next leap in technology would be a car that required no "fuel" per say - for example, a solar powered car which would be fueled by the sun. The problem with any traditional fuel (and I'd count nitrogen in this category too) is that so much energy is wasted in preparing the fuel before it even gets into the vehicle. I mean, just look at gasoline...it has to be drilled out of the ocean, hauled to land, refined, distributed, sold, etc... that's a lot of wasted energy! On the other hand, sunlight is sunlight...until the sun burns out, we've got this untapped resource. We just have to learn how to use it to the best of our abilities. -GL
I used to think you were funny.
Not when I posted anonymously, I imagine.
To celebrate the end of the karma freeze, I posted all the stupid crap with my account that I would normally post with an AC account because it shouldn't even start with a rating of "1".
My karma took a satisfying drop.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Isn't absolute zero -273.15Celcius (0 Kelvin), (not -373)?
The submitter of the article questions about the polution of nitrogen into the atmosphere. This is not a concern because our atmosphere is something like 70% nitrogen and we would take the nitrogen from the atmosphere to use in our cars.
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May the source be with you!
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May the source be with you!
Jason Zwolak
This reminds me of the whole "water powered car" scam that someone brings up every few years.
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I got me one of them little scooters.
lf.o
No way, man! FLYING cars are the future. EVERY sci-fi flick shows them! :-)
JL
"Where are my flying cars?"--Cmdr Sisco, IBM commercial
The best short-term compromise for this problem is to make an electric car that is charged via a gasoline engine. The advantages to this is there is no clutch, transmission, or drivetrain, and the engine is either on or off so it's always operating at peak efficiency.
Considering the atmosphere is around 80% nitrogen anyway, the phrase "Pissing in the sea" springs to mind...
I doubt there would be too much environmental impact, seeing as the atmosphere (as in the air we breathe) is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% trace gasses (varies slightly for urban areas.....) as long as the nitrogen is not in an extremely concentrated cloud, people should still be able to breathe. i remember reading somewhere that if the air one breathes exceeds 12% CO2, one will asphyxiate (sp?). IMHO think I would rather breathe the nitrogen... but thats just me.
end
"who? huh? what?"
Keep in mind that thermodynamics is fine and dandy, but there is no energy being produced by liquid nitrogen. It's really just storing energy.
In this sense, nothing really produces energy. Energy is only stored. Entropy always increases. Viva la heat death!
baldeep
Using the energy from nitrogen (or releasing the energy used in compressing and liquifying it beforehand), although clean at the point of immediate use, is wasteful. You need large liquifaction plants and cryogenic storage facilities. Admittedly, the problem is less severe than with hydrogen, but it is the same kind of problem. The short term answer is combined gasoline (or diesel)/electric systems similar to the Saturn automobile. Medium term, it will be battery electric with small diesel or gas booster engines to provide increased range. Longer term, it will be battery electric with fuel cell boosters or alcohol powered engine boosters. There are two basic problems - the efficiency and cost of refining, distributing and storing the fuel & converting it to useful power, and environmental problems. The last is the simplest one - as long as a carbon based fuel is used (gas, diesel, alcohol, coal, heavy oil) & burned at high temperature, there will be problems with NOx & CO/CO2 emissions. These are best dealt with by restricting their use wherever possible to fixed generation plant, which can have complex and highly effective emissions control gear not realistic for a mobile or small plant (e.g. a car or small generator). Where mobile plant is necessary, it needs to be as clean as possible, which is most easily achieved by using it as little as possible. A small engine boosting an electric drive system is therefore a major step on the way. Most of the power generation needs to be done in large, fixed plant where it is much more efficient and clean. The choice of fuel becomes less important as less is used, but gasoline and (especially) diesel, are filthy fuels, esp. when burned in limited air (inside a car engine). Cleaner combustion can be had by burning the fuel in excess air (e.g. to vaporize water to run a steam engine). Generally, alcohol is a cleaner fuel, as well as being infinitely renewable. One might imagine a variety of designs on the market before they are whittled down to one or two basic options. Perhaps there will be a renewal of interest in steam vehicles, and some wacky designer might come up with a hybrid electric & alcohol-burning steam hybrid. The use of liquid hydrogen (for combustion or for conversion in a fuel cell) is not so likely to happen because of cost and safety considerations. My money is on batteries and alcohol.
The engineering behind nitrogen powered cars is pretty compelling, but there are some big drawbacks to using nitrogen as a vehicle fuel source. First and foremost is that nitrogen is very heavy. Imagine the weight of carrying a load of compressed liquid nitrogen, the necessary coolant to keep is liquid, the weight of the container, and the weight of the engine itself. Sure, nitrogen does deliver more power than batteries, but the power/weight ratio would seem to be prohibitive to me. Even factoring in the composite materials that would presumably be developed in the next 50 years, nitrogen just doesn't have the performance to justify the weight.
The fuel of the future, IMHO is hydrogen. Long maligned for the Hidenburg disaster, hydrogen is a fuel source with a lot of potential. (In fact, it was *not* hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg disaster. Static electricity discharged between sections of the outer skin covering, igniting the highly flammible weatherproofing compound that covered the skin of the Hindenburg. That's why the fire was described as a bright orange - a hydrogen fire would be virtually colorless. The myth of a hydrogen accident on the Hindenburg has attached a stigma to hydrogen that is based on poor evidence.)
The way a car hydrogen engine could be made safe is through the use of advanced carbon nanotube technology. These nanotubes can trap the hydrogen molecules, making them safe to transport. The holy grail of hydrogen/nanotube research is a nanotube that can hold 65% of its own weight in hydrogen. Above that figure, hydrogen fuel cells become economically feasible. Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel that provides a great deal of energy and can power a car with greater efficiency than electric motors or gasoline engines. If someone can create a nanotube storage system (and there have been rumors that breakthroughs are pending - they're at least up to 10% hydrogen/carbon) then hydrogen will become the fuel of choice for automobiles.
Is the way forward, thats why GM smothered it. Still too much money in petroleum.
The specific heat of liquid nitrogen is pretty low. So it's not that dangerous in the event of an accident, although if you were completely bathed in it, it would kinda suck. I guess it's a matter of quantity...
But back in the physics department, we used to shoot each other with liquid nitrogen from squirt guns. Yow! That gets your attention.
Then there was Frank, who would actually swallow a few drops, and belch long musical selections.
As for transporting it, a thermos dewar is your best bet. Make it out of stainless steel, so you don't have shattering glass in an accident. I'm not sure how much you'll need to have in your tank to fuel the car though, so it may get big, bulky, and heavy.
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bukra fil mish mish
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Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Yes, there's a limit. Most modern landfills have a system to collect methane, and larger landfills use it to drive a power plant. But not much of a power plant. After the first few years, gas production declines. The power plants are usually removed, one engine at a time, over the first five years. A number of the dumps along the San Francisco Bay had such systems at one time; the Menlo Park dump still has at least one engine running.
Sewerage treatment plants usually generate enough methane to power their own operations. Sometimes they can sell a little power. But it isn't a big-time energy source.
Most serious biomass power plants run off some kind of agricultural waste. Even that's marginal. The ethanol industry, by the way, is a joke; it takes more energy to make the ethanol than comes out. It's a tax break Archer-Daniels-Midland exploits, not a real industry.
A liquid nitrogen car would need some kind of engine to convert the expansion of the gas into rotary motion, which is inelegant and mechanically complex... and not being able to directly drive the wheels, it would entail a need for transmission, clutch, driveline, differential, and all that other yucky stuff which internal-combustion cars have, but which could be eliminated using a proper electric design.
About the only plus I can think of is free air conditioning (a non-trivial consideration in Phoenix, where I live!), because the exhaust (non-toxic nitrogen gas) is actually quite cool. But in a conventional electric vehicle, air conditioning takes a small percentage of the power necessary to actually move the car, so it's not impossible to have the creature comforts we're used to.
In short I'd expect EVs to become mainstream long before the liquid nitrogen idea does, but maybe it will surprise us and find some niche where it fits better.
Actually, renewable energy sources (ie. NOT fossil and NOT Nuclear) CAN supply the world with the energy it needs. The problem is that we currently have not PRODUCED the production facilities to do so. The current wave-energy transformers are to large and ineffective. The current solar cells (electrical enrgy) are also not sufficiently efficient to do more than drive a car a mere 40-50 KPH. Windmills are to cumbersome and expensive to put up, but produce MASSIVE amounts of energy if there's wind enough (BTW; I have a patent for sale on a high efficiency, almost soundless windmill that can be scaled REALLY small).
All of these are limiting factors, however, some are technical some are logistical. Why do You think we Danes INVENTED the windmill ? Because the number of days with no wind over here are virtually 0. Why do solarengery races tak place in desserts ? Because there's the most sun. Why is the most common renewable enrgysource purchased by homeowners the solar heat generator, because it's the most efficient (cost and energy wise) they can get. Why are dams build where they are, becuase there's water there.
Truly the world CAN survive without fossil fuel and without nuclear power, it's just a matter of political will, and MONEY, because we need to INVEST in new technology, but the fossil fuel plants, and the nuclear power plants are already there, so why not keep using them. It's so much cheaper... And THAT'S why the world "needs" fossil and nuclear fuel. Technologically the fossil fuel was obsoleted more than 50 years ago.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
This isn't exactly anything new... The University of Washington has been researching this for a while and has a working (albeit inefficient) model of a LN-powered car...
Here's a link: LN 2000
At least you can launch stuff liquid nitrogen... Cool page.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
What amazes me is your ability to see a perpetual motion machine when there is none. A perpetual motion machine requires no constant energy input, this one does- electricity. Thanks for making an intelligent (?) contribution.
Love, Stu
Folks,
While things like hydrogen power, fuell cells, battery power and now nitrogen power is potentially great for automobiles, people are forgetting that gasoline and diesel engines are far cleaner today then they were 30 years ago when emission controls first became common.
On the engine side, the rapid development more precise fuel metering, better combustion chamber design, catalytic converters and sophisticated computer controls have cut emission levels on gasoline and diesel engines over 93% compared to 1970 levels.
And today's gasoline and diesel burn quite a bit cleaner than the old fuels, too. Eliminating tetraethyl lead has reduced a major pollutant source, for one thing.
Already, the technology is now in place to reduce engine emissions to almost 98% lower than 1970 levels. The combination of direct injection of fuel into combustion chambers, closely-coupled catalytic converters or particulate traps (for diesel engines) and the advent of low-sulfur content fuels (sulfur content under 80 parts per billion) in the next few years will result in gasoline and diesel engines where the exhaust may end up being -cleaner- than the air going into the engine!
Besides, there is still a surprisingly amount of petroleum reserves we've not even come close to tapping. Much of China's oil fields have yet to be tapped, there are many oil fields in Siberia that have been barely exploited, and the oil sands in western Canada have potentially more oil than all of Saudi Arabia!
Right now, scientists are studying the use of plant products to produce a synthetic diesel fuel equivalent called SynFuel. This could mean that agricultural waste could end up being converted to SynFuel, and we essentially have a renewable source of a diesel fuel equivalent.
In short, technology has advanced to the point that gasoline and diesel engines will still be viable 20 years from now, but they will burn extremely cleanly and a large fraction of the fuel source may come from the byproducts of agriculture.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The USA has *excess* cropland. The US government currently pays farmers to *not grow* crops, in order to keep the price of crops up. Growing plants to turn into alcohol fuel would not interfere with food production.
The amount of cropland that lays unused because it's not needed to supply food in the USA is scary. It'd be better if it was put to some use. People still freak out about fission, and it's not especially dangerous. Satilite collected solar power beamed down by microwave can be inherantly *more* dangerous than fission...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I have difficulty believing that. Do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Spin up a gyroscope with its axis at 45 degrees to the horizontal, then balance the lowest point of its axle on your finger. Now imagine a black box around the system, ie. with the gyroscope spinning inside it. The centre of gravity of the black box lies beyond the point of support, yet the black box doesn't topple over.
... indeed.
Internal forces acting externally
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I saw one run on TV about a year ago. It did work. It was a University project somewhere and it putted around like a golf cart.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
great, a lot of stinky cars... the whole world is gonna reek...
If anything, methanol would be less smelly than petrol, surely?
The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Methanol on the other hand can be obtained biologically via fermentation, and the plants grown for this purpose will absorb the CO2 produced when the fuel is used in a fuel cell. Thus a methanol economy can be much more ecologically sound than a hydrogen one.
A Canadian company called TriTec Power Systems Ltd. is already marketing a device that can use compressed nitrogen to power a vehicle. However, it is not limited to nitrogen - they're actually promoting it as a modern-day steam engine. Of course, it will work with any expanding gas, so you could even use dry ice if you really wanted to (although I have a feeling you wouldn't get nearly as much power out of dry ice as you would nitrogen or steam).
Mr. Ska
There are many different sources of fuel for cars that are much cheaper and more efficient and less polluting than petroleum. None of them are going to catch on though. If just the US stopped using fossil fuels for cars, it would turn our economy upside-down. Half of our economy is based on fossilfuels. If our economy goes belly up, so will the rest of the world. All of these nice, fuel efficient cars and such have been, and will be shot down by our government. I saw an article in PopSci one time about a car that ran on water using electricity and the hydrogen in water...there are many ideas such as this that will never make it to market because our car manufacterer's are in cahoots with the fuel manufacturer's. Until we run out of fossil fuels, or come real close to it, fossil fuels will rule. I don't think they are going to be replaced any time soon.
I am not saying that I would not like it if they were though...I think it would be great if these alternatives would catch on. There are so many good things that would come of it....but...then again, you have the bad things like loss of jobs, money, petroleum producing countries, etc...it would change the whole world.
The anti-salmon
The mistake you seem to be making is in the assumption that a thermovoltaic system could convert heat to electricity without using a heat sink. That assumption is false. Consider the photovoltaic cell. A typical PV cell is maybe 15% efficient, so 85% of the absorbed energy is converted to heat. If the sun radiates at 5700 K (the source temperature) and the PV cell is dumping heat to the environment at 323 K, the entropy change per joule of light is (0.85/323) - (1/5700) which is greater than zero. Even the PV cell is subject to the Second Law, and so will the postulated TV cell.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Safety is not the issue, T2 aside, Nitrogen is significantly safer than any other fuel source currently on the books. It is totally inert, easy to store, and full emersion in the event of an accident is really no likely. The real question is efficiency. How much energy does it take to create, store and transport, and what is the power to weight ratio. It is the hidden costs of alternative energies that is the problem. If it requires three times as much energy to produce the same effect, even given the higher efficiency of macro energy production, it's not viable.
That's a wild claim. Let's consider :
(a) "Low Cost." Liquid nitrogen is >-200F. That's cold enough to crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?). What kind of container is needed to hold it and can stand a collision so that it does not shatter into bits? Plastic probably. Composite highly likely. That's not to mention the plumbing, the compressors. Doh!
(b) "Pollution Free." To freeze something takes energy. To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel. So you put in an extra efficiency factor in your fuel chain. You make the City Mayors happy, but you make the people around power plants Extremely Unhappy.
(c) "Safe". Things take can crystalize metal is more dangerous than things that burn. A 3rd degree burns may be survivable. A crystalized head is not.
The "small town engineer"'s nitrogen powered car is a paper design (with all due respects). I remembered doing something like that (N2 powered motor) in a thermo problemset back in school. It's nothing new.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Sure, methanol is poisonous, but so is gasoline. People probably don't drink gasoline because it smells bad. I beleive that this smell is added to prevent accidental drinking (at least I know it is for methane). Ethanol would be safer (our bodies don't convert it to fomaldehyde and formic acid as they do with methanol), but the temptation to drink it would probably be too great for some people. Regardless, ethanol is corrently used to cut down gasoline in the corn belt, and can be used at about 30% or so without modifications to the engine (it runs cleaner and soaks up water in the gas tank too). The reason why we aren't switching fuels is because the oil industry is too big and powerful to let that happen (conspiracy!).
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Not much. The atmosphere contains 78% nitrogen...
Mundus Vult Decipi
This problem goes away if you just include the oxygen in your liquid. Unfortunately, liquid air has a tendency to fractionate itself during evaporation, leaving behind LOX. LOX is fire and explosion hazard (add LOX to asphalt and set it on fire, it goes BOOM).
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Imagine a leak. Imagine happily driving, and then feeling very very drowsy....without knowing that you have a leak. You don't smell it, it won't kill you. But it will slowly suffocate you without you knowing it.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
But here's the cool part: They don't make or collect the methane specifically to power cars. It's already being generated by rotting biomatter in landfills. It's just a matter of collecting it and they were doing that anyway and burning it to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions because methane is estimated to contribute 20-24 times as much to the greenhouse effect as the CO2 produced by burning it. So basically, from an environmental standpoint, these 20 cars are free.
There's an upper limit on how much methane collected from landfills can do for us. Not enough methane is produced by our waste to power all our cars. The people involved in this methane experiment estimate that the methane being collected now could power 1200-1400 cars and it's not overly optimistic to assume there could be 1000 methane cars on the streets of Reykjavik in just a couple of years. The CO2 emissions saved by 1000 cars would be 100.000 tonnes per year, or 5% of Iceland's total CO2 emissions. In the slightly longer term, it's estimated that by 2012, we'll be collecting enough methane for 2500 cars, which means a savings of 12.5% of the current emission rate. That's not going to take us all the way, but that doesn't make those 12.5% any less important.
Economy is the big problem though. The methane infrastructure costs money to build and operate. Currently, you get 23% better mileage per dollar with methane, but only because methane isn't being taxed. In Iceland, as in much of Europe, a litre of gasoline costs about the same as a gallon costs in the US and 70% of that is tax. The same tax on methane would kill it.
There's also another way of using the methane. Just burn it instead of other fuels in power plants. It's being done on a small scale already. The Icelandic power grid is fed by hydroelectric powerplants so this doesn't do anything to lower Iceland's emissions, but it can help elsewhere. Many of the other "clean fuels" for cars aren't really much cleaner since they have to be produced with energy generated at a power plant which may itself be running on dirty fuel, but if the powerplant is running on methane, you get a real benefit.
PS. The numbers I user here are from this article (it's in Icelandic). If any of them are wrong, I wouldn't know.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
In the event of a tank rupture (I'm assuming a car would be carrying a good quantity of liquid nitrogen, but perhaps I'm wrong) the hazards from liquid nitrogen are twofold: Freezing and suffocation.
If you are really close to the tank when it ruptures, you have a good chance of getting frozen. If the nitrogen has to fly through air as a thin stream for several feet, it won't likely hurt you. I've had liquid nitrogen poured (purposefully) onto my hand in a pencil thick stream from about 4 feet above it. By the time it had reached my hand it was very close to boiling and vaporized quite rapidly in my hand. It "danced" in my hand like water on a hot skillet (CMA disclaimer: I do not recommend repeating this without a trained cryogenic gas safety expert present, you could be seriously injured if you mess this up). However, having 20 gallons of liquid N dumped in your lap from 1' away would be quite lethal. It is all a matter of range and quantity.
However being in a nice enclosed space like a car presents another hazard from liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen expands a LOT, and strangely does not contain any oxygen. If your nitrogen tank bursts and vents into the cabin of your car, it will drive all the air out of it. If you are unconscious or too dazed to get out of the car quickly you could suffocate very quickly. (it does not take more than 2 or 3 breaths of pure nitrogen before your blood O2 drops enough to make you pass out anyway). The resulting gas is also cold, thus denser than air and will not "float away" on it's own.
Admittedly CO2 presents a much bigger suffocation hazard, but that too is generally not used in enclosed spaces. I guess I am also ignoring the forceful explosion hazzard caused by the rapid expansion of liquid nitrogen insided an enclosed space, but this post is getting too long :)
A fuller outlook may be had by consulting the international chemical safety card for nitrogen (courtesy of the CDC).
-Matt
I think a good orbital platform would work wonders. Pump up all the gas you need, the atmosphere is 80% nitogen after all. shield the tank from the sun, store the runoff in small shielded tank. Send the small tanks back to earth, filled with liquid N. You also have plenty of O2 to hand off to the space station.
later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere? Well, first off, 80%of the atmisphere is nitrogen (if 100% was O2, then air would be ignitable). If we have plants that purify the N2 in the air, and change that to fuel, well theres no bad impact.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
false. nitrogen boils at 77K at 1 atm. it will not liquify at room temperature simply by being compressed(ie. like propane can be). its called the critical temperature(for Nitrogen it's like 126 Kelvin[-233F] at 33 atmospheres). below which, you cannot liquify a gas no matter what the pressure is increased to.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It seems much more likely that cars will run on proton emission membrane fuel cells, powered by ethanol. A company called Ballard Power produces them for automobiles, and they have made deals with both Ford and Daimler-Chrysler. These cars will be environmentally friendly, and are much further ahead in development than any nitrogen-powered car engine. (IIRC, Ballard is currently testing its fuel cells on buses in Chicago.)
car companies can now give the bonus of free cryogenic freezing to anyone in an accident....
--- Hey, Jesus is coming! Everyone look busy
I'm waiting for systems which use cheap materials for storage to get around that. Something like a photosynthetic rooftop which converts CO2 and water into methanol (CH3OH) and oxygen would fit this bill, because the cost of storing a liquid like MeOH is minuscule compared to the cost of a battery or even the tanks for holding H2.
The energy density (both per volume and per mass) of mere hydrocarbon chemical fuels leaves every battery ever invented in the dirt. Don't even get me started with nuclear (you measure the output of a reactor fuel load in the tens of thousands of megawatt-days per ton).... There are many applications for which the need to carry your energy supply with you leads to a serious degradation in system performance when you try using renewables. Hydrocarbons and nuclear are not obsolete, quite the opposite. They are the gold standard that keeps renewables from gaining acceptance, because the systems for storing and delivering renewable energy fall so far short.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Everybody uses Kelvin these days, but you get exactly the same results with Rankine or any other absolute scale. You can prove this to yourself by multiplying the numerator and denominator of your equation by any non-zero factor. The result does not change.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Flywheels have promise as short term energy storage for things like regenerative braking, where the car's energy of motion would go into the flywheel as it slowed down, and then be used to accelerate later.
The gyroscopic forces can be eliminated (mostly) by having two flywheels spinning in opposote directions.
Flywheels can never (IMHO) be a full-time automotive engine for safety reasons. When a flywheel fails, its entire energy is released at once. The more energy a flywheel stores, the faster it has to spin and the shorter the time that its energy will be released in. So you'll have the equivalent energy of a tank of gas being released in about 20 microseconds. BOOM!!
Note that it is irrelevant what the flywheel is made of. Energy is energy, and it has to go somewhere. Unless you can convince me that the energy is in the form of neutrinos (lotsa luck!) it's going to be heat. Basically, in the case of (say) a catastrophic vacuum failure, your flywheel would turn into a ball of very hot plasma.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
If you aren't counting mass as energy (since nothing can use it directly), then combustion and other exothermic chemical reactions decrease the mass of the system very slightly, increasing the kinetic energy. Most of you know that nuclear reactions convert mass to (more conventional) energy, but relativity has turned out to be correct in that the chemical binding energy of a molecule actually increases its mass to slightly more than the sum of its parts' masses.
If you are talking about mass-energy, that is conserved absolutely.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
You're missing the "big picture"...
When all the world's oil reserves start drying up, guess who's going to be holding all the cards (plus a solid economy that DOESN'T rely on oil exports to survive)? It looks like a cold and calculated strategy to me, and extreemly far-sighted for a group of politicians facing re-election challenges every 2-8 years.
Well each stage of the process is compress, radiate the heat of compression, and then expand, So the description I gave just needs the phrase "repeat as needed" tacked on the end... -dp-
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
it seems to me you're going through two major energy losses -- one to cool the nitrogen, one to convert it to steam.
with something like fusion power and ultra capacitors, you get a carnot loss at the generation plant, line losses, but a relatively simple powerplant with a fantastic torque curve (electric motor).
how long til the naysayers finally admit that ZEV electric vehicles are the future?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
It's quite easy, you just store it in nitrogen...
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(A serious post, that I will try to keep short)
This is nothing new, the basic idea: burning fuel to move a car. The fuel you choose is arbitrary, and safty concerns are more or less moot with modern technology. I personally perfer hydrogen to nitrogen, simply because when you "burn" hydrogen you get water, which can than be electrolyzed (via solar power) back into hydrogen and oxygen. The reasons that hydrogen is not currently used as a primary fuel source is becuase of the hindenburg, and the space shuttle challenger, BUT I am willing to wager that no more people will be killed/injured with hydrogen powered cars than with petroleum powered cars (read about it and you will agree). The other reason is because of "big Detroit money" (you know what I mean)
One last point: If you think this has never been tried, then you should do a web/library search for "hydrogen power."
Anyhoo I could go on for hours but I won't.
You can generate electricity with any of the others (And many more besides, including hydrodams, solar and wind power), so clearly electricity can take on the properties of any of the others. You can even mix and match to tradeoff cost and pollution in any way you want.
Even alcohol will be more efficient, and less polluting run at a big power plant than in thousands of small engines run by ordinary people at variable speeds.
Nothing else comes close to the flexibility of electricity. It's a fundamental force of the universe. In my view it's as foolish to argue about how we power our cars as it is to argue about how we power our kitchen blenders.
The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Yes, but you can use solar power to manufacture hydrogen (e.g. in the Sahara, in the southwestern US, etc.), which can then be shipped in fuel cells to wherever it is needed. The entire cycle, from creation to burn, is thus clean, environmentally safe, and sustainable.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Well, for one thing, the car isn't actually burning nitrogen. It's just using some of its physical properties to store energy.
Burning nitrogen is something that you want t avoid doing in an automobile engine. In fact, your car has an "EGR" system ("Exhaust Gas Recirculation") which pumps a controlled amount of exhaust back into the engine to be re-burned. This helps to dilute the air/fuel mix in the engine and therefore lower the temperature of the combustion. Lower temperature = less nitrogen burning = less NOx emissions = less yellow haze over the city. If your state or province does an emissions test, you're going to fail it if your EGR system doesn't work.
Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid?Well, the risks are the same as carrying around tanks of LPG (liquified propane gas) or compressed natural gas. If they rupture but don't ignite, it'll get pretty damned cold. Since the nitrogen won't burn under normal conditions, I think you're still better off than you would be in a LPG/Natural Gas car. And, I'd suggest, a mechanical explosion caused by a compressed tank blowing up is probably more surviveable than a thermal explosion like a Ford Pinto gas tank.
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?Air is what, 78% nitrogen anyway? It's not an issue. You'll be taking nitrogen out of the air, compressing it, and then releasing it as the vehicle drives. It's not an issue at all, it's as environmentally benign as a hydrogen powered car (but a lot safer).
My only question is what powers the compressors that fill the pressurized tanks of nitrogen? That's really where the energy that runs the car is coming from; it's just being stored in a format that is convenient to a mobile vehicle. (Similiarily, a hydrogen vehicle will not be *powered* by hydrogen, it'll be powered by whatever actually broke the hydrogen away from the oxygen in a water molecule. (Chemical reaction, electrolysis of water, etc.) Hydrogen is just a convenient means of storing and carrying the energy.)
I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too.Keep it compressed to the liquid state in the vehicle's fuel tanks. Release it as you need it. As you decrease its pressure, it will evaporate at a boil from a liquid state to a gaseous state. As it evaporates, it will maintain the usual temperature one associates with liquid nitrogen.
Similarily, when water boils, it maintains the contant temperature of 100c (212F) until all the liquid water is gone. (Or you seal up the vessel to increase the pressure - car cooling systems are usually good to about 120c because they keep the coolant (mostly water with some ethylene glycol to prevent freezing) under a pressure of 10-15PSI above atmospheric. Some later steam locomotives managed to get liquid water to 200-300 degrees celsius.)
It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?Yes. The car isn't going away. Public transit, no matter how good, is too slow, inefficient, and full of derelicts and other disgusting people who lean on you or let their kids puke on your Armani pants. This is why I drive. Now, if I worked right downtown, the economics of parking would probably make me take the TTC. But since I live and work in the 'burbs, and my workplace provides parking, there's no question that I'll keep driving.
Besides, driving is fun. It's in our blood. Imagine asking any typical North American to give up his or her TV sets? Same thing but worse.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
One more response for the day before the limit kicks in.... have to decide priorities. <sigh>
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
And neither is nitrogen. Both are energy transport media (like a flywheel or a lead acid battery). Both hydrogen and nitrogen are incapable of delivering net on-the-books BTU's of energy. True fuels do delivery BTU's of energy.
Also note that there's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. All this "hydrogen is the energy source of the future" talk is a bunch of hooey. How are going to make the liquid hydrogen? No non-nuclear means is known to make terrestrial hydrogen that does not consume considerably much more energy than it delivers. How are you going to get liquid hydrogen to the public safely?
Check out Don Lancaster's excellent site for more debunking of hydrogen as an energy source.
Also, how about refueling via the electric car refueling inductive type plug they have at malls now. Just have a small refrigerator in the car to convert electricity -> liquid nitrogen. (Or is there a better way to do it?)
PS: The car can be "nitro'd" all the time, although you would have to re-design the gas engine to handle it.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Point taken. However, I no longer make .sig changes to make AC's happy.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
>Not when I posted anonymously, I imagine.
;-)
Doubt it since I browse at +1
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I thought this local news site might get slashdotted so I put the page on my server (so that it can get slashdotted).
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Now, instead of taking an exit and driving to the nearest gas station, you can just pull over and urinate in your gas tank. The nitrogen from your urine oughta give your car an extra boost!
The advantage to liquid nitrogen as a fuel is that the process of creating it could potentially actually remove CO2 from the air, even if you're burning carbon fuels for the energy. Since you use the smoke from your burning as the feedstock (not pure nitrogen), you create dry ice (solid C02) as well as liquid air. You could then take the purified CO2 and hide it somewhere - inject it in old oil wells, put it in your airtight biodomes to fertilize your hemp crop, poison deep-ocean fish with it. All of these ideas, of course, are pretty blue-sky, no pun intended.
Since you're taking the nitrogen from the air to start with, there's no "negative consequences" from releasing that nitrogen. And besides, nitrogen is already 4/5 of the atmosphere and relatively inert.
(BTW I got my one negative "offtopic" karma point for mentioning this technology in an alternative energy discussion about 7 months ago. This ain't new.)
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
The idea of a nitrogen powered car is hardly new, the University of Washington has been developing the CryoCar for a the past 3+ years.
it would probably be less painful than burning to death, and they would have more chance to save me anyway.
Of course, if anyone's played with dipping their hands into liquid nitrogen, you'd probably wonder whether the guy had any idea when he said you'd get flash frozen by it.
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First off; Ambient systems are not likely to work because this is low-quality heat. Getting one to work would be a nobel prize winner. Check out a intro thermo book for some depressing facts about the wonderful world of heat transfer: Simply put: (stolen from someplace I forget)
Yes, using alcohol or nitrogen to power a car moves the pollution up the line, DUH. The objective is to expend energy (see above rules) to make something that puts energy in a portable form (be it a battery, nitrogen, alcohol, whatever). Of course it's going to cost more to make that energy than you'll get out; That's why it costs money! The objective is mearly to put it in a portable form.
We don't know how lucky we are to have petroleum; The cost of powering cars with alcohol or nitrogen would be a LOT more if we didn't have vast reserves of petroleum. I'm just hoping we make the switch to alcohol because lots of people forget that petroleum has another much, much more important use as a primary source of hydrocarbons for making PLASTIC. We use plastic everywhere, and there are other sources, but they all cost a lot more.
At any rate, cars in the future are going to cost a lot more to run, and they'll cost more the longer we run on petrolum products, it just happens that right now, gas is the only way to go fast cheap.
..don't panic
Just so we don't get stupid arguments like "if we can get energy from the air, why can't we just make an engine that runs on air?", the thermodynamic principle here is that a heat engine can produce work from a temperature difference, by letting the energy flow from hotter to cooler while "skimming" off part of the energy to transform into work. The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency, which obviously can't be higher than 100%.
So a theoretically generalized heat engine doesn't care whether you carry around a fire or a block of ice, or (for that matter) if you skim along with one ski in a trough of cold water and another ski in a trough of hot water, as long as it's got access to a temperature difference. In practice, of course, you've got to design different engines if you want reasonable efficiency.
Incidentally, being from the frosty Northern near-state of Canada, I'd really rather not have a car without a toasty hot engine. While you can use liquid nitrogen to heat your cab, it's not terribly efficient. However, people who live in hot places might appreciate the cheap, efficient, and simple air-conditioning.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I've worked on alternative fuels for two years. Alot of these ideas have some of the same problems:
Storing N2 in liquid state in, say, the hot arizona desert at 108 degress is a challenge. Having a system that does all this while still being crash-safe, low-maintainence, and reliable is fucking hard.
So far, alot of the industry is looking towards hydrogen fuel cells, hopefully with reformers. Reformers extract the hydrogen out of normal gasoline cleanly, and the fuel cells add ambient oxygen to it to make water: a very acceptable byproduct. Gasoline storage is easy, safe, maintainable, and reliable. The exhaust is pure water. The systems cost is feasable to be near that of cars (+/- $1000).
Nitrogen is pretty funny :-)
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Much as I hate to admit recalling this, it was stated in the 'Knight Rider' TV series that KITT ran on liquid nitrogen... am I hallucenating that, or does somebody else remember it?
You'll get frostbite like you (and I've) never seen if you spill it on yourself or on objects in contact with you. Air has 20% oxygen; asphyxiation starts below 19.5%. You won't be parking in enclosed spaces.
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
Put a mechanical pump of sorts to repressureize the N2 by using braking energy, manual recharg at stations (gearshaft) or such. One amt of nitrogen, no emissions, closed cricuit. Should be feasable somehow.
The Voices cannot decide on whose base belongs to whom.
Man is a part of nature. Resources are meant to be used. I don't see "Man" hurting himself from using resources. Nature is a luxury item... there is plenty of it where cities are not. Hell, 9 out of 10 people in the world will never make or recieve a phone call in their LIFETIME. You think they are hurting nature? No. Think what we do really has an impact on anything but a very small portion? Get some perspective. "Mother Earth"? Please. Did you get that cute little quote right out of your Greenpeace newsletter?
(from a friend that's a nuke)
Actually, there are several reasons we don't build these.
The first is apparent right in the name. It uses LIQUID METAL (Liquid Sodium, actually)as a coolant. Really, really, really nasty stuff. Very corrosive, quite toxic, and it has a tendency to react *ahem* poorly when it comes in contact with the cooling water used everywhere else in the plant.
Other than that, the reaction in this reactor creates more fissile material in the form of "weapons grade" plutonium than fissile uranium it starts with. Hence, you get more fuel out the longer it is running, so it "breeds" fuel.
As a political stance, here in the US we have decided not to pursue civilian technologies that create the stuff of nuclear weapons. And, using plutonium for a fuel makes the reactor much more difficult to control, from a core design and operational standpoint, increasing the complexity of the design and the chances of non-"the big one" type accidents.
Basically, the things are nightmares to run, the liquid sodium coolant is a tremendous problem, and the waste you have left can be turned into a bomb.
They do have the big benefit that you just have to dump in one load of natural uranium and the thing will keep running for much longer than a conventional reactor.
There is no free lunch, and here in the US we've decided that the problems associated with LMFBRs are not worth the benefit. That could change if uranium supplies start to dry up, however.
The liquid sodium problem can be solved by careful selection of piping and humidity control and such to reduce the risk of fire from a coolant leak. This is a problem with the LMFBR, but it is a solvable one, and I don't know all of the specifics as to how it was solved in the IFR, but it is my impression that this is not much of an issue. Furthermore, a fire from a coolant leak would not generally threaten the reactor core as it would have shut itself off if coolant was no longer flowing sufficiently.
As to the "Weapons Grade" problem, yes, this is a problem, but the IFR design solves this by making sure that Pu is never in pure form. The on-site reprocessing separates out the fissiles from the non-fissiles, but not specifically the Pu. So the stuff they put back in the reactor is a mix of fissile elements, many of which are gamma emitters. Hence, it would require further refining to get "weapons grade" Pu, and the risk of theft of fissile material is essentally zero because while the radiation from Pu is managable, it would be nearly impossible to handle the mixed fissile material in the IFR.
Unfortunately, Uranium supplies would dry up in about sixty years if we used it for all of our energy in non-breeder reactors. Granted, it's longer than oil will last, but as I see it, one of the big advantages of nuclear power is that it is sustainable over the long term (until we get fusion going). I think that 5000 years should be enough time.
I'll bet a carbon nano tube tank would glow a similar color when buning and heated by the contained hydrogen.
I want some hot stuff, baby, tonight.
Yup... anybody who's handled liquid Nitrogen in a confined space knows... displacing vast quantities of oxygen is a bad thing.
It's quite apparent that there are better technologies out there than what we have, yet it's also quite apparent that the oil companies have such a stronghold over North America that this will never actually take place just for reasons of corporate pressure from them. Don't kid yourself :(
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
In this case, you don't burn anything. The final exhaust stream is room temperature (ambient environment, actually, but close enough), so you don't need to heat anything up. As for storage, it doesn't require any energy to store; you just stick it in a container when it's cold, cap it really tight, and it stays liquid because it can't expand into a gas.
To get energy out of it, just let it out of the container slowly. When it warms up it will try to expand and create a high pressure (it will warm up in storage, so you need to seal it in tightly in a tank that can withstand high pressures), which you can use to push a piston, just like in a gasoline engine.
It's a pretty neat idea, the article says it has three times the energy density of batteries, which is not bad. Nitrogen gas (N2, not NOx like from gasoline cars) is completely non polluting, so it's environmentally friendly once it's in the car. Nitrogen is also a renewable resource, so no worries about resource depletion.
There are some obvious difficulties, too, though. Battery energy density will likely improve with new technologies, whereas this won't. Batteries can be recharged on the go with solar panels, also. Fuel cells and gas-electric hybrids will both have much higher energy densities. That means this comes out on the low side when it comes to range before refuelling. I'm not sure about performance. It depends on the pressure, but I would not be surprised if it comes in behind even electric cars. I strongly doubt it will come anywhere near matching gasoline cars. That's just conjecture, though. Safetywise, you need a high pressure tank, and refuelling could be a problem. You will probably have to cool it down until it liquefies at standard pressures, or pump it in at very high pressure so it stays liquid; both methods have big problems. Finally is the issue of compressing the gas to a liquid. That takes a lot of energy, so this isn't exactly free environmentally. If your electricity source is a coal generating station, these cars would probably pollute just as much as gasoline cars.
With all the problems, I doubt this is the way of the future, but still, a very interesting and unique idea.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
this is just plain false/stupid. refer to here. there is no reason to keep high pressures in liquid nitrogen dewars. there is however sometimes a low pressure (>10-15 psi) kept on the liquid to facilitate easy vertical extration from a cylinder.(its own pressure caused by evaporation is used to push it up/thru tubes.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Now, i dont know alot about these kinda things, but i thought that nitrogen was good? I mean, animals crap nitrogen, and it helps stuff grow, right? So, couldn't you get all your emissions, and have them stored in a bag or something, and bring it to the recycling plant, to be put back into the ground. Again, I don't really know about it...just a thought. Maybe some of you chemists can clarify the issue for me...thanks.
"There is no there, there." ---William Gibson, on Cyberspace
Biodiesel could be considered a very high "pollution at car" source, because there are numerous studies that seem to implicate diesel particles in the causes of allergies, and may be responsible for the high incidence of allergies in humans living in urban areas. That's no fun at all. I'd like to see some studies validating this or refuting it, but that just isn't done yet.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Nothing will beat the hold that crude oil has on us, at least any time soon.
Remeber the electric car? The one that never got out of the showroom? It was cheap, sleek. And no and no fossil fuels = no icky CO2... Sure it only went up to about 70 mph, but it was efficient and cost effective.
But electricity doesn't move money the way oil does. All that effort in the Persian Gulf would have gone to waste. Unexplained price hikes on gasoline wouldn't give our corporate masters those much needed bonuses. Oh things would have been very different now had the elctric car become the "future".
It would take a helluva lot to break the global oil insustry. And nitro just don't seem tuff enuff...
There is _no way_ the state change of nitrogen could propel a car at any reasonable speed for any reasonable distance. This simple state change could not impart the kind of energy you get from combustion. Add to that somewhere the energy gets spent to compress the nitrogen to liquid, and keep it in cool storage.. both from coal and oil burning power plants. And then there's the billions that would need to be spent to build infrustructure.
You could go electric, but then your propelling a thousand pounds of battery; and you can only go about 90 miles on flat ground if you don't run the AC. Again you've just pushed the polution problem out of your car but back to a coal or oil burning electrical plant.
If you wanna go eco today the best solution is to get a hybrid; I think honda makes one. If you are lucky enough to live in an area with decent public transportation then go bus/train; good public transit is a rarity in north america, they should take a lesson from europe on how to do it.
I sense an ecologic agenda on the part of Timothy; seems to post alot of this tree huggin kinda stuff. Know how much toxic waste was created casting the silicon for that computer you are typing on? har har har.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Can someone comment on flywheels. Wouldnt the gyroscopic effects of having a massive spinning wheel in your hood cause problems going around corners?
2^5
My dad told me a few years ago about a similar and just as interesting story he'd heard.
Apparently, some guy who owned a fleet of trucks had the idea to use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then combust the hydrogen and collect the water again. Really, the only energy used would be the electricity used in the electrolysis reaction and that to trigger the combustion, which, if it could be controlled, wouldn't need more than one spark per use. If anyone knows anything about this or could provide a link to more information, I'd love to read it. My dad went on to say that the guy never got to use his idea because the automakers and gas giants patented the idea before he could implement it in his fleet. It could just be conspiracy theory, but it's interesting just the same.
Love, Stu
Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.
Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes.
Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable - yes.
Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
If nothing else, I bet the A/C would work quite well...
As someone who subsists entirely on corn, I feel that my very survival is threatened by this scheme.
All kidding aside, I think we're better off using cropland for food and generating our energy with fission. Fission or giant orbiting arrays of solar panels.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It will go about 15 miles at 20 mph on 48 gal of LN2.
There is another project at the University of Washington called LN2000, and after a quick glance at the website it appears to be even further along than the UNT project. Their test vehicle is a converted 1984 Grumman-Olson Kubvan mail delivery van and they also have a website.
A rough calculation says that an hour of driving will require 180 kg of liquid N2 -- not including the storage container. Why?
Nitrogen's energy density sucks
Herewith:
Most of the available energy is from the phase change (using the cold N2 as the "bottom" of an energy gradient running from ambient) For N2, this is a measley 400 J/g (compared to carbon, at 60,000 J/g). So, in going the 200K to ambient, a gram of N can gives at most 600 J of energy. (Specific heat ~1 J/g/k). One horsepower is a 740 Joule/ second. Assuming an efficient car only needing 20 HP, and riduculously high Carnot efficiency of 50%, you need 20* 740 / 0.50 / 600 = 50 gram/s, or almost 180 kg/hr.
Nitrogen isn't even close to being a useful transportation fuel.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
I hate to call this bogus, but the article's author is clearly clueless about chemistry, and is implying things that just can't be. I used to size tanks for storing various fluids and gases, including Nitrogen. Yes, it is true that you can get useful work out of pressurized nitrogen. But the *amount* of work is rather miniscule. We sometimes used pressurized nitrogen as a rocket propellant, but only because it was such a safe, predictable fuel; the performance was a tenth of what you could get with conventional chemical rockets (even rockets burning gasoline.) The article draws a comparison with batteries. With batteries, they may not hold a lot of energy, but you can recharge them. With gas, the depressurization process is essentially on-way. Getting energy back into a nitrogen pressure vessel is just too hard. Of course, then there's the danger...
The way it'll be done is to have a super-insulated tank of LN2 or liquid air at more or less atmospheric pressure; no pressure container, no explosion risk. A pump draws liquid from the tank and pressurizes it to several thousand PSI. This liquid goes through the evaporator where it becomes high-pressure gas, which in turn operates the expander to produce power. This limits the high-pressure sections of the system to a few tubes instead of the entire fuel supply, and cuts weight and expense. A system designed for efficiency will have several expansion stages with a re-heat in between.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
you are a complete douchebag!!!! you douchebag!!!!
The idea was that it would be best `in the city' where you were always stopping and starting. When stopped, there was no engine to run, so no energy wasted there. That and with no emissions (certainly nitrogen gas isn't a problem) it didn't contribute to the pollution problem of the city.
Of course, the thing that people don't get with cars like this and with electric cars is this - sure, they don't create pollution -- but somewhere pollution IS being created. Coal or something else is being burned to charge your batteries or to liquify nitrogen from the air. The only way there's no pollution is if it's being powered by something else, like nuclear, geothermal, solar or hydroelectric power. Great ideas, but not that commonly used yet.
Another problem with a car powered by liquid nitrogen - while it wouldn't be hard to rig an A/C unit out of this (and it would be next to free, not reducing your mileage at all), if you wanted a heater you'd have to burn gas for it, just like you do in an electric car.
Also, I imagine that using energy to create liquid nitrogen from the atmosphere and then letting it expand and harnessing that energy is going to be a good deal less efficient than just using that energy directly to run the car. Exactly how much less efficient I do not know (again, electric cars have the same problem. But generators and motors are very efficient, so the loss isn't much, unless the batteries lose a lot.)
And last, keeping it cold is a problem. And I'm not sure if you could carry enough liquid nitrogen to get much range, and you'd lose range every night your car is parked. Exactly how much depends on how well insulated the nitrogen storage is.
You're still releasing the carbon dioxide bound in those untapped oil fields and all that oil sand out of the ground and into the air.
It's far from certain, but there's pretty good reason to fear that such action would seriously warm the earth. If there's any non-linearity in the system -- and there's no reason to assume linearity -- then we could have a runaway greenhouse effect that we might be unable to stop.
I'm sure life would thrive on such a planet, but perhaps not human life.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
For those who don't know,
LN2 is often made by using an expansion piston process on air. I.e. the air is put into a cylinder and a pisto is drawn out which expands and cools the air. The air condenses and is drawn off. Then the LOx and other trace liquids are allowed to boil off, leaving the LN2 behind which is stored in a double walled/vaccuum insulated tank called a dewar (which others have noted already).
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
http://www.mtsc.unt.edu/CooLN2Car.html
The University of North Texas has been working on this project for a while. Check the website for more details.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
if 100% was O2, then air would be ignitable
No it wouldn't. Reduced material (read: wood, petrol, hydrogen, ...) is what is ignited (read: oxidised, releasing energy). Strictly speaking, oxygen gas by itself is non-flammable.
You're right; a regenerative system in this example would work perfectly. That fact illustrates why this Nitrogen idea is nonsence in the first place. The only place you're ADDING energy to the "equation" is by pressurizing it and storing it....the Nitrogen itself is more of a medium than a fuel. It's equlivalent to mechanical fly-wheels.
(I didn't read the article, so I may be full of shi7, and if so I apologise.)
Mike
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
You can carry methanol around in a gas can and with minor modifications, you can burn methanol in your current car.
Methanol can be generated from CO2 and water, to which it, of course, returns when burned. It can also be manufactured easily from vegetable matter.
Like hydrogen, it supports a simple closed cycle using the atmosphere as the return pipe without polluting it with toxins, and can be easily burned or used in a fuel cell to generate electricity. Unlike hydrogen, it's energy-dense and simple to handle under even the most primitive conditions by unskilled labour.
A little added complexity on the manufacturing side for a big payoff in simplicity everywhere else is why methanol is a much more likely "fuel of the future" than hydrogen (methane is intermediate between the two in almost every way, but it's another gas so I'm still betting on methanol).
If we could just stop the damned blind rednecks from drinking it all, we'd have no trouble with supply.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think I first saw something like it:
You can't win
You can't quit
You can't break even
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Gee, there's only a few million trillion tons of nitrogen in the atmosphere already ....
1000 years of nitrogen-powered cars will have less environmental impact than 10 years of carbon *oxide-emitting vehicles.
Why do we hear all these insane ideas like natural gas and electric when something like rubbing alcohol would work perfectly. It's an infinitely renewable resource and we can make as much as we need. We wouldn't have to worry about anymore air polution, OPEC, running out of it, or making extreme changes to the curent automobile. The only changes would be to make the engine expect a hotter burning fuel, tear out all the smog devices that would be useless, and watch as fuel prices fall to the floor (instead of increasing) as demad goes up and up. I know it's hard to imagine LA or NEW YORK without smog. :-)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No matter what kind of process you use to turn fuel into energy, we need to remember that a certain amount of energy is needed to propel one vehicle a certain distance. The only things that make a difference are the efficiency of the process (from fuel to kinetic energy) and the weight of the vehicle (plus friction, but this is minor compared to weight). So long as we all keep on driving around in our cars, even if they are of light weight and use an efficient process, that energy has to come from *somewhere*. This means, mostly, fossil fuels. These are a) messy and b) going to run out sometime (a recent WIRED article suggests otherwise - that there is a vastly larger amount of hydrocarbons down there than we think - and therefore a whole lot more potential for polluting the atmosphere into an unbreathable state). The whole point of this rant is this: we have to get our asses in gear re alternative energy ASAP or cut down on vehicle usage. But these both look like unlikely possibilities.
True, Your points are valid. STORAGE of energy is a problem.
BUT not an insolvable one. Many "highland" regions use water and pumps to "store" spare energy, by simply pumping the water up into the hills in large tubes and then when needed let it come back down and through turbines to (re-)create energy. A siple and VERY efficient battery. I challenge You to find a better large scale storage method of energy.
Agreed solar power alone would require massive amounts of energy transfers from the "sunny side" of earth to the not quite so sunny side, or an effective storage of energy to be used in nightimes or in "low energy output"-weather. But I never said it was CHEAP, I merely said it was possible.
As for the energy output of Nuclear power Plants, true.. I never said that nuclear power was obsolete. I merely pointed out that it was not a NESSESITY as we have alternatives, the fact that these alternatives are more expensive even though environmentally more safe, seem to not be foremost in the minds of the desitionmakers.
As for my point on the fossil fuel engine, I was refering to CARS (in reply to a previous post), not to fossil fuel powerplants (ok, I could have mande it more clear). But look at the operating costs of fossil fuel powerplants, and You WILL see that they are obsolete. first of, the sheer cost of rawmeterials WILL increase as the availability of materials decrease (law of supply and demand). Second look at the environmental impact. The cost of cleaning up the environmnt, reversing the greenhouse effect etc. We've not even developed the technology yet to do these things, and as such the cost pr. megawatt is certainly a lot higher. Only problem is that nobody really CARES about cleaning up, and that's why it's not "normal" to include these costs in the price of electricity.
However, MANY countries are right now doing fine wihtout nuclear power, MANY countries (including a lot of US states) are suppling a larger and larger part of their electrical energy from "environmentally safe" powersources like windmills, solar cells, and the likes. And this is and SHOULD BE the way to the future. Safe, clean and abundant energy. Ok, so it might sound a bit naive, but from a sociological point of view (as well as a macroeconomical) I believe I'm not off by much....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Hey all,
:-) The LN2 is fed through the exchanger to a pressure regulator to the "engine" where it is allowed to expand and propel the vehicle. No compressor, cryogenics, etc. onboard at all, just the LN2 in a vacuum dewar, the exchanger/evaporator and the "engine". IT is an odd sort of heat engine, but it is still a heat engine in that it uses the "low grade" ambient heat in the air passing across the heat exchanger to power the phase change from liquid to gas. THe hotter it is out, the better it runs, per regular heat engine theory. Probably also want to try and keep the engine block warm, too, to help in the expansion there. Nifty use of ambient heat, for sure!
The LN2 car is an interesting one. Last time I read about it, I liked the idea. You make a vacuum-insulated tank and cap it at only a few psi, just enough to keep it from going vacuum on you on transition from hot day to cold day. The LN2 boils off slowly over a period of days to weeks, it is a "use it or lose it" scenario.
The breakthrough is in the heat-exchanger: it is a "frost-resistant" device in that it still works pretty well when iced over, unlike most air conditioner evaporators...
Sure it takes a fair amount of energy to make the LN2, but it generates other liquid gases during production that can be sold to recoup some of the energy cost.
Transport in bulk works better than the smaller tanks in that the much higher liquid volume makes it resist temp change a bit better. If it scales up, the price for the LN2 will come down. It isn't too bad right now, though, 'cause lots of industries use it.
Pretty safe in a crash, too. The tank will be located similarly to a regular gas tank or a LPG tank on a vehicle: OUTSIDE the passenger compartment. Current vehicle regulations require this, as well as venting of the tank enclosure space to the atmosphere. There would likely be a "popoff valve" similar to those used in LPG cars in case of excess pressure build up (clogged vent or whatever). One of the "cool" things about it would be that in a crash it is very likely to make the OTHER presumably ICE-powered car cool off, thus greatly limiting the chance of a fire from the gasoline. You'd have a nifty big cloud form, but the LN2 would boil off pretty darn quick. Might get frostbite if you grabbed the twisted metal around where the tank was, but it is otherwise unlikely to harm you.
If I can get to the URL I'll read more about it...
-cajun
- This is not useful unless you have a large supply of water close to a much higher area you can use for an upper reservoir. If you don't have the necessary geography, you can't use pumped storage.
- This is not something that coexists well with other uses. Fish tend not to fare well when they go through the pumps.
- The net efficiency is only about 80% at best.
- The systems must be huge to be effective. To store 6 gigawatt-hours (to replace one major powerplant's output during the afternoon hours) with a 200 foot rise takes (6e9 * 3.6e3 / 9.8e3 / 61 ) = 36 million cubic meters of water. That's an area of 2900 acres covered to a depth of ten feet. It can't be used for wildlife habitat or fish or much of anything else because it's always being filled and drained. Here are links to sites for the Ludington MI pumped-storage plant, and one for the Mount Elbert plant. (Note that the Mt. Elbert plant claims a capacity factor of 15% of its rated 200 MW, and that is probably when running on a daily cycle. If it had to even out multi-day variations in supply from e.g. wind, it would be far lower.)
Storage is the killer for alternative energy applications. Chemical fuels have storage built in, all you need is a tank. When alternative energy technology comes to a point where it can be transformed into, or generated directly as, a form of energy which is easily stored and transmitted, that will address some of the biggest issues immediately. Long before the limits of possibility are reached, cost has forced everyone to do something else. Currently, PV with battery storage has a delivered cost of about $.90/KWH. That kind of cost makes the most gold-plated nuclear plant look cheap by comparison. Ummm, no. An alternative must satisfy the same need. There is potential for alternative systems which incorporate work-arounds to achieve the "where needed, when needed" parts, but this requires re-thinking the system from end to end. In general the alternative advocates have done a lousy job of this. So was I. Hybrids kill pure electrics, because they carry chemical fuel. However, the storage problem is not specific to vehicles. The price of crude oil has been falling in real terms for many years. So has the price of coal. The technology for extracting the raw materials has been improving as well, and in some cases faster than the difficulty of finding new reserves. After looking at that, nuclear may still be the preferred alternative. It's far easier to isolate a few tons of fission products for a thousand years than it is to store and cycle millions of tons of chemicals, especially when those chemicals include ions of toxic heavy metals. For alternative energy to get away from the problem of toxic releases, it will have to move to materials which are made entirely of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These include hydrocarbons and alcohols. Interestingly enough, hydrocarbons are a lot like fats, and sugars are alcohols...Reversing the greenhouse warming (we need the greenhouse effect or the earth freezes solid) needs further tricks. One that I like involves taking the methane clathrate deposits on the continental shelves (which are threatening to decompose to gas, and CH4 is about 200 times as good a greenhouse gas as CO2) and mining them for fuel. Crack the CH4 into H2 and carbon soot, then bury the soot (old coal mines seem appropriate). Burn the H2 in whatever is convenient.
With a few exceptions, those countries are generally producing their electricity from fossil fuel and exacerbating greenhouse warming something awful. China is a huge offender in this regard.In this DOE table you'll see that the total nameplate capacity of non-hydropower renewable energy generators in the country for 1999 was a whole 2000 megawatts. That is out of a total generating capacity of nearly 700,000 megawatts. The entire nameplate generating capacity would barely replace 2 nuclear plants, and probably have about 1/3 the capacity factor. If it's going to really be an alternative, it has a hell of a long way to go.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
When you burn the alcohol, you get polutants. Growing the alchohol and fermenting it are low-pollution activities.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
An interesting alternative to gasoline and or diesel is compressed natural gas (CNG). It's abundant and domestically produced, inexpensive, and natural gas powered vehicles are available now, unlike the vaporware fuel cells, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. You can learn more about natural gas vehicles at NGV.ORG
The fact of the matter is, using alcohol *does not* move the polution up the line. All the polution from alcohol as a fuel comes from burning the alcohol, the energy itself is relitively efficient solar power.
Plant corn. Grow corn. Ferment Corn. Burn corn in cars. Everyone wins.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
And where will all of this liquid nitrogen come from...that's the main question that comes to mind. Unlike, say, fossil fuels, we don't have liquid nitrogen just sitting around in our natural environment on earth. Sure, you could use liquid nitrogen as suggested as a propellant, but WHERE WILL YOU GET IT? There is a great abundance of nitrogen on earth, but NOT in liquid form. We have to spend plenty of energy to get it into the liquid phase that is needed. So this idea doesn't really solve anyone's energy problems... alas, we are once again defeated by the all-pervasive first law of thermodynamics. Remember, if you're going to use something as a fuel it has to store potential energy in some form. Unfortunately, if you're going to take advantage of the potential energy stored in liquid nitrogen, first you're going to have to put that energy in yourself, since there aren't stores of liquid nitrogen just waiting for us underground a la fossil fuels.
/.'ers are interpreting it this way. Hence I felt the need for this post.)
This sort of reminds me of people who think, "In the future, we'll all have electric cars, and then pollution due to fossil fuels will disappear." Doesn't occur to some of these people to think of where all that electricity is going to come from.
(BTW, I realize that the engineer proposing this surely didn't have resolving our energy problems in mind, but it seems that many
Just orient them so they resist your car tipping over. No need to worry about rolling your car ever again! Of course, you might start turning when you speed up or slow down...
Almost all that cost is energy, the liquefaction process is not that efficent (and can be noisy as hell). (what isn't energy is cost of the machinery, the feedstock is ordinary air). How do I know its not very efficient? Just look at a liquifier. Step one: Filter out the solids. Step two: BIG multi-stage compressor. Step 3: even BIGGER heat exchanger. The gas heats up when you compress it, and you have to get rid of that heat (while keeping the pressure) before you run it thru the expansion nozzle. Nothing in the plant that you won't find in your ordinary household refrigerator, its just a different scale, and with a different working fluid. Anyone know the actual conversion effiency of a LN2 plant? If it makes it out of the single digits, I would consideer it a fine tribute to human persistance. The engine would be interesting. You would want at least quadruple expansion, to make best use of the high pressure. You would be able to make it mostly from plastic, and you won't need the transmission, but the valvegear would be a real challenge to get "right". The problem isn't knowing when to open or close things, its an easy thing to get an embedded controller to do. The problem is coming up with the electromechanical side of the problem. You notice, despite many attempts, auto engines still have mechanically acutated valves, they haven't yet produced a solenoid system that can come close to the lifespan of the mechanical setup. (depending on engine speed and torque requirements, you need to be able to vary how much of the stroke you admit gas into. You want all of the expansion to happen in the engine. The exhaust wants to be as close to atmospheric pressure as you can manage, to get the most energy out of the gas. An steam engine "puffing mightily" is dumping a lot of energy out the exhaust. In return its developing peak torque.) The air engine, like electrics, and even steam to some extent) does have the advantage in urban traffic that it doesn't consume fuel at a stop. And this will become important as we try to crowd ever more cars onto our urban roads, they will spend ever more of their day idling in near gridlock. (there comes a point where adding roads makes things worse, even if we had the space, or could afford to add roads to our cities) Right now a lot of urban traffic moves at the same pace that it did in 1900. (in the case of London, thats 11mph. In the case of NYC, its about 4mph (crosstown)). NYC has reached the faster to walk stage. One potential soultion (assuming we won't get fundamental changes in traffic planning until long past the time when its unbearable) is the internal combustion/electric hybrids. Things like the Toyota Prius, and the Honda 2 seater, which shut the engine off when stopped, run off the electric when in "creep" mode, only starting the engine when needed to replenish the battery, or when moving steadily at speeds greater than 10mph. What we really nead is a change in transport use patterns. If the private car had its acutal operating costs visible, we might make more sensible use of them. As a way to get several people a medium distance, they are fine things. As a way to get a single person, usually less than 2 miles, they are not so great. (the median trip length in the US is under 2 miles) It should not take 3 tonnes of steel, a couple of ounces of petroleum, and an adult to transport a healthy teenager 2km to an athletic practice. Instead of trying to find better ways to keep our road crowding behavious viable, we should switch to a fundamentally more efficent way of doing things.
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
Since the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway, my guess is that most of that liquid nitrogen would come FROM THE ATMOSPHERE. Hence, releasing it back into the atmosphere would amount to.... well, jack shit.
hydrogen fuel-cell technology is already well ahead of any of the other alternative fuels, and it has NO harmful emissions, only oxgyen and water as by products. in conjunction with a little solar, we've already answered the problems. now to make it economical :-) methanol will probably supplant gas first but hydrogen will completely replace conventional combustion engines..
Fuel cells react hydrogen with oxygen to create electricity directly. Their waste product is pure water. The main problem is storing the hydrogen.
But the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) invented a way to use methanol as your hydrogen source. With this technology, methanol fuel-cell vehicles have become possible. They run on methanol and air, and their exhaust is carbon dioxide and water.
Methanol is just an alcohol. You don't need to supercool it. It doesn't crystallize metal. You can pump it from ordinary gas station pumps. The infrastructure changes needed to support methanol are tiny compared to pure hydrogen, or even the liquid nitrogen idea.
I read somewhere that it might even be possible to make a fuel cell that runs on gasoline instead of methanol. I like the idea of an electric car that can stop at ordinary gas stations. No changes needed to infrastructure!
Read more here.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Ok... I'm not going to reply to all of that. Mainly because the topic is "Nitrogen powered cars" and "alternative energy sources" by proxy. But also because I will not attempt to argue the point of efficiency (or rather lack thereof) on behalf of the alternative power sources. Thirdly we seem to be in agreement on the difficulties of power delivery and storage, so no need of arguing that point any further.
However, I will offer this comment:
You obviously know Your chemistry. But apparently not a whole lot about economics, ecology and sociology. My point is and has always been that alternative energy sources that are RENEWABLE should and COULD replace NON-renewable energy sources (regardless of the problems this will bring with it, problems which would be solved quickly if there was a sufficent incentive to do so). Since this is environmentally and inevitably also economically safer.
Uranium (and whatever else they choose to stick in those Nuclear generators) and oil ARE of limited supply, even though we might not run out for another 50 years (or even a thousand years, it's not the actually SUPPLY that's the issue here, only the fact that it's LIMITED), it doesn't mean we shouldn't face problems head on. Just because it's only "parts" of the world that's experiencing serious ecological problems due to global warming, lead poisoning or nuclear contamination, it doesn't mean the rest of the world is safe. Sticking our heads in the sand and beliving us safe because we do not SEE the danger doesn't actually MAKE us safe.
I know that the point of ecology doesn't normally go really well with Americans, but seeing as Americans are the most polluting people on earth, they SHOULD be the ones to care the most. Not the ones to close their eyes the hardest.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
My point is that people will do the same old thing unless they feel a need (economic, moral, or otherwise) to change. People have many needs, and energy is only one of the many competitors for their efforts. The least-effort method of generating electricity leaves more time and money available for other pursuits, and is ipso facto the preferred one. The need is to properly price electricity according to the impacts of its source (internalizing the externalities), and then the problem will take care of itself. The problem is that properly pricing the externalities is a political can of worms of titanic proportions.
I ran a calculation a while ago, and even at enormously increased rates of use we have literally centuries of uranium left and at least a millennium of thorium. In contrast, we have a problem with global warming right NOW. Technology for the positively-renewables isn't quite here yet, so nukes are a great way of cutting the damage in the meantime.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency,
No, the percentage that it skims is equal to the efficiency. The percentage that slips by, and doesn't get "skimmed" into work is the complement of the efficiency.
Don't ask how that slipped by me. I am a bear of very little brain.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere (by volume), and occurs as a constituent of all living tissues.
i doubt that nitrogen emissions from second generation death-boxes would seriously mess anything up.
but when will they get rid of asphalt???
adrien cater
boring.ch
Point and Grunt
From the LN 2000 car page.
The process to manufacture liquid nitrogen in large quantities can be environmentally very friendly, even if fossil fuels are used to generate the electric power required. The exhaust gases produced by burning fossil fuels in a power plant contain not only carbon dioxide and gaseous pollutants, but also all the nitrogen from the air used in the combustion. By feeding these exhaust gases to the nitrogen liquefaction plant, the carbon dioxide and other undesirable products of combustion can be condensed and separated in the process of chilling the nitrogen, and thus no pollutants need be released to the atmosphere by the power plant. The sequestered carbon dioxide and pollutants could be injected into depleted gas and oil wells, deep mine shafts, deep ocean subduction zones, and other repositories from which they will not diffuse back into the atmosphere, or they could be chemically processed into useful or inert substances. Consequently, the implementation of a large fleet of liquid nitrogen vehicles could have much greater environmental benefits than just reducing urban air pollution as desired by current zero-emission vehicle mandates.
When can we start?
Anybody read Portal? I just thought Swigart had made up his "liquid nitrogen" transports out of thin air.
max
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
Earths atmosphere is 80% nitrogen
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And just what energy are we going to use to make liquid N. I would think that the energy required to produce liquid N would really not really payoff. It would take energy, probably from an electrical plant, to fuel the process...
But I think most of the posters on this topic have missed a very important point: it takes energy to make the nitrogen expand. This heat comes from the atmosphere, as well as from the expansion chamber, the motor, fuel lines, etc. At the same time that you're heating the nitrogen, you're also cooling everything else down. As everything else gets colder, the system gets less efficient.
If you've ever fired an air rifle or paintball gun, you might have noticed how cold they can get.
Also, the you have to deal with frost forming on the outer components.
You'd need a massive heat sink or an electric heater to keep it all working.
(SARCASM)
Wait, I've got it! We'll use an electric heater to heat ordinary air so that it expands, then drive an air motor with the extra pressure!
(/SARCASM)
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
...would do pretty much squat.
Our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway. If we're going to be pumping any gas into the atmosphere, I can't think of anything less harmful.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
As it is, his solution requires that we first SPEND a lot of energy liquifying the nitrogen, then carry it around in well-insulated tanks, and then make sure there's a way to keep the LN engine heated (analogous to the need for cooling the gasoline/diesel engine) so that the LN can continue to be evaporated and thus be exploited for moving the wagon forward.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I have seen in a while.