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Hydrogen Powered Cars
ErrantKbd writes: "CNN's science section features this article about BMW's recent tinkerings with hydrogen-powered cars. It has some interesting information about safety issues, which are understandably a major concern for cars no less than for zeppelins. Hopefully other manufacturers will adopt the same attitude as BMW, so the rest of us can afford these if they should ever emerge on the market." For now these cars have a limited range and one (1) fueling spot, which is fine if you commute to and from the Munich airport. One day, though, it'd be great for the rooftop solar collector to be separating fuel for the next day's commute ...
It's not a myth. Observe what happened to hemp in 1937 when something invented a process to make better and cheaper paper than that from trees.
The Original Threat to the Petro-Chemical Industry
It seems that the long touted "clean fuel" of the 21 Century had some unfortunate and unexpected consequences today when the massive amounts of H2O converted to car fuel finally caused the ocean to sink (The process of the surface of the ocean passing below the rising continents) due to the demand for hydrogen created by urban commuters.
"We were really caught off-guard on this one," says John Shepley, an engineer at the BMW Deep Valley Station, one of the three man made structures still with a beach front. "Everyone knows that the coasts have been crawling farther and farther for years. The granola eater types really started complaining when California lost its coast, but we figured all that liberal spouting was just hyperbole. I guess we were wrong."
The engineers have been working for some time on further innovations that may make the world inhabitable once again. "Yeah. We can make a machine that uses combustion to turn H2 and O2 molecules back into water, but the only design we could come up with didn't use fossil fuels. We figured, no, we'll stay away from that. Not using fossil fuels would be a blow to our economy."
How does a solar collector work for the "next day's commute"? Would that be a solar collector that takes in starlight, moonlight, or city lights reflected by clouds? Have you any idea how much energy it takes to separate hydrogen out of water?
I hope for alternative fuel sources, whatever they may be; however, for the future the real answer IMO would be new forms of "public" transportation. Cars have always symbolized a freedom. You can go when-ever/where-ever you please.
As the lands become tightly packed making the world appear as one giant city, there will be a network of tubes. With shuttles travelling at incredible speeds taking you where you tell them to. Private transportation will be no more than an upper-class luxury rather than a mode of transportation.
Ok, to that's a little too far into the future.
As long as we're able to enjoy the pleasure of being in full control of our modes of transportation, it would certainly be nice to enjoy clean air at the same time.
Sorry if this is somewhat off topic.
Price has nothing to do with it, the context was the allegation that hydrogen cars aren't clean because of the electricy involved in creating hydrogen.
Please read the whole thread before responding to the middle of it.
Electricity is needed to extract oil too, y'know. And as many have already pointed out, hydrogen is no more dangerous in cars than gasoline. In fact, it could be argued that it's less dangerous.
It's a "clean energy" because the car itself isn't polluting much. Of course, this argument has the same flaw that electric-powered cars do, which you pointed out. No matter how egological the car itself is, the power it uses has to come from somewhere, and in most of the US, that means coal-burning plants.
And from what I understand of the CA situation, coal plants are the only new source of power being seriously considered down there, because they're simple and cheap to build. Sigh. As if we didn't have enough rampant pollution already.
Me, I want a fuel cell car. I won't drive an electric car, though, since so much of the electricity to charge it gets lost in transit over the power lines.
I'm confused. You spent all that time explaining why hydrogen isn't really efficient, it just moves the pollution.
And the you say to use electric cars? Can you please go back and read your argument again, and tell me why electric cars are any better of a solution?
It's always nice to be jumped on for being in the US. I do appreciate your uninformed assumption, even if it is true. Please, continue to believe all Americans are completely unaware of the world beyond their borders. It really is a healty attitude.
As a side note, I'll mention the area I live on is powered exclusively by hydro power. Yes, we're fortunate to be able to do that, since much of the country is too entrenched in fossil fuels to adopt other means.
The problem with cleaner sources of power is that they just don't meet the demand. Solar is fine, but it swallows up massive quantities of land (Yes, I realize the irony in an American griping about using up land). Same with wind power. Hydro is a good option for areas that can employ it, and it's my favored source of energy. But what else is there? Well, there's global warming. At some point that reality is going to kick the US government in the ass and get them to actually act, and push industry to find better ways to generate power. In the mean time, politics prevents any progress from being made over here.
Actualy, most people being stupid, don't think to consider several factors that lead to the myth of hydrogen being dangerous.
:)
#1: people survived the crash of the hindenburg. when was the last time someone survived a crashed 747?
why? because hydrogen is lighter than air, and moves upward while it burns. jet's use a liquid fuel, which sticks to everything, and causes much more damage. it goes the same for cars, gasoline is just as volitile as hydrogen, actualy it's more volitile, because it has a higher energy density than hydrogen. it takes a supercharged diesel to produce similar engine preformance to a gasoline engine of the same displacement with hydrogen. Hydrogen is not an optimal fuel when it comes to energy density.
an auto accident with a hydrogen vehicle would be similar to an accident with an LP gas based vehilce. unless the tank is punctured, there isn't much of a problem.
the thing that makes hydrogen a slightly more dangerous fuel is the fact that it must be stored presurized at cold temps to get any kind of sufficent quantity of the stuff stored in the same space as gasoline.
this is why I'm still an EV fan. batteries somewhat safer than combusting fuels. they only have the major drawback that current batteries have really nasty chemicals inside, lead, hydrochloric acid, lithium, Nickle. I can't wait for polymer batteries.
Posted by mcarp:
Ok, I pretty much read most of these replies and it was pretty tuff to decide where to stick a comment. I've spent a great many man hours reading about alternative fuel and I have to say that most of what is addressed here is not new. Solar takes a long time to make very much useful electricty, uses up too many raw materials to manufacture collectors and the payback is long term with the collecting systems being expensive and large. Electricity can indeed by produced in what is now a well thought out and large scale industry but increased demand would be hugely more than we can muster and what about the batteries? Think about the waste byproducts from batteries, spent acid, lots of used up zink. Where are we going to put all those spent battery components? Will it cost too much to recycle such large quantities of batteries? Aren't vehicle batteries already a big mess? Multiply that by at least 10. Hydrogen from natural gas? Please, just burn the the gas as is. And i have tons of other discrepencies with the other alt sources mentioned. But here is the #1 question I ask all of you since no one has seemed to think about it. Where is all that water going to come from? Fresh water is cheep yes, but will it be cheep after its demand is doubled or worse? Some areas already have rain deficits, low water reserves and its still cheep water but how long will it be if we burn it all? The exhaust water vapour will be more than the exaust liquid so most of it will be evaproated away...ok so are we counting on it to rain more after we start using water as a fuel? Is that enough? Ok so what about using sea water? Pipe it in? Locate refineries and H2 plants on shores? Maybe... but at what expense? If we pipe it how much does that cost? Fresh water we cant afford to burn, sea water we cant afford to pipe or even refine. No sir. Hydrogen fuel is a long LONG way from being a useful alt fuel.
Posted by damiam:
I think what some people here are missing is that hydrogen has energy in and of itself. When you burn hydrogen, you don't just get back the energy it took to electrolyze it, you get back the chemical energy in the hydrogen itself, which is usually much greater.
Posted by duke of W:
.Solar collectors on car make hydrogen then hydrogen is fuel, that runs car. At night these solar cells can catch up on the inefficiencies of this system.
I gotta goe, the white jackets want me back....
Lets see now
If you are assuming that you are going to take compressed hydrogen gas and burn it to make H20, then you have a real problem. The energy to split H20 to make Hydrogen gas is greater than the energy you get out when you later burn the gas. Its that pesky second law of thermodynamics again.
Ofcourse the energy required to create oil is greater than what we get out of it too. Its just that that energy was put in by biological proccess when the oil was created. (Could be petrol or olive oil)
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Die antwort ist.... füllen Sie sie herauf
As several people have already mentioned, use solar power. Electrolysis doesn't take much energy, so you could use solar power to seperate large vats of dihydrogen monoxide.
Hell, get your ass on a converted exercise bike and earn the gas you'll be using the next day. Kill two birds with one stone.
-kidlinux.
I couldn't find the man page for one(1). This doesn't seem to exist:
$ man 1 one
No entry for one in section 1 of the manual
In fact, there isn't an entry for 'one' in any section:
$ man one
No manual entry for one
Perhaps you meant zero(4)? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) :)
Hydro-electricity is a good example. I believe Australias' Hydro-electric power scheme still powers a substantial part of NSW.
There is quite a lot of loss in transmitting electrical power across power lines. I think the whole "solar panel on the roof of the garage" idea probably has a lot of merit for most people, and they can ship the hydrogen to gas stations for people going on a longer trip.
So, I don't think the centralised power plant powering all those vehicles is very practicle. By the time the electricity got to your car (to either power it or crack hyrdrogen, for example) it would be about 5% efficient.
Ouch.
There isn't an easy solution for this, but I'm sure by the time we start running out of fossil fuels the so-called "energy" companies will have some way to make money out of us.
Actually, the major problem is the 1KW / m2 max solar insolation at the surface of the earth (i.e. noon, clear skies, etc). After you take into account night (minimum 1/2 of your time, regardless of where you live), the the movement of the sun (divide by 1.44 for average), and clouds, you end up with a pretty lousy average power to start with (at best, 347 W / m2, assuming no clouds, more likely 250 W / m2). Now start figuring efficencies into it (including transmission losses).
Solar is good, and should be a part of the total equation, but people need to understand it's not the "silver bullet" of energy (of course, nothing probably is).
I love how BP, Texaco, Mobil, et. al. are evil because they produce gasoline.
I mean, wow -- Texaco is evil? What's Texaco? Well, it's your grandmother, for one. Your parents, possibly you, your sainted aunt and thousands of widows and orphans who depend on Texaco's profits in order to eat
Point one: Texaco is a corporation. Anthropomorphizing Texaco by calling it evil is just plain silly.
Point two: Texaco deals in petrochemical by-products, only one of which is gasoline. To say that Texaco will suppress a hydrogen powered car because they won't be able to sell gasoline is asinine. It's the same as saying that your local drug store will suppress the planting of willow trees because it will impact their sales of aspirin. (willow bark contains aspirin-like chemicals and can be chewed to release the chemicals)
Texaco will continue to provide oil to people who make Vasaline, lipstick, WD-40... so they stop selling gas? Big deal -- they're still needed for home heating oil, kerosene, Castrol, you name it.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
You are assuming hydrogen combustion. The much more interesting work in that regard is on hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity from hydrogen and oxygen from the air via catalytic reaction. From what I've read, they are extremely clean, nearly distilled-grade water as the exhaust. "mmm thirsty, need to drive somewhere..." 8-)
You are a bit pessemistic with those values. Most NA (Naturally Aspirated) engines have a BSFC (Brake Specific Fuel Conspumption) of .5, turbo and super, .6. What this means is that they are only 50% efficient, and 40%, respectively. Then there is VE (Volumetric Efficiency), which is the relative performance efficiency of an engine with respect to it's displacement.
.4 or VE of .8 or greater.
But the rule of thumb is that it generally takes the same amount of fuel to produce the same amount of horsepower. This rule is only upset when you have ultra efficient engines with a BSFC of <
I can tell you right now that the 750hl motor is the least efficient motor to use. It has an average of 12MPG with only 300hp produced, so it's BSFC and VE numbers are way off. However if you look at it's CR (Compression Ratio), you'll understand; it's 8.5:1, very low by today's standards. However this enables you to run low octane fuel in it, or add a power-adder (Nitrous, Super and Turbo charging) without making any mechanical changes to the motor. BMW probably thought that a street driven 500hp motor in their luxury car was pushing it a bit, because that's what you'd get if you ran 10:1 CR. That's what many cars today use, some higher when small displacement, and some lower when large displacement.
>NO CARRIER
Great sig. In the good old days, this sig would cause many fights. It seems that some stupid terminal programs would see this in people's sigs and proceed to reset the modem for a redial. It was a pretty good prank.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What would you rather have? A tank of hydrogen in a 1/2 inch thick steel bottle, or a tank of gasoline (with just as much energy) in a tank made of *plastic*?
I'll take the hydrogen.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The rusted metal gas tank is also mighty thin. Especially in Pintos.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Potatoes then. You can ferment anything with sugar in it to get alcohol. You could probably ferment a possum if you ran out of juice miles from an alcohol station.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Toilet cleaner (with HCl) and aluminum foil work well too.
I'd like to see alcohol become a widely used fuel. The corn gets carbons from the air, so when it is burned, the carbons go back to the air. It would solve a big problem with CO2.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Actually, what the Zeppelin company used was a combination of aluminum powder and nitrocellulose as a doping compound for the canvas covering of the Hindenburg, which was supposed to reflect heat.
Unfortunately, the Zeppelin people didn't know the doping compound was extremely explosive. It was research by a NASA scientist who managed to get a sample of the outer skin covering from the Hindenburg and looked at its chemical composition that he noted it had almost exactly the same properties as the solid rocket fuel used on the Space Shuttle SRB's. He came to the conclusion the ignition of one of the canvas covers possibly set off the hydrogen gas.
In fact, a secret Zeppelin internal report done in 1938 also noted the penchant of the doping compound to burn extremely rapidly, but that report was squelched by the Nazi authorities for propaganda reasons.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Solar energy hitting the earth will get transformed into heat pretty quickly no matter what happens. All we're doing with solar collectors is doing a little work with the heat before it gets tossed out. The waste heat situation ends up no worse than if there were no solar collectors to begin with.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
If you've seen the footage, the paint may have been the cause, but the real power came from the hydrogen. The skin burns quickly, but it did not main explosion/fire.
In the documentary about it and NASA scientist and hydrogen specialist Addison Bain's inverstigation, it was highlighted that the colour of the fire and it's spread was not characteristic of a hydrogen fire:
That's not quite correct. Hydrogen absolutely had something to do with the Hindenburg disaster. However, it was not the only factor. The Hindenburg was repainted for that flight. The new paint was metal-based. Electrostatic in the air was able to flow as a current on the surface of the airship. The current produced a spark which ignited the hydrogen.
So, yes, the Hindenburg wouldn't have gone down in flames if it weren't for the canvas paint. But it also wouldn't have ignited with a helium-based lift.
I expect the logic was this: Gasoline has been deemed by society to be 'safe enough'. Hydrogen is about as safe/dangerous as gasoline. Therefore, hydrogen is also 'safe enough'.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Perhaps, but one of the things they are working on is converters to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen. If those pan out, then the oil companies probably wouldn't mind so much.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No, batteries just have issues with
A. Amount of energy vs weight (yes, that energy can be replenished over and over, but one charging of 1 kilo [or choose your preferred measure of mass] of battery is less than 1 kilo of any reasonable fuel) You also have to carry dead weight around as the battery is drained -- 'dead' fuel is burned and is not carried by your vehical.
B. Recharging -- granted, part of this is a social problem and can be dealt with (by having recharging stations) but even your corner recharging station isn't going to help the fact that it takes far longer to recharge a battery than to fill a fuel tank. And if you happen to be going somewhere without stations of the appropriate type, it's more efficient to carry containers of fuel than fuel + generator.
C. Hydrogen (in particular) is far less polluting than Lead Acid batteries -- in generation and in getting rid of it at the end of it's useful life. (Yes, recycling is good. however, I'm not seeing americans recycle -- in fact, I'm beginning to see backlash -- recycling is *not* cool -- I don't believe that, but my belief doesn't change the fact that many do believe that)
And leaking gasoline isn't half so dangerous as an exploding gas tank on your standard sized car. Think of the blaze if the hindenburg had been filled with gasoline (that's a lot of volume there).
Oh, and the original poster was at least sort of right...read
http://www.hindenburg.net/theories.htm
Specifically, the bit about the fire not being consitant with a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The solution to the fueling infrastructure problem is obvious. Not simple, but obvious.
Let the consumer buy their own filling device.
Like timothy said, someday they oughta be built into the car, with solar panels on the roof providing the energy to seperate the water by products back into hydrogen....
But in the meanwhile, they oughta be able to come up with something the size of a wardrobe or two that you can stick in your garage and use....
(powered, of course, by the solar panels on your roof and windmills in your yard)
--
Tweet, tweet.
Someone has to manufacture and distribute hydrogen. You think the Oil companies are that short sighted? They are already reskinning themselves as "energy companys"
So if a drunk driver's breaks fail, then it's okay to drive drunk, because driving drunk didn't cause the accident?
Hydrogen is still dangerous, Hindenberg anecdote or not. If Challenger wasn't sitting on a tank of liquid Hydrogen and another tank of liquid Oxygen, the challenger disaster would have looked very different, and might not have even happened, despite the fact that Hydrogen wasn't responsible for the failed o-ring.
Hydrogen isn't safe. Not that gasolene is particularly safe, but the logic in the parent post is pretty contrived and false.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
You're right. It is all about comparative risks, and I wasn't making the point that Hydrogen is a a bad fuel, just that it's not a SAFE fuel. In response to your assertion that you have to have a fuel, and therefore an unsafe fuel, for locomotion, be it spacecraft or car, I'd point out that lead-acid bateries don't tend to be as explosive as gasolene or hydrogen.
Also, in response to those who point out that leaking hydrogen floats upwards out of harms way, this is a good poiont. Leaking hydrogen isn't half so dangerous as an explosive release of pressuraized gas (flammable or not) that a hydrogen-powered car carries around.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Here's a nice article posted more than a year ago on slashdot about producing Hydrogen in Algae filled ponds. Sadly the link is broken, but search on most search engines and you'll find what you need to know. Apparently the aparatus is fairly simple. It might even become a backyard industry. Imagine growing and cultivating your own fuel for your car. Being a commuter, I know if I could supply my own fuel I'd have probably another $100 a month to use. Over 3 or four years the savings would more than be paid back.
Who knows, pipe dream or whatever, it's a nice one.
As optimistic as I am about alternative-powered cars, I always fear that the multi-billionaire oil companies will just step in and squash whatever idea people have about alternative fuel.
:)
Maybe it's just a myth, but if I were some huge rich cigar-smoking king-of-cash, I'd want to trample whatever threatened my empire. Kinda like Microsoft
They don't "own" oil companies, but they definitely 0wnerz them (in the 31337 h4x0rz speak) since OPEC can pretty well shut down all the oil companies on Earth. (Or at least deal them a mortal blow...)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Humidity isn't helping you, but cooler, denser air is. The main advantage of ram air systems like on your Camaro is not the increased pressure of the air cramming into the intake at 70mph, but the fact that that air is from the cool outside, rather than from the hot engine bay. I'm not familiar with the particulars of the Camaro's system, but I know that cold air induction kits for Miatas are good for about 5-10% increase in horsepower.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
OPEC is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, consisting primarily of Persian Gulf area countries who produce the vast majority of cheap oil on Earth. There's plenty of oil outside the Persian Gulf area...it's just very difficult and expensive to locate and extract it. So, since getting oil around the PG is pretty simple and inexpensive, those nations have a very strong bargaining perspective WRT the oil companies who want access to their fields.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Note that, as this quote mentions, hydrogen flames are basicly transparent. The big fireballs in the Hindnburg footage were not burining hydrogen. Also, hydrogen needs a ritcher mixture than gasoline, and it disipates up rater than sticking to things like gasoline.
--Ben
... I expect more of the editors than this. No don't ask me why. Two things I need to pick a bone with:
1. The hydrogen had nothing to do with the hindenburg disaster. The fire was caused by the rocket-fuel they used on the canvas for paint, or sealant, or somesuch.
2. The danger with hydrogen powered cars also has nothing to to with the flammable nature of hydrogen, it's simply the fact that it's stored under very pressure....
Anyway, enuff from me. Just had to get that off my chest.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Hydrogen power is great for cars. I'm all in favor of it. Assuming that all the engineering aspects are worked out, and the oil companies don't block anything (which is assuming a lot) there is still a problem-supply of hydrogen. You can't just go and pick it up off the street. Electrolysis of water is expensive and time-consuming. One of the solutions to this problem was using natural gas plants to produce hydrogen during the non-peak hours. This was a great idea until natural gas prices skyrocketed. So this probably won't be a viable method. However, some of you may remember a story on slashdot a year ago about how algae can produce hydrogen. I'm placing a lot of hope in this. Maybe, in the not too distant future, people can have little algae ponds outside their houses that will produce hydrogen to fuel their cars. Other than these three methods-algae, power plants, and electrolysis, I don't know of any other ways to really make hydrogen for fuel cells. And none of them is that practical right now. Just something to consider in the hydrogen fuel cell debate.
Colin Winters
Has anyone here really stopped and considered that millions of people driving personal trasportation devices is just going to be bad for the environment regardless of how they are powered? Sure, switching to a cleaner energy source will clear up alot of the pollution from emmisions, but what about the 'other' emmisions?
For instance, how often do you replace the tires on your vehicle? Once aevery year or so... and where do you think all that tread is going?
Wiper fluid... lubricants... turtlewax... it all adds up, you know? Maybe we should focus on ways to scrub our environment instead of just limiting what millions of people release into the world every day.
My new catch phrase is: "I NEED A NEW CATCH PHRASE, BABY!"
Given the choice between petrol and hydrogen on grounds of safety, Hydrogen has one very significant advantage.
It's really, really light. If it leaks out of its controlled environment it goes straight up, extremely quickly. As opposed to the petrol, sitting in pools underneath the leak.
Really, it's nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Quite good, in fact.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Takes too much land to produce enough fuel to run enough vehicles.
It's a lovely idea but is only workable on a large scale when there's a really, really big surplus of agricultural land.
There was one interesting idea which I heard about a while back, though - mutant algae producing hydeogen. Wonder what's happening on that one?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Of course that's why people are talking hydrogen rather than batteries and electric charge. Pumping gas into a car is equivalent
to "charging" it at a rate in the BILLIONS of watts. You're not going to pull an electric into a station and give it a quick charge.
You'd be using the entire output of a fossil fuel or nuclear plant to charge ONE car. The magnetic fields around the cable would
bend the sheet metal.
While I agree with most points you make, these numbers are not entirely realistic. A full tank of gasoline is about 2 MJ, but nobody is expecting that you can recharge an electric car in 1 second. If you take a more realistic number of about 2 minutes for a charge, you 'only' need about 15 MW. The best way to do this would be to exchange the batteries for fresh ones. This isn't really feasible with current battery technology, of course.
The heat wasted in the brakes of a car stopping from 50 MPH, once, could heat a snowbound four-bedroom house for half an hour
Sounds impressive, but is exaggerated. A 1000 kg car, running at 50 MPH has a kinetic energy of about 250kJ. Divide by 1800 seconds, and you'll get 140 Watts. This isn't going to heat a four-bedroom house. You'll need something closer to 25 kW for that.
Stationary pollution is easier to deal with. Plus, nuclear plants don't contribute to global warming, don't emit ordinary pollutants, and are cheaper than any other technology when all costs are accounted for. And yes, the risk of a nuclear power plant has been socialized. Then again, so has the pollution from a coal plant, or the pollution from producing solar panels.
But rather than argue about it, we should just make sure that each technology has to pay the full cost of its operation. Then we let the free market choose.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The best info I have found is
here. Very informative.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
The Hindenburg dident blow up because itw as full of hydrogen, it blew up because it was coated in the same stuff the Solid rocket boosters on the Space shuttle use for fuel, or at least something verry similar
It also carried a large amount of Diesel fuel...
Had it been a hydrogen fire it would have not shown so many flames and been over in seconds
Gasoline has been deemed by society to be 'safe enough'. Hydrogen is about as safe/dangerous as gasoline. Therefore, hydrogen is also 'safe enough'.
Except that since hydrogen is lighter than air it is less likely cause explosions in underground structures. Which is a big risk with fuels which are heavier than air (including methane.)
Yeah, that stuff they coated the hindenburg with was just ground aluminum.
Look at your beer can. It is hard to believe that ground and processed right it would make a very nice bomb.
Aluminium is actually about as reactive as sodium or magnesium. What makes it stable is that under most conditions in contact with oxygen (or water) it will form an inert oxide which prevents further reaction.
Several countries already blend their petrol with ethanol and it is not much of a step to make an engine that will be happy running on pure alcohol.
Ethanol has a long history of being used as an "anti-knock" additive. Though TEL ended up being used for a long time, apparently more for political reasons than anything else.
In fact I saw a bus at my local shopping centre yesterday that runs on pure ethanol.
A fuel injected engine with load of electronic hung on should be less fussy about its fuel than a 100 year old design. At least in theory.
One of the major problems, is that the plant-based diesel fuels tend to come from seed oils. Most of the plant is not the seed, so you get relativly little return on the total biomass.
Assuming the rest of the plant cannot form a commercially useful crop. Problem is one of the best candidate plants has been made illegal due to it's alkaloids. (Anyway plenty of plants are already grown commercially for only their fruit or seeds.)
while you're at it, get paranoid about your gasoline tank spontaneously exploding too...
Insert mind here.
Actually, action movies not withstanding, I'm fairly sure ordinary gas tanks won't explode if you shoot them. Gasoline in a contained space will only explode if heated to a fairly high temperature, and even then it has to have oxygen to mix with. A ruptured fuel tank is certainly dangerous and a bullet might cause a spark that could ignite gasoline at the point of impact, but it would not immediately explode.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I irritated the crap out of people by capturing the ZModem auto-download sequence and using THAT as my sig. I was rapidly banned.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Your idea, my implementation idea, hopefully will show prior art when someone tries to patent it.
Anyhow...
Imagine if the "tarp" was made with black colored Tyvek, and on the roll were two layers (like toilet paper), however, along the length of the roll the Tyvek is "bonded" (however they do this process - heat?) in a wavy back-and-forth across the length, so that a "tube" is formed. Cut at the right place, and you have an inlet and outlet for the water. Hook up the water system and go...
Of course, all of this supposes one thing - Tyvek won't rot in the sun and weather. Not sure how well it would stand up in such conditions, pressurized with water. Perhaps another material could be used, like PVC or PEC?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually, cars aren't equipped with this because they don't explode...seriously...despite what you see in movies and on TV, it's virtually impossible to get a car to blow up.
>>Hydrogen is NOT abundant in nature. The only source of it is water.
9 16 .htm
>Water, eh? Not much of that around.
The hydrogen in water is tightly bound. You have to add energy to split the water. So hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is merely an energy carrier. Let me repeat that.
HYDROGEN IS NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY, IT IS MERELY AN ENERGY CARRIER.
>>When you move from an internal combustion engine with it's small size and all those moving parts up to a big, ole power plant you can get an order of magnitude or so more power out of the same amount of fossil fuel.
>>
This is just not correct. I think at most you could gain a factor of 2. And I believe that this would be less than the losses involved in *making* hydrogen, *compressing* hydrogen, and then *using* hydrogen.
Anyhow, electrolysis is an expensive way to make hydrogen. It is better to skip the electricity step and use a chemical process to go straight from natural gas to hydrogen. By expensive, I mean using more fuel, and making more pollution.
Also you ought to check out the NASA hydrogen safety site. Hydrogen has a low energy of ignition, and a wide flammability range in the fuel to air ratio. By both of these measures hydrogen is more dangerous than gasoline.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/doctree/871
The gasoline tank explosions that you see on TV after every collision are a gross exaggeration and not representative of gasoline safety.
The solid rocket boosters fall off before the space shuttle exits the atmosphere. They are recovered from an ocean (I forget which) and re-used. On the other hand, the big orange tank carries liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen so that it can burn in the abscence of an atmosphere (space). There are also some smaller tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen on the actual shuttle that are used to correct orbital positions, re-enter, etc. The big orange tank burns up in the atmosphere.
-- no
They used a pigmented dope on the fabric. The pigments used were iron oxide and aluminum.
You may remember that pair of powders from your chemistry class. It's called "thermite".
It's really hard to ignite. (You have to get the oxide layer off a particle of aluminum and melt the particle. Think of the oxide layer as saphire, or corrundum.) But a spark can do it if the pgiment is spread sufficiently thin or if the spark is hot enough.
Once it's lit, it burns by the aluminum pulling the oxygen out of the iron oxide, leaving elemental iron and the difference in the heat of formation of iron and aluminum oxides. Iron oxide has a moderate heat of formation - you can burn steel wool if it's fine enough. But aluminum oxide has THE highest heat of formation of ANY compound. The difference is enough to leave the iron molten and glowing brilliant white.
They weld railroad tracks by putting a thermite crucible above the join and letting the resulting molten iron pour down into a form wrapped around the rail. It melts the ends of the rail and fuses the whole thing into a single piece.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... someday they oughta be built into the car, with solar panels on the roof providing the energy to seperate the water by products back into hydrogen
You can forget the solar panels on the car. And Timothy can forget the ones on the roof, too. If you've got a few acres you might be able to swing it.
The reason is the sheer AMOUNT of energy involved in mechanical motion. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KILOwatt. Your car needs about 18 of them just to push the air out of the way as you cruise, more than a hundred to start up from a stopsign without inducing road rage in the people behind you.
A 135 HP engine is putting out a tenth of a MEGAWATT. That's enough to power a thousand houses. The heat wasted in the brakes of a car stopping from 50 MPH, once, could heat a snowbound four-bedroom house for half an hour.
Insolation is about one kilowatt per square yard. At the mid-latitudes of the USA you have about 5 solar hours per day. Let's be generous and say the panels are 10% efficient. And let's say your car has 3 square yards of panel area, you park it in unobstructed sunlight, and you have no weather. 4/3 * 3 * 5 * 1/10 = 2 horsepower-hours per day.
But that's as electricity out of the panels, with perfect storage, perfect motors, and perfect regenerative braking. We were talking using it to make hydrogen and burning it in an engine. Divide by another factor of 5 (at least).
Ok, now you're down to 2/5 horsepower hour. Call it one horsepower for twelve minutes. Call it enough to cruise for about a minute and a half at highway speed, or maybe enough to accellerate from a standing start to highway speed - ONCE.
Not going to do much commuting that way.
Of course that's why people are talking hydrogen rather than batteries and electric charge. Pumping gas into a car is equivalent to "charging" it at a rate in the BILLIONS of watts. You're not going to pull an electric into a station and give it a quick charge. You'd be using the entire output of a fossil fuel or nuclear plant to charge ONE car. The magnetic fields around the cable would bend the sheet metal.
Ever wonder why electric cars are a BAD idea? Think about the power shortages in California. Then think about everybody commuting with electric cars. Figure a one-hour commute and perfect efficiency so you can approximate it as averaging maybe 24 horsepower. Figure charging them for 12 hours - 2 HP average. That's 1.5 times the power demand of the house, JUST to charge ONE very efficient car for ONE hour of commuting for ONE driver. For every two power plants we have now, build three more.
Now add in shopping. Stop-and-go. Call it another four power plants. Drive from silicon valley to San Francisco and back for a little entertainment - five more. Don't even THINK of a pleasant drive in the country, or going to visit grandma for the holidays.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're right when you say that this just moves the polution. The difference is that those big power generation plants are _much_ more efficient then your typical car engine. The typical oil power plant is ~40% efficient - compared to ~25% for a car engine.
Those plants are heat engines. "Perfect" is closer to 35 if I recall correctly.
But if you're using it to generate hydrogen, and burning the hydrogen in the car, the car engine is STILL going to get about 25%. So (using your numbers) you're getting 25% of 40%, rather than 25% of 100%, of the energy from the fuel.
Oops! Now you're burning two and a half times as much fuel.
Now if you could take the power the plant makes and store it 100% efficiently, transport it to the car without loss, and use it in the car without loss, THEN you'd have a 40% efficient car instead of a 25%. And you'd have moved the pollution and reduced it somewhat. That's what they're TRYING for with the electric cars.
But forget about it. You make the car heavier with those batteries, so you need to move the batteries around, too. Net payload stays the same while gross vehicle mass goes up, and even with perfect motors, batteries, and transmission lines you end up with less efficiency.
Better would be to use a car with regenerative braking and flywheel storage. LOTS to be gained there.
But if you have regenerative braking and flywheel storage, you can use it in combination with a LITTLE internal combustion engine running at max-efficiency, and get rid of the major storage. Call it 200 horsepower-minutes of flywheel storage and a 25-horsepower engine running at closer to 30% efficiency than 25 and you'll get city mileage beating the country mileage of current vehicles, while country mileage also goes up, though not in proportion. You'll need a few other things to break 100 MPG, but it's no longer unattainable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I live near many different railroad lines and have never seen this done (or a fused rail).
Most railroads don't use welded rail. It's tough to do an expansion joint with no joints. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm a little uneasy at flywheel storage. I've heard enough stories about what happens when early harddrives (heavy, quickly spinning cylinders) and ultracentrifuges "go" that I'm very apprehensious about them, especially when poorly maintained.
And that's one of the big design issues.
But it's not unique to flywheels. Imagine what happens when you get in an accident that shorts and/or spills the contents of batteries capable of delivering a megawatt for ten minutes.
At least one uperflywheel design (which is NOT disk-shaped) is intended to go to powder if they fracture. And the breaking of the bonds absorbs a lot of the energy. (A superflywheel at max is operating where the molecules throughout its structure are strained just short of the breaking point, so the stored energy approximates the heat of formation of the compound.)
But if it doesn't work it approximates a small bomb. (So you put it in a container that approximates armor.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Let's see...
You're using energy from your electrical system to electrolyze water into hygrogen and oxygen. The electricity replaces, at a minimum, the "heat of formation" energy of the water as it cracks it to its elements.
Then you inject the hydrogen into your intake manifold, where it burns with oxygen from the air, releasing the heat of formation - as heat.
The heat is converted to mechanical power by the engine, which turns the generator to make the hydrogen.
Perpetual motion? Hardly.
A PERFECT heat engine only gets about a third of the energy out of the heat it uses. The other >2/3 goes to heat up a cold place. So you lose AT LEAST 2/3 of your energy each time through the cycle. And while automobile engines are pretty efficient they are optimized for portability, power-to-weight ratio, and a wide operating range. So they don't approach Carnot Cycle efficency all that closely. You need a big stationary power plant for that.
Electric generators are good - you'll probably only lose another 10% there. More for the fan belts.
Your electrolyzer won't be 100% efficient either. And that pump is pure loss.
The hydrogen might do something useful to the mixture. But more likely it will just confuse the engine control computer, which expects to be working with a mixture of gasoline and air, and lower the efficiency of the engine further. (But probably not as far as if you tried it on a pre-computer engine, which doesn't have feedback from an exhaust oxygen sensor to let it adjust the gasoline flow to compensate for the hydrogen.)
I suspect any mileage improvement to be an illusion. But there's one possibility for some improvement from this setup. The bubbler is probably putting some fine water droplets into the intake manifold. Water injection does help an otto-cycle engine, making a non-trivial improvement in both mileage and NOx emissions. The droplets boil and the steam helps transfer the energy into mechanical effort against the piston, while the boiling water cools the burn and reduces combustion of nitrogen.
It's not done in cars because it's an expensive extra complexity, leaves you with TWO consumable liquids to run out of, and tends to rot the metal. Compared to a computer controlled engine without water injection it's not enough of an improvement in performance to justify the costs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually I just caught a show on Discovery (Canadian) last weekend that covered alternative transportation, that included a section on Hydrogen as a method to power cars.
Someone made an good point that everyone's eyes go wide when you mention H2 as a fuel, as they link it to exploding blimps.
Yet, everytime we get into a car, we step into a small bomb. Gasoline is an extremely explosive fuel as well (of course it is, if it wasn't it would suck as a way to power a car.) and noone ever worries. Why? Well we have developed good saftey systems. How many people have actually seen a car explode in real life, as opposed to on the big screen? Not many I'll wager. Why, because gasoline isn't explosive? Of course not, because we have developed very good systems for keeping it where we want it, in the gas tank. The same will of course be true of hydrogen.
So set aside the blowing up blips for a moment, since if your gas tank blows on impact you're probably not gonna hang around to worry about if it's hydrogen back there or petro, ethier one will burn you good and quick, and look at the other facts.
1) Hydrogen produces relitively harmless byproducts when combined with air, mostly water (H2O), and would therefore resolve the vast majority of the air polution problems associated with vehicals.
2) Hydrogen is relitively plentiful and easy to get at. Water is pretty available, and splits to 2(H), O through a pretty straight forward mechanism, and it seems concievable we could extract Hydrogen out of some of the hydrocarbons as well.
As for the comments that the oil companies have been squashing alternative fuel vehicals, we're starting to see that change now. Many cities run on fuel cells (hydrogen batteries, essentially) and several mainstream auto manufactures have released hybrid cars that are dual petro/elect. I think the days of Opec's stranglehold on the world economy are likely numbered. Better educated consumers are questioning why we're stuck with a technology that has not changed signifigantly since its invention, when even in 8th grade, I could see that hydrogen was a superior solution for a fuel.
Food for thought from an over caffinated mind!
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Actually, producing hydrogen is very expensive, especially when using eletrolysis. The steam reforming method might be another story, though. But let's look at the cost of getting a megaJoule worth of hydrogen.
.04/.15/3.6
Electrolysis is approximately 15% efficient, and you're going to pay about 0.04$ for a kWh of power. so
That means a megaJoule worth of hydrogen is going to cost you 0.075$.
Now, gasoline costs 0.5$ per liter, and a liter of gasoline is good for about 31.5 megaJoules. That means gasoline costs 0.016$ per megaJoule.
So:
0.075$/MJ Hydrogen (electrolised)
0.016$/MJ Gasoline
Conclusion ? You're going to need to produce lots of power to make your oxygen. Power isn't free, or even cheap. Worse, you're using a 15% efficient process. It's going to cost you a lot of money to make your hydrogen on a commercial scale.
Now, if you're using the latest hydrogen making processes, you might be able to achieve 80% efficiency. Over 5 times as efficient ! It drops the price of the power needed to make your megaJoule worth of hydrogen to less than 0.015$. That doesn't include all the equipement, personnel and taxes, methods of transportation and everything that you'll need to add to the cost of your hydrogen..
I have heard of explosion supression systems, made mainly for aircraft, that flood an area with an inert gas (some halogen) if there's a danger of explosion. I don't know why cars aren't equiped with such systems, it's probably just a cost issue. I'd certainly pay for it if it were available.
Well the pollution won't happen in the city, you spread it out or put it far away from people they don't really care about it.
Solar and wind power could be more feasible, batteries are very poor storage devices, hydrogen could be a better storage medium.
I think it is mostly the not here thing.
You are assuming that hydrogen production is going to be centralized like gasoline production is today. But anybody can go out and make hydrogen, it's just too expensive right now. If hydrogen is cheaper to produce taxes will be limited to something less than the cost differential between centralized hydrogen production and made at home hydrogen production. Anything more and they are going to lose control of the revenue stream because people will just make their own and not pay the tax.
Natural gas, another alternative fuel (and a lot closer to production if the Dean Kamen rumors are to be believed) is even more resistant to taxation. Most people in the urbs/suburbs have it piped to their houses already and use it for heat. You can imagine the political resistance to making it so that granny can't heat her shack on her fixed income...
Don't think the government/corporate insiders are omnipotent because that's their biggest edge.
Yes, government intervention can cause clean to be profitable, juicing up investment in clean technologies. However the fields of human endeavor that are profitable become smaller.
There is an alternative. Spend your own money and that of like minded people on funding the research and leave the poor marginal workers out of it. They are the ones who are going to get shafted as their cost of living rises to unbearable levels.
Heartless bastard
Malthus would have been proud of your post. The problem is, Malthus was wrong. Supply does not increase arithmetically as demand increases geometrically. The question on all of these power issues is are we willing to accept the tradeoffs that keep us from population crashing. Nuclear fission (CANDU type or newer) is quite safe and it's certainly capable of fulfilling the necessary power needs you state but there is a large portion of the US population that just won't accept it. Perhaps the CA experience will change their minds...
If you look beyond the headlines, you will see that most advanced societies are plateauing or crashing their populations. Japan, Europe, even the US is only maintaining its numbers via immigration. The key is to get those darn 3rd worlders something more productive to do than have that 8th kid. That means helping them develop a rich society where children are no longer viewed as primarily an economic asset.
DB
It's a little difficult to run such studies because so few governments are stupid enough to raise environmental standards enough to impoverish their lower and middle classes.
It is quite telling though, that when the Clinton administration started trying to put environmental standards increases as conditions for trade deals, Mexico and all the other poor countries that were offered better access to US markets in exchange for this turned them down specifically because it would hurt their poor. In fact, a popular theory among 3rd world nations is that environmentalism is just another way that the 1st world is trying to keep them down.
DB
Differential tax regimes are tough to maintain. The reason that they color diesel/home heating oil is specifically to make it as easy as dipping a stick in your tank to spot a tax evader. But what realistic regime are you going to do for a gas fuel? Opening a pressurized tank of gas is certainly going to be more dangerous than a non-pressurized liquid tank. Is it possible? Sure, but it's a great FUD point for tax opponents.
Another thing to think of, heating oil is much less common than natural gas heating and the people they check up on for violations are overwhelmingly commercial drivers. Natural gas cars are likely to be overwhelmingly passenger vehicles. A punitive tax regime that doesn't let any of the cost benefits get passed on to the consumer is simply not going to fly in this day and age. Differential taxation based purely on what appliance I put my gas into (heater, grill, or car) is a political non-starter.
+++
Sigged!
March 17, 2005
It seems that the long touted "clean fuel" of the 21 Century had some unfortunate and unexpected consequences today when the massive amounts of H2O released into the atmosphere finally caused the earth to sink (The process of continents passing below the rising surface of the ocean) due to the exhaust created by urban commuters.
"We were really caught off-guard on this one," says John Shepley, an engineer at the BMW Space Station, one of the three man made structures still in existence. "Everyone knows that the coasts have been crawling closer and closer for years. The granola eater types really started complaining when California went under, but we figured all that liberal spouting was just hyperbole. I guess we were wrong."
The engineers have been working for some time on further innovations that may make the world inhabitable once again. "Yeah. We can make a machine that uses electrolosis to turn water back into its component H2 and O2 molecules, but the only design we could come up with used fossil fuels. We figured, no, we'll stay away from that. The use of fossil fuels can get you into all sorts of trouble."
I recently saw a documentary which discussed how hydrogen wasn't the cause of the Hindenburg disaster. Instead, it turns out that a coating used on the cloth that surrounded the hydrogen ignited due to a spark. I can't remember the exact details, or provide a link, but from memory the investigation was conducted by an ex-NASA employee.
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
You forgot their biggest ally.
- passion
Why "instead of nuclear terrorism"? You just have to wait one or two millenia, till hydrogen powered vehicles make use of the true powers of hydrogen, and bingo! Although you'll probably need a degree in nuclear physics if your car happens to break down...
--
Cthulhu fhtagn!
The problem of the supply of hydrogen will be solved very quickly once there is demand for it. By the time only a few percent of vehicles are hydrogen powered, that is still a massive demand which will spur research into new or more efficient ways of producing hydrogen.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
lol... that reminds me of the simpsons episode where the teachers go on strike... "Lisa! In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
heh.
There were a number of factors involved, not least of which being that the surface of the blimp was sealed with rocket fuel. It's a lot more likely to dissapate safely and cleanly than your average high octane (Which just sits there messing up the environment until it either sinks in and pollutes the water table or catches on fire.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
grass clippings
See methane co-generation. Some waste plants do that. Most don't.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Open source is just shit.
Oh, you are so right.
Look at TCP/IP. Why, if Microsoft wasn't using BSD code in Windows, windows would not have a working TCP/IP.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The efficiency is not as important as where the energy comes from. Currently much of the energy for transport comes from petroleum, much of which is imported into my country (Australia) and the US. With hydrogen engines the energy comes from electricity.
Admittedly electricity is more generic, but considering the trouble the US is having with supply now it has to be asked whether the electricity system can supply the extra power for all transport. In addition to this, gas reserves are looking pretty thin, the US will probably be moving to coal-fired powerstations soon. If this happens the use of coal will skyrocket and it current prediction of 100 years worth will drop considerably.
Hydrogen may help us transition to other forms of power, but what is really needed are new energy sources, not just ways of storing energy.
I think sooner or later the human race is going to have to face up to the fact that we cannot grow forever. Short of usable fusion power our numbers and industry are already too great to sustain for more than a couple of decades. Getting smarter about energy is good, but as long as our society is modelled on exponential growth it can only postpone the inevitable collapse.
Acording to this article the Hindenberg Disaster was caused by "the extreme easy flammability of the covering material brought about by discharges of an electrostatic nature" and not by Hydrogen.
OK, hydrogen is supposed to be clean. However two things need to be taken into account:
1) Normal cars produce three (at least) kinds of pollutions: carbon monoxide/dioxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ozone (O3). Of course, hydrogen will not produce carbon oxides, but it will likely still produce nitrogen oxides and ozone. These are not created by the fuel burning, but by the effect of heat on the air (ie. the nitrogen in the NOx come from the air).
2) How do you produce hydrogen? If you use electrolysis, then you need to get the energy from some place. If you burn fuel to get that energy, you're just moving the pollution. Note: while power plants are more efficient than a normal gas engine, the gain you have will likely be lost in the electrolysis.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Great, instead of nuclear terrorism we can have terroristic opportunists in these BMWs deliberately having gruesome accidents, sparking flames from combustion-powered cars, and blowing huge areas to bits.
Does Ted Kaczynski know about this yet?
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
Obviously since a "combustion engine" works by combustion and combusting something at the wrong time can be harmfull then any type of fuel used in one of these should be considered unsafe.
Gasolene combusts more easily than hydrogen making it more likely to start combusting at the wrong time.
So gasolene is not only dangerous as you said, it is more dangerous than hydrogen.
Cyclists are more safe from stuff randomly combusting around them. But in my experience, people driving cars don't notice cyclists as much as they do trucks. And then you have the wacko's who like to try scare cyclists by driving their beat up pickup truck as close to the cyclist as they can and then honking the horn.
Hope this helps.
I looks like the article doesn't tell you much about the tech part. AFAIK BMW is only working on combustion engines modified for hydrogen. In other words you don't really get a boost in efficiency and you're car is likely to break down as your old one.
A real alternative concept are cars that draw the energy from fuel cells and use electric motors. This gives you higher efficiency, nearly no moving parts and you can can build the cars somewhat lighter.
An interesting sidenote is that Iceland, which produces energy by making use of geothermal activity, plans to ship lots of hydrogen to the europen market. It's kind of a national effort.
Funny, I thought electrolysis involved electricity!
But on a serious note: I wonder what the performance specs are - does it do 0-100 as fast as gasoline?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Gasoline combustion engines only utilize 30% of the energy of gasoline. So what's the point to your post? We have infinite amount of water (as the exhaust of a hydrogen burn is water) but very finite amount of fossil oil which is pollusive and toxic.
-- They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool -- John Lennon
Iceland is currently underway of becoming the world's first hydrogen community. A fertilizer company has been making hydrogen since the 1950's and now the government has made a contract with Daimler-Benz that they make hydrogen powered busses for public transport. So other car manufacturers are working towards incorporating hydrogen powered engines. Also there's some talk of converting the fishing troller fleet to use hydrogen power. As oil is quite expensive here, cause of transport (we, f.eg. pay the same for the liter here as americans pay for the gallon) And a oil distributor (believe it or not) has jumped on the bandwagon, and is going to provide these hydrogen powered vehicles with hydrogen in their gasstations, and are also selling small electric generators (12v, one amper) that use hydrogen. Everything is in fact in order.. Except for storage of hydrogen, which I hear is somewhat problematic.
:-)
l .G IF
Iceland is the perfect place for this, as we have very clean ways of producing electricity in our hydroelectric powerplants. In relation to that, many government agencies have incorporated electric cars.
Its a futuristic society
Anyway, I'm no authority in this field, I just repeat what I've read in newspapers/website. I have a couple of links but they're all in icelandic, but I do have one interresting picture:
http://www.islandia.is/vetni/Myndir/pem_fuelcel
-- They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool -- John Lennon
Things have improved a little on the solar front since, and further, if one really wanted to have a locally-solar powered vehicle, one would use the generating capacity of one's home to produce a portable form of energy (e.g. hydrogen) to fuel the car.
Doing the calculations though, is pretty grim:
- In California, 20 square metres of area gathers on average roughly 110 kW hours of engery in a day.
- The top theoretical efficiency for solar cells is about 88%. Current best in a commerical product is about 25%.
- Best efficiency for producing hydrogen from water using electricity is about 70%. Best effeciency for a fuel cell in a vehicle is about 60%.
So, using best available technology, using a solar -> electricity -> hydrogen -> fuel cell path, we get about 10kW hours of energy per day from one house. This will drive an efficient crusing vehicle (stretching here, and claiming 10kW power consumption) for one hour.With processes closer to the maximum theoretical efficiencies, and perhaps utilizing some more direct solar->hydrogen processes, one could possibly extract up to 5 hours worth of vehicle driving per household, foregoing any other sort of energy consumption.
Clearly, this isn't feasible, at least with that sort of energy consumption for a vehicle. With that consumption, it's basicly impossible to power a car with an energy source which is both renewable and local. The options are:
As far as I can tell, the only shortish term solution is the third. If we want to use energy sustainably, we have to rework our transport systems in a major way. At the moment, we're chewing up thousands of years of stored solar power in the form of fossil fuels.
On the bright side, 10kW hours of energy per household per day is quite nice, if we didn't have to worry about this whole transportation problem. It demonstrates that currently available solar and hydrogen technology is on the verge of being able to locally supply well in excess of all of our domestic energy needs, for those in the sunnier parts of the world.
I'm not saying that the US is bad becasue it uses coal, and nuclare, because I realise there isn't really any alternatives at the moment. What I'm saying is that just because some idea may not work over there. It dosn't mean it is a useless idea. Because there are plenty of other countries that can benifit
And here I was hoping for interesting newscasts whenever a car accident occurred :(
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
It's not just moving the pollution.
Suppose all cars use electricity instead of gasoline. Under present circumstances, that does mean much of the pollution is simply moved to a centralised plant. But remember that not all power plants pollute equally. What if all that electricity came from a hydroelectric power plant instead of a coal power plant? Or a wind field?
As advances in electricity- producing technology appear, less and less of the pollution will be simply moved, and will disappear instead. Even today, we don't get all our power from coal or oil plants. So electric cars would indeed help the environment as a whole, and especially result in cleaner air in ciy areas where cars are used the most.
Who says if you have a natural gas car that you're allowed to tap into your house's natural gas line. Take diesel fuel and heating oil. They are very much the same except that diesel is a little more purified (although not much) and it is colored. Yet, you aren't allowed (under threat of heavy fines) to use some of your home heating oil in your diesel engine, even though you pay for the oil. Go figure, eh? So, if natural gas cars become as common as everyone would like them to, you can bet there will be measures taken to ensure you don't use your home natural gas to drive around. They'll start selling natural gas at the gas stations which is marketed as being a different kind of gas.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Click Boom! is already taken, amiga software company ;)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
You should look into postgresql! I mean, I realize this is a troll, but postgres is a much nicer database.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Ok, lets take this real slow and simple. When you burn something, you're combining with oxygen at a lower energy level. The energy you release is the difference between energy in the old chemical bonds and the new ones. Now these cars work by burning hydrogen, what do you get when you combine Hydrogen and Oxygen? That's right, water. Water is the byproduct of burning hydrogen (or, usually water vapor). In order to extract the hydrogen from the oxygen, you need to put energy back into the system... Burning the hydrogen would get you exactly as much energy as you put in to make it. Of course, you would loose tons of energy along the way (gas seeping out, mechanical ineffectiveness, etc). In other words, its not going to happen, and thinking that it could is ridicules.
If you think you can somehow power a car by simply converting hydrogen and oxygen into water over and over again, well then, you are an idiot. Please stop telling people what they need to do.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
There is a huge difference between using electricity to extract oil, and using it to extract hydrogen from water. In the first case, you're going to be using a lot less energy then you're going to be putting in, the energy is already there in the form of carbohydrates. You'll be able to get all the electricity you need to power the drill (or whatever) by using a tiny fraction of the oil you just got. On the other hand, there isn't any readily available chemical energy in water, the only thing you get out of it, is what you put in. It's more like charging a battery then anything else, and you're always going to loose some energy a long the way. You'll never be able to power a hydrogen creation plant off of the energy you get from burning the hydrogen you just got.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think you can figure out why.
NO CARRIER
Why are hydrogen cars so popular? There is 0 to be gained from building hydrogen cars. Contrary to popluar belief, there is no help to the enviroment. Hydrogen is NOT abundant in nature. The only source of it is water. However, the hydrogen atoms are bonded to oxygen atoms in water, and need to be seperated. The only way to seperate the atoms is woth force. So to extract hydrogen from water to use as fuel, a processing plant needs to be built which will extract the hydrogen. B/c this country is very much against nuclear power, the plant that seperates this will probably use fossil fuels. This means that to produce a tank of hydrogen, a lot of fossil fuel will be burned. This does not help the enviroment. All this does, is moves the source of pollution from the individual car, to one centralized plant. While adding an additional step (The processing of the water), to lose effeciciency. It would be a much wiser invesetment of all thees companie's time to find some magical way of producing hydrogen, or developing electric cars. After all, combustion isn't very efficient. Why must we insist on using it?
-- Henry Cipolla
Should hydrogen begin to leak from the tanks or fuel lines it will rise into the air, rather than pooling under the car waiting for a spark to ignite it like gasoline would. As for the reluctance to have a tank of hydrogen in one's car... We already have automobiles with tanks full of gasoline. When it comes down to igniting a fuel, it doesnt make much difference whether its gasoline or hydrogen, if it ignites you have a huge problem one way or the other.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I've heard the same thing on National Geograhic Channel.
Monkey sense
Who keeps down the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenburg a star?
Ha! I kill me!
The amount of electricity required to electrolize water isn't that much, and isn't required all at once.
You could have a giant field of solar panels slowly generating electricity and breaking tanks of water into O2 and H2 with little supervision needed.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
Air may be commonplace, but hydrogen is not so commonplace. There is not much hydrogen in the atmosphere. Free hydrogen rapidly escapes the atmosphere, as its mean velocity at all temperatures in the atmosphere exceeds orbital escape velocity (cf. Jeans Escape) If you want to utilize hydrogen as a fuel, you have to make it and pick it up somewhere, since you won't be finding it in sufficient quantities in your intake manifold to be useful.
I would think that once a little fire started, the fact that the oxygen is cold wouldn't matter for long.
The concern that I had about CO2 is that it is heavier than air, invisible, odorless, and displaces oxygen. Time for a big Doh! on the liquid factor, I did know that. Still, dry ice is transported by truck, isn't it? Didn't we have a big volcanic CO2-fart somewhere a few years back that wiped out a whole town? Or am I hallucinating again?
Interesting attitudes. Could you tell us something about the safety protocols around liquid oxygen? Seems to me that would be a lot more dangerous than liquid hydrogen. What about CO2?
Why do you think gasoline, yes, gasoline, the stuff you can easily make napalm out of, so much safer than hydrogen? Never mind the fact that the Hindenburg blew up becuase it was coated with fscking rocket fuel. Never mind the fact that if the fuel tank ruptures, hydrogen will float upwards and disperse quite nicely, while gasoline will pool around and burn slightly less nicely. Never mind that while gasoline prices are constantly rising, LO2 is one of the cheapest fluids out there, and along with other gasses can only get cheaper as usage increases.
Did you read the article? That hydrogen fuel tank is armored, man! If you you are involved in something that breaks it, you've got bigger problems than crummy H2.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
I would buy one of these in a heartbeat, if I could get H2 easily.
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Dyolf Knip
Come up with a way to compress it further, and you're golden.
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Dyolf Knip
My bad. I was thinking of LO2 when I wrote the air part. Still, to get hydrogen you just need water, also much more commonplace than oil.
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Dyolf Knip
Um, doesn't Honda ALREADY have a hydrogen fuel cell car, almost ready to ship? What is with this news...
Ethanol has about 2/3 the amount of energy, methanol about 1/2. Neither of them has proved all that practical either, though there's tricks that can be played that improve this.
The simple economic fact is: You will put more energy into creating the hydrogen fuel than you can ever get out of it since 1) entropy rules all energy transactions, and 2) the efficiency of a fuel-burning combustion engine is ultimately limited by the Carnot efficiency of the engine, which states that you can only get the working fluid to expand from its previous state by the ol' PV~T rule. Therefore it will be at least as expensive as that many joules of electricity, which is that many tons of coal, air, or wherever the hydrogen plant gets it from.
The only reason that drilling for oil is cost-effective is that there is more energy contained in the product than it takes to get it out. Obviously. The same for coal, natural gas, and even wind turbine energy, etc... Once the return on investment slips to a lower level than is profitable, the energy companies stop mining it.
How is this supposed to be different with hydrogen? Can someone with a calculator please tell me how much a mile of hydrogen will cost in terms of kW-hours of electricity? I suspect that it can't be more effective than the ol' 13.6 joules it stores and releases...
When I took Direct Energy Conversion in college we talked about hydrogen, but only in terms of electric fuel cells, i.e., battery-powered vehicles. This is because the specific-energy stored in a cell (energy per unit weight) was much higher than lead-acid batteries (you need a trunk full of Pb batteries, and then your pickup and go suffers terribly due to all the weight).
But, remember that it is never a question of 'creating energy', only moving it around, and entropy is there at every step, robbing the transaction of precious joules. So, it is really a case here of plug-in cars, just like the flywheel concept and the battery-driven vehicles.
But perhaps Dean Kamen can help us gain economic feasibility of hydrogen where all but the Kaiser failed? Why are we not talking a little more about that, anyway? That is fascinating stuff, IMO...
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Yeah, that stuff they coated the hindenburg with was just ground aluminum. They did it so the ship would reflect the sun light and wouldn't heat up and expand during the day. Look at your beer can. It is hard to believe that ground and processed right it would make a very nice bomb. Rocket fuel is nasty stuff. The stuff they use in the space shuttle can't be put out once it is ignited ( what are you going to do -- cut off it's oxygen supply? The stuff was made to work in the cold vacuum of space.) The safety people get real concerned when you start playing with rocket fuel.
That's such a fatuous mischaracterization of the original poster's point it's hardly worth addressing.
The Hindenburg was coated in a highly inflammable substance which was probably ignited by an electricical discharge. It might well still have been a disaster if it hadn't been filled with hydrogen.
And it certainly wouldn't have been better off if it had been filled with gasoline ;-)
Yes, very different. Challenger would have been incapable of space flight. I think I'm being charitable by treating your comments as if you're not trolling.
You do realize that "safe" is not a perfectly objective term, don't you?
The point to all this is that hydrogen developed an undeservedly bad reputation in the public eye from the Hindenburg disaster. No one is claiming that's it is absolutely positively one hundred percent safe. What is?
The hydrogen storage tank is so good that it can keep a charge for 7 days. Also, it's only a 40-some Liter tank so the car has basically the same mileage as the gasoline version of the 750iL.
One thing to realize about liquid hydrogen is that it is actually pretty safe. If the vessel were to be ruptured, it would never explode due to oxygen. More hydrogen would boil out, keeping any oxygen from entering. Any hydrogen exposed to air would rapidly (1.) dissapate, and (2.) flee upwards. Hydrogen/oxygen concoctions are only a problem in enclosed spaces.
The biggest problem from a cryogenic vessel is if the pressure were to build to high, but that never happens as there are lots of check valves and safety ports to release pressure build-up.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Meanwhile, I think that lower class Americans might enjoy paying a third of what they pay for gas now. They might also enjoy the thinning of the disgusting halo that rings our major cities.
The oil giants, Exxon, BP, Texaco, etc...are rapidly attempting to portray themselves as energy corporations. In the event of a switch to a more modern power source, they will be ready to jump in and provide much of the power and infrastructure that is needed.
I think that the smaller drilling and prospecting firms are the real lobbies that will keep us stuck to fossil fuel dependence. With Dubya, proud CEO of multiple failed drilling operations, at the helm, the lobbies of these smaller companies will have a great effect on standards and federal research effort.
I don't think OPEC will keep us dependent as the entire world would love to force that cartel out of business.
Although it may seem strange (and to many libertarian minds quite unethical), the best way to move society towards clean sustainable power is to toughen emission standards. The trucking industry will always cry out that this will make profit impossible. The effect of this is to unbalance the economic playing field in such a way that clean == profitable. This effect was noted in the 70s when new emissions standards transformed the auto industry. You can thank your 35 mpg sportscar on these efforts. New standards, if they ever go through, will immediately lead to hybrid and fuel cell cars with 70+ mpg initially, and over 100 mpg later (or whatever equivalent metric fuel cells use).
The large cap corps can predict and move with these changes, causing at most a 3 year dip in margins and stock prices.
BMW, and other manufacturers, need to investigate the possibility of creating hydrogen from water in the vehicle, not at the filling station or earlier.
I'd definitely buy a car that can be refueled by dragging the hose around the side of the house and sticking it into a tank. It gives new meaning to the term, "Free car wash with every fill up!"
Imagine the savings. What is water, a few cents per gallon in cities? In rural areas, it's absolutely free, because people have wells dug for them. Suddenly my monthly autmobile-related bills drop dramatically.
Furthermore, since water is nonvolatile, it could be stored in every feasible spot--in the door cavities, in the engine compartment, in a regular tank, in the roof. All one would need is a small pure-hydrogen tank, and the water-hydrogen conversion could be done in the last few stages of the energy consumption chain.
217 miles isn't a bad range at all for these cars... my '98 Contour gets 280-320 miles per fill up. This is much better than the 60 mile range the EV-1 sports, and with hydrogen refueling stations where every gas station used to be (assuming my ideas above don't come to fruition), America could survive with cars that get 220 miles per tank.
I'd like to see this succeed... it would make cheap, clean transportation available to the masses, and there are no real crippling problems that other technologies bring.
A new year calls for a new signature.
At night these solar cells can catch up on the inefficiencies of this system
At Night??? From the streetlamps? Any system running on solar power is going to be better off using the electricity to power an electric motor.
I lost my copy of the green golf ball joke can anyone find it for me?
Crusing is 200 to 500 Watt hours per minute, not Kilo Watt Hours. Sorry for the typo.
The truth shall set you free!
Q How much power can I get from sunlight?
A typical 2 ft X 4 ft solar panel is about 65 watts. If you can park in the sun for 8 hours you will collect about 500 Watt hours.
How much power does it take to drive a sporty car on the freeway?
Accelerating onto a freeway, about 100,000 watts. Divided by 60 minutes shows a consumption of 1.667 KWH per minute. Cruising on the freeway, about 12-25 KW uses about 200-500 KWH per minute.
Q How far can I go on a day's sunlight?
A About 1/2 mile at expected performance.
For references, look up electric vehicles and fuel cell cars in google.
The truth shall set you free!
Actualy it was the Water sealant that was the Explosives, it went on top.
The Hindenburg dident blow up because itw as full of hydrogen, it blew up because it was coated in the same stuff the Solid rocket boosters on the Space shuttle use for fuel, or at least something verry similar.
- At low temperatures, many electronics have much
better performance. Thermal noise is reduced, transistors switch faster, and
laser diodes are brighter. The backyard
astronomer could make near-zero K amplifiers or CCD cameras for radio or
infra-red astronomy, and the computer hobbyist could overclock his computer to
unheard of levels.
- A lot of materials superconduct at that
temperature.
- Liquid Hydrogen is an ideal fuel for a lot of
purposes. It is powerful, and it can be used to cool the engine too. (Model
planes or rockets, gas turbines, etc... )
- If you have liquid Hydrogen, you can use it to
make liquid air and then by simple distillation, liquid Nitrogen
(77.3K) and Oxygen(90.2K)!
--"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least
once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
This is a very do-able thing, but only if you have experience with repairing cars. I was all excited to try this myself since I understand all the basic principles and the plans seemed relatively simple. The only problem that I ran into was when I got to this paragraph: If the timing is the same as in a normal gasoline engine, the new fuel's explosive forces will fire before TDC and will not be properly harnessed. This will not aid mileage, but actually could retard it as well as cause possible engine damage. Yikes!! I don't want to damage my car!! Of course there is a fix: The damage might be caused because the explosive force is pushing down when the piston cannot really move much (when at the TDC point). By retarding the timing, the forces can fire when the piston is ready to go down. You can set the timing for 3-5 degrees later. A tip for setting your timing: I have found (if you have no timing light) you can use a vacuum gauge. Just set the engine to the highest vacuum at idle. This stopped me. How do I do this? Who do I talk to? I'm not about to go to my mechanic and say "Hey man, can you help me with this totally experimental hack?" Otherwise, this setup seems like a pretty cool way to increase your mileage at least 25%!! (possibly more as the article mentioned)
Where can I pick up my hydrogen-powered hovercraft?
I personally believe we are foolish not to go after this technology. After all, most of what we do with gasoline is burn hydrogen, and then spit out what doesn't burn as dangerous byproducts(of course, CO2 isn't a pollutant, and catsup is a vegatable, if you follow a certain way of thinking). Besides, as I'm sure many previous posts mention, it's just about as dangerous to use gasoline as it is to use hydrogen in terms of unexpected combustion. As any welder will tell you, a fuel gas cannot burn until it's mixed with oxygen. A far more salient concern would be explosive decompression of the fuel container under heat or a good hard knock, but, although I can't remember who it was, there was a company recently experimenting with using a metallic matrix for hydrogen fuel storate, with the idea that even if the tank were cut in two, the gas as it escapes rapidly cools (as gases do) and would freeze over the opening, thereby sealing it. I dunno, but the BMW engineers don't seem the least bit concerned, as they say the liquid H just dissapates, which you may or may not choose to believe. Besides, I see natural gas-powered vehicles all over the place today, and where's the outcry? And what's the difference between powering a vehicle with natural gas or powering a vehicle with hydrogen? The natural gas is, of course, supplied by the oil companies, where just about anyone with the gumption can produce hydrogen with nothing but electricity and water! Which may explain the somewhat hysterical opinions circulated against hydrogen-powered vehicles.
As far as the autopump thingy goes, didn't the nozzle on that thing look sort of like the torture machine Darth Vader used on Princess Leah in Star Wars? Around here, we probably wouldn't use one, though, as it would put people out of work.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, except the thought expressed itself as
"Gee, we must really be getting close to the end of the oil if the oil companies are actually letting this one out of the bag."
Then again, a friend of mine once told me about meeting a shit-faced automotive engineer at a party who said he'd been on a team that helped build a car engine that could get 'mileage' on the order of hundreds of kms to the litre. She said that he said they eventually took the pieces out of the factory in envelopes, which tells you something. OTOH, he was drunk, but that story almost falls into the "I couldn't make up anything that weird" category.
Then again, the first "hybrid" cars are out...which either confirms my theory, or just implies that that particular cat is already out of the bag, or both.
Hmm...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Actually, airships are making a comeback; even the name 'Zeppelin' is being resurrected by a new German company, although previous *cough* bad associations with the brand are being worked around by calling it... get this... Zeppelin NT. Honestly!
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If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
Hydrogen fuel advocates are assuming, perhaps correctly, that once economies of scale are applied to hydrogen that more long-term and large-scale production methods will become practical and economical. But it hasn't happened yet.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
From the article:
"No more smelly fumes at the gas station. No more polluting C02 emissions. Far less dependence on uneven supplies of fossil fuels."
I find this really debatable for this reason: most (if not all) hydrogen comes from water. To obtain it a lot of electricity is needed which comes from one of those sources anyway, in some cases nuclear energy, but in many others no. So the argument that this a clean energy is not valid for me. Add to that the fact that there is a risc when working with such a volatile gas.
2 things are needed for fire. Air and Fuel.
In a fuel cell you are carrying Hydrogen, Yes, Hydrogen that stuff that was in the big blimp looking thing that tried to land in the US from Germany.
Also.
In a fuel cell you are carrying Air, yes, Oxygen. That stuff that an MIT professor thought would be fun to poor in liquid form on charcole so he could cook his hamburger in all of 2.5 seconds flat.
When I get hit in my FUel Cell Pinto, It will take out Me, the car that hit me and anything within 20 feet. Possibly my girlfriend, depending on when you hit the car and how roomy it could be with a fuel cell.
It's true, I don't spell check.
First of all, a hardware forum like Anandtech would be a better place to ask than slashdot. Second, CPU clock speed is controlled by the motherboard via either jumpers or the bios. Windows has nothing to do with it.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
they are just as dangerous as regular cars. when the combustion engine was made, the first cars which also ran on a highly volatile liquid, gasoline, were thought to be too dangerous. the thought of a cart powered by explosions was proposterous. hydrogen is just the same. the only problems really arecost, lack of fueling stations (the chicken or the egg problem), problem of maintaining hydrogen in liquid state.
You can "tinker" your own car and get a little extra mileage with just a little bit of acid and water and these plans. Basically, it runs a current through the electrolyte-filled water, causing it to electrolyse into Hydrogen and Oxygen gas. These go boom and you go faster. (don't worry, it's a little boom.)
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- It ain't easy, being green.
You can produce hydrogen without electrolysis. Just get some pool acid (muriatic acid), zinc nails, a beaker, and a balloon. Put the acid and nails into the beaker, put the balloon on top of the beaker, and WHAMO! The ballon inflates with the hydrogen it is collecting! Ultimately Hydrogen IS the future fuel, as a Wired magazine article discussed. Hydrogen is cool as a fuel because with it, it is possible to build a car that never needs refueling! Since both fuel cells and direct combustion of hydrogen produce water vapor as their exhaust, it would be easy enough to recollect the exhaust and feed it back into an electrolysis device that breaks the exhaust (water vapor) back into the fuel (hydrogen). The electrolysis device could be powered by batteries or possibly solar cells. Now, talk about a hybrid car! BTW, BMW isn't the only company looking at hydrogen... Ford's new museum next to the Henry Ford Museum (& Greenfield Village) in Deerborn, Michigan, has a display that says Ford is investing in fuel cell technology. It's only a matter of time before we have hydrogen cars, especially if they are made to never need refueling. And safety concerns are moot, as the article points out, since hydrogen is just as combustible as gasoline.. Hell, a hydrogen powered car could be much safer because in an accident, all the hydrogen fuel that seeps out of the car will float away.
This is a very offtopic post, I'm using a windows box right now and I desprately need to change the clock speed(don't ask why). The unfortunate part is that I have no idea were to get help with windows(I use linux). Can anyone please help me, or direct me to a site where I can get help with this, prefrably help me. I'm using WinME with a P-III.
Thanks Robert.
Several companies, including auto-makers, are currently looking into non-combusting fuel cell systems (as is the US Navy). Fuel cells, imho, are much more practical than hydrogen combustion systems. They don't combust, so they produce no gaseous emissions. Fuel cells exist that run on hydrogen (these are perfectly non-polluting), but there are also ones that can run on de-sulfured diesel fuel and gasoline, as well as natural gas. The non-hydrogen ones use fuel reformers to utilize the hydrogen in the fossil fuels. These are usually used in large-scale applications like power plants, but they are being scaled down.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells provide the emissions benefit of hydrogen combustion systems without the problems in making new 'hydrogen stations'. Of course, you're getting energy from fossil fuels, and they do produce some waste (along with some other disadvantages, too), but they don't combust in a giant ball of flame, like people worry hydrogen systems will.
For more info, try http://www.ballard.com and http://www.internationalfuelcells.com/.
See... we'll make some hydrogen powered generators to create the hydrogen we need to power the hydrogen powered cars. Then to power those generators, we'll make even bigger hydrogen powered generators... and then bigger... and bigger! Amazing! Oh... and imagine a beowulf cluster of these things.
Casual Games/Downloads
These miniature fuel cells would be a great source of hydrogen. That might let them avoid some of the difficulties of storing liquid hydrogen in the car. Also, an alcohol-powered fuel cell would allow for a cheap and easy fuel distribution system....just use the methods we use now to transport alcohol.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Hydrogen powered cars would be a great idea for the future but in the mean time why not just hook up an engine that runs on the used oil of french fries? This mode of fuel is not only cheap it runs efficiently and is not harmful to the enviornment! Besides that the streets you drive by will smell not of car fumes but of french fries. This smell would drive the people near by crazy untill they could buy some, hence forth allowing fast food chains rule the world! Ha Ha Ha. Sorry, I guess I got a little carried away with the fast food chains ruling the world part.
Buzz Off
Wow! Think of the day when people have access to cars that can have cheap and clean burning fuel. It will help the big cities a lot and won't force car dependant cities to have metro transit systems. The day will come near when all of the bugs have been worked out of these cars. I predict that they will be marketable in 2300-2500.
dude...do you know that H20 is water? water already covers 2/3's of our earth... I don't think an extra 2-3 gallson a year will change the earth that much.
"History will look upon the Act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." -Ghandi