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Hydrogen Fuel Cells Running On Sunflower Oil
tigersaw writes "You've heard about Biodiesel , Greasecars, and Fuel Cells for a while now. At yesterday's meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers from the University of Leeds in England described a novel approach that combines these ideas in a fuel cell device that employs steam and two separate catalyts to generate hydrogen using sunflower oil. Experimental results show a hydrogen yield of 90 percent, versus 70 percent in other hydrogen fuel cell technologies. 'The sunflower oil used is the same type found on grocery shelves. "We would happily toss our salad with it," says the researcher, who adds that the process can also work with other types of vegetable oils.'"
They toss their own salads?
ymmv
"We would happily toss our salad with it,"
They need a much, much better PR person.
best paid jobs of 2050:
4. microsoft historian
3. slashdot moderator
2. crop flyer
1. sunflower farmer
A car that runs on flower power?. Wouldn't that make the ultimate hippy car?
Especially as a VW combi van.
I told myself, once tossing salads became a common part of slashdot, I would have to switch fields.
That's it I now officially hand in my slashdot account.
This
Now where would all those sunflowers be grown, and what state will have to rename itself The Sunflower State?
Logic, macros, and more
The modern Hydrogen economy has to get over a huge hurdle in the wide-scale distribution network of H2.
Distribution for H2 is pathetically inefficient. In order to ship it at an efficient level, they have to compress it into liquid form. That takes up a lot of energy, along with the associated costs of now transporting a very cold liquid (yeah - not very energy efficient either).
If H2 can be made using a novel approach, you can minimize the huge potential transport and distribution costs by setting up a lot of small production facilities (local refineries?).
This could be a pretty big deal.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Should only be done with KARO Syrup....
Imagine if the $50 billion or whatever the US spent invading Iraq was spent of H2 research, production and infrastructure?
They toss their own salads?
Ya--goatse's been following these guys for a long time now.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Toss away. Just don't do it anywhere near me.
So how much energy is required to generate the steam that produces the hydrogen? Do you get enough H2 to make it worth the cost and effort?
It's like an all-electric car... sure it uses no gas but that power has to come from somewhere to begin with. You've only moved the problem to someone else's back yard.
At least with Biodiesel you get out more energy than you put in to make the conversion (the balance of the energy comes from the sun, which the plants have collected and turned into the raw oil).
=Smidge=
That's the whole point: one problem to solve (at the power plant) instead of many to solve (at the cars). If you run many electric cars from a single power station, then you have:
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
In the article they mentioned that the byproducts of methane and carbon dioxide were produced. Isn't it possible to generate electricity using methane? I remeber hearing about some dairy farmers that were doing that. I don't know what the effects of that would be, but it could be one more way for the system to become even more efficent, and possibly self sustaining.
...But I don't get it. Tossing a salad in a dressing is what you do. Once you put dressing (e.g. oil and vinegar) on it, you don't stir the leaves or whatever around, you 'toss' them.
Yes, I am aware of other meanings of the word, but do you snigger when somebody tosses a ball to you? So what is the joke?
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
You don't know? Didn't even stop to ask?
I didn't think so.
Being a wet blanket bugs me sometimes, but somebody has to do the dirty work of dragging everything back down to earth and facing facts. Here are some:
- The reactor doesn't generate hydrogen with 90% efficiency, it generates hydrogen of 90% purity. Given that the off-gas is about half methane (RTFA) it appears to me to be very inefficient. (Note: neither the author nor your Slashdot editor bothered to RTFA either.)
- There are already engines, and even fuel cells, which can burn hydrocarbons directly. Sunflower oil makes reasonable diesel fuel as-is. Solid-oxide or molten-carbonate fuel cells can reform fuels internally, and while they might coke up on straight sunflower oil they'd probably work just fine after it had been steam-reformed a bit.
- Hydrogen as a motor fuel suffers from huge problems with storage. People see it as sexy but for all the wrong reasons.
I could see this as another technology for making compact laptop power supplies whose fuel couldn't be used to bring down an airplane (just TRY making a fuel-air bomb with sunflower oil). The key to renewable energy? Gimme a break.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The vehicular power requirements of the United States average close to 200 GW. Then you have losses in transmission, conversion and storage. Total US electric generation capacity in 2002 was about 900 GW.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Why don't americans stop living in the suburbs and move back into the cities where they could perhaps bicycle or *gasp* walk to locations instead of insane hour long commutes. Perhaps all that hydrogen could inspire a blimp comeback - who needs anti-grav when we already have balloons? Sure they're flammable, but with helium that's not an issue. I'd like to see an antagonist element try to take out a building by crashing an airbourne bouncy-castle into it...
Sure they're flammable, but with helium that's not an issue. I'd like to see an antagonist element try to take out a building by crashing an airbourne bouncy-castle into it...
I'm not so sure - could you imagine a building full of people speaking with high pitched helium voices all day?
A staff meeting at Disneyland, Mouse Division!
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Why not use a fuel that's liquid at STP? Ethanol, say? The energy-per-unit-mass is lower, but it's so much denser you end up with a far higher energy-per-unit-volume. Storing and pumping liquids is a solved problem; you can use the existing infrastructure built by the petrochemical industry. Ethanol can be burnt and synthesised by fuel cells, too.
So what's with the hydrogen obsession?
If I recall correctly, the efficiency of the electrolysis/fuel cell cycle is about 50%. Some types of batteries do much better, at 80% or so. You're going to need a lot more power to run cars on electrolytic hydrogen than on batteries, and the difference between the two is something like 30% of current consumption - far from trivial.
On the other hand, with the current market penetration of electric vehicles you could do things either way and it would be cheap, especially if you used off-peak electricity exclusively. It's when you begin converting substantial parts of the vehicle fleet that the impact would be felt; you'd have to make big investments in the generating part of the infrastructure, mostly to replace low duty-cycle peaking generators burning expensive fuel with high duty-cycle or base-load plants burning cheap fuel.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
... because:
1) by-products are carbon dioxide and methane.
2) unseen by-products: whatever is required to grow sunflowers (fertilizers & their production, tractor fuel by-products, etc)
3) scaling: how many sunflowers does it take to make how much usable fuel?
4) scaling: how much viable farm land can afford to be lost to the production of "fuel" vice "food"?
Fuel cells are really neat. The problem of fuelling fuel cells is huge. Even without fuel cells the whole concept of biomass based fuels simply can't scale to current demand . Think about it, the U.S. produces amounts of oil measured in millions of barrels per day to sustain current consumption (let alone what it imports)! What quantity of biomass is required to come close to that and what are you willing to sacrifice to do it?
Sorry, but this story is a non-starter. If we're serious about addressing the dangers of fossil fuels, then we have to cut back on our energy consumption first and foremost. Anything else is just a "diet pill" approach. Don't change your fuel or engine, learn to live without/depend less on the vehicle(s).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Total area of the USA is 3,618,784 square miles, so you're talking 12% of the total land area (including Alaska) and a much higher fraction of the arable land.
Note that if you want to replace the gasoline as well, you have to multiply that figure by about 4.5. This is clearly not possible.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I find that many people are quite pessimistic when it comes to the feasibility of alternative fuels. Encouraging research such as this is good for the general public's morale, hopefully sooner than later American farmers, rather than terrorist states will power our vehicles.
BBC also has a story on this...
All the torrents you could want.
... really. Here's a link stating that cigarettes are greater polluters than diesels. It makes it hard to really focus on what the greater ill is. Are our vehicles really greater polluters than our industries (seems unlikely in the Third world)? Are fossil fuels truly the great satan or might they actually be the most efficient source of energy we currently have despite their imperfections? Or perhaps there are more dangerous and ubiquitous polluters closer to home as this article suggests.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I wonder if they have tried this one. It's designed to supress methane production and increase hydrogen production.
From the article:
...a Raneynickel catalyst, named after Murray Raney, who first patented the alloy in 1927.
Raney-nickel is a porous catalyst made of about 90 percent nickel (Ni) and 10 percent aluminum (Al). While Raney-nickel proved somewhat effective at separating hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules, the researchers improved the material's effectiveness by adding more tin (Sn), which stops the production of methane and instead generates more hydrogen. Relative to other catalysts, the Raney-NiSn can perform for long time periods (at least 48 hours) and at lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
High-yield rapeseed, 145 gallons/acre/year (1.52 KWH/m^2/year)
Algae-derived oil, 50000 gallons/hectare/year (212 KWH/m^2/yr)
Silicon PV cells at 15%, receiving 700 W/m^2 average, 6 hrs/day: 230 KWH/m^2/yr
Future PV cells at 50%: 766 KWH/m^2/yr
Algae is pretty impressive, but doesn't hold a candle even to present-day solar panels (and the energy from solar cells does not require conversion in a heat engine to make it useful). The advantages of algae are that they reproduce themselves and oil is more easily stored. Looks like the combination could be a winner.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Can it run on "I cant believe this is not butter"..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
... we already produce WAY too much food as it is, don't we? Aren't we still paying farmers NOT to grow crops?
+++ATH0
http://www.hyweb.de/index-e.html/
That link covers efficiency and basic major players in europe. Its the portal site to the companies doing EU funded research in hydrogen power and also to prducts currently available.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.