Slashdot Mirror
The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel
Spy der Mann writes "A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was recently developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. And it's completely emission free."
first post to call bullshit! :: cough ::
Scott
I can produce methane inside my body using only common vegetables such as beans. OK, so it's not emission free.
...I'll believe it when I see it.
the car can use itself for fuel ..... nice
You guys are total suckers. Come on!
Does it have cupholders?
From the article referenced by the Slashdot story: "The metal atoms will bond to the Oxygen from the water, creating metal oxide. As a result, the Hydrogen molecules are free, and will be sent into the engine alongside the steam."
This is just an example of moving the pollution elsewhere. The metal must be refined, at great cost to the environment. Then it is oxidized in a "pollution free" car.
TFA is just a commercial filled with hot-air.
This seems way too good to be true. Anybody with some credible knowledge care to debunk it?
I'll believe it when I see it published in a peer reviewed journal, or I can buy it at a local car dealer. Until then, I call shens.
Too good to be true, I don't believe it. Bah.
And no, I didn't RTFA - so shutup.
Reading the article it says the way it works is by superheating water and using a metal catalyst to seperate H2 and O using the super heated steam and hydrogen to fuel the car. The problem not mentioned at all in the article is where does the super heated water come from?
Doc Brown from back to the future called. says his time machine broke and needs a new garbage-to-power converter, but can't get it as we are still in 2005.
In all seriousness, I wish them success. It remains to be seen whether they can create an efficient system for collecting the corroded/expended metal. How often do you see puddles of leaked material under a car? No mention of how much "metal oxide" this venicle produces, but I cannot imagine it's something we want leaked onto the ground.
I'd put my money on the H2N-Gen, but then again that guy's being sued for patent infringment.
Let's see just how long it takes for this to be a real-world application...assuming it's even legit.
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
This is what I've been waiting for from hydrogen. Something that will let me pour water into my tank and go. Give me horsepower and I'm set!!!
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Pretend you are in Minneapolis, 5 am, 20 below fahrenheit, the sun won't rise for at least two more hours. It is rush hour. All the cars are putting out steam, which billows white in the frigid air. Ice coats your rear bumper and the streets, an ice fog reduces visibility to a car length or so.
No no. This simply can not be. The Oil companies, with their record profits, are developing this type of thing. If they haven't come up with it, then it simply does not exist.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I suppose it is technically possible, but they have to heat the water to high temperatures to do this. So, according to the Article, they should need something to get the water hot. But I see nothing that does that.
I doubt the american public will be so quick to adopt such a technology that gives them neither a significant discount from oil prices, nor a significant increase in vehicle size. Then again the heavy coils they mentioned are well suited to the monstrous vehicles of today.
And in other news today the Israeli team and their entire families have Mysteriously Dissapeared without a trace.
Investigators are also confirming that their Lab and Offices have been completely emptied of all items including the plans for their breakthrough fuel device.
No suspects in this baffling case yet.
of the solar powered flashlight. It shines into its own solar cell to recharge itself.
Refuelling the car based on this technology will also be remarkably simple. The vehicle will contain a mechanism for rolling the metal wire into a coil during the process of fuelling and the spent metal oxide, which was produced in the previous phase, will be collected from the car by vacuum suction.
I don't get it... What does a built in vacuuem have to do with fuel?
Actually, a lot of Hydrogen Economy True Believers need to enroll in that same class. Nothing against hydrogen per se, but half the nation seems to think of it as an energy source, which of course it isn't..
This just in, perpetual motion machine developed as well and the laws of thermodynamics are no longer safe in this house.
Seriously though, the title in the article and the summary is misleading. The car isn't making it's own fuel. There's still a fuel station, it's just using a novel idea (I'm guessing) at producing hydrogen. I'm not sure how effective it is but it's a pretty neat trick, and if all the things the article says (which must be taken with a teaspoon of salt) come true, this could be a real breakthrough (chances are it comes 10 years too late with half the performance.)
Does the car have a tummy-ache? How is producing Aluminum and Magnesium Hydroxide going to solve anything? I predict a lawsuit by Mylanta...
i remember seeing this sort of thing done to power russian torpedos (and it failing badly)
The more I learn about Windows the more I am surprised it runs at all
"Engineuity"... more like ingenuous tan ingenious...
As far as I can see, you would still need to refuel the car. Except this time, instead of oil based gasoline you will be using metal coil made from light metals like magnesium and aluminum. So although the article says the cost of running this car would be the same as today's gasoline-based cars I somehow suspect that those estimates will rise if it's ever used on a global scale...
Oh no! This will give the zinc and magnesium cartels a strangehold on the world economy!
===
It definately sounds too good to be true, but I guess we'll see in a couple of years when the thing goes commercial, eh?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
File a patent to this invention - fast! Otherwise someone may do it making you lose money big time.
Yes, you can get hydrogen out of acids by combining them with metals like aluminium or magnesium -- or hell, even sodium with water. But the cost of refining these metals in the first place is very high.
For instance, aluminium is produced by electrolysis: the ore is dissolved in cryolite, and the pure metal produced by passing an electric current through it. (Details)
There's a number of aluminium smelters in Australia (my home country); at least one of these has its own dedicated power plant, burning brown coal to produce its electricity.
So no, it's not "making its own fuel". The fuel is the refined metal and the acids (or water) that are combined with them to make the hydrogen gas. The fact that burning the hydrogen is what generates the useful energy is irrelevant to this point. The pollution is shifted to wherever the power to make the metals is produced.
When it comes to energy, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Using our factory prooven VapoMax technology, we use common metals to generate hydrogen to power your car on! Our PATENTED fission-fusion transduction method uses a ion-converter coil to bring you: THE CAR THAT MAKES ITS OWN FUEL!
A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was developed by an Israeli company based in. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars, plus it runs Duke Nukeem Forever on a new POWER-based-ARM processor with 500 gigs of visio-ram harddrive access. When it becomes commercial, real soon now(c), the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost nothing to run, and will be completely emission free-- they even reverse pollution!
Soon, you can drive in your eco-friendly Vapo-car, while playing Duke Nukeem forever, past clear mountain streams flowing into cities powered by rainbows!
DYWYPI?
The 'ignition' problem exists in regular cars as well. My guess is that they would use a small amount of stored hydrogen to kick start the process. The 'waste' from the engine is coincidentally super-heated water which could then be used to keep the cycle running.
Is the infrastructure to transport Magnesium and Aluminum easier to implement than the infrastructure to transport Hydrogen? I guess an Aluminum tanker never left a huge smoking crater in the ground, but it seems like transport costs would be at least similar.
I like music
http://engineuitycoil.nationprotect.net/
If you ever get desperate for fuel could you feed the car its own parts.
If this really works, I wonder how long until we can use aluminum soda cans, like Doc did in the movie.
It would definitely help with recycling, because everyone would have a real-world incentive to save their cans and not junk them. Then again, the metal is probably too impure, and it would take a lot of soda cans. It would be a step in that direction, though.
One thing I've learned over the years: Slashdot editors aren't much interested in science. The publish a lot of pseudo-science articles, or nonsense science articles like this one.
The issue here is that the process works, but it is very expensive in energy, because the metal oxide must be refined.
Anyhow, there is nothing new in the referenced article. The fact that it is possible to produce hydrogen using reactive metals has been known since perhaps 1860, maybe much earlier.
If I remember correctly, there was an explosion in Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's lab caused by hydrogen released by heating with metal. Mr. Lavoisier died in 1794, and not from the explosion.
LISA! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!!
So,
We eliminate the handling of hydrogen, a not incredibly obnoxious element and substitute the handling of a metal oxide which I would guess is going to kill some sort of lizard or bird if not handled properly.
This ain't a solution, it's pie-in-the-sky dreaming...
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
Starting isn't the problem, dumping water on the road in freezing temps is.
And I think that storing and using hydrogen in cars is not a problem, I read of a guy who converted his 1950's car (diesel?) to run hydrogen in the 1960's (teenager at the time with a handmedown). He had to make some modifications to certain components because hydrogen is a gas, not a liquid, and is also corrosive to certain metals/alloys but nothing major.
Correct me if I wrong, but isn't hydrogen's biggest problem simply that it's stored in water (for us on earth) and that the electrolysis to seperate it has like only 8% efficiency? Steam Electrolysis is more efficient, but how is this a breakthrough?
Water price dips to $50 a barrel...
First, mining, smelting, transporting these metals is going to cause pollution.
But any hydrogen based car system is going to dump a lot of water into the environment if everyone goes to hydrogen. I wonder with 200 million cars if the water/water vapor is going to act as a pollutant, encourage mold growth, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Obviously. The part everyone misses is that it takes at least as much energy to liberate the hydrogen from its oxygen as you can get back when it recombines. Think of it as a battery: you never quite get out what you put in.
One of the major US car mags last month had an analysis of the prospect of replacing all of the energy we get from burning gasoline in cars with hydrogen. By the time you add up the energy to obtain the free hydrogen, then compress it to 10,000psi or more so you can get decent range on a tankful, you have spent around 2X as much energy as you got from gasoline.
Someday the gasoline will run out, and there'll need to be an alternative, but whatever it is had better be twice as plentiful!
This is the very kind of article that belongs on Slashdot. The whole point of posting something like this is having it taken apart and scrutinized by the Slashdot community.
How much fun would an article be was bullet proof? There would be nothing to say about it.
.: Max Romantschuk
Other than "Does it run on Linux" of course ;).
The only one who has created an emission free hydrogen car that even RESEMBLES that of something that's drivable, is BMW. At least their hydrogen car doesn't run on a fricken 1 gear, 100hp, electric motor.
"How much fun would an article be was bullet proof? There would be nothing to say about it."
So that explains why we never see stories about Kevlar jackets.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Was one of the developers name "Bussard"?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Yeah but can they run it on copper so that I can have a use for all of these PENNIES? My jeans are really getting low.
This is a horrible tfa for a simple concept: Instead of producing the H2 through electro-hydrolysis at a production facility, then trying to distribute it to cars, they simply use the electro-positivity of light metals to produce H2 within the car itself via chemo-hydrolysis, which can then be burned in the engine.
/kCal than petroleum based fuels?
/kCal more toxic than that of Petroleum. Cheaper to handle? Since you have to carry it around instead of throw it into atmo you can't use much fuel to go places.
The reason people don't do this now, is that pure light metals are hard to come by, and are often difficult to handle. Sodium and lithium are excellent light metals which are too expensive to refine as pure metals to make effective fuel supplies. Their process likely uses incomplete oxidation with the weaker, but cheaper metals magnesium and aluminum, with some form of reaction catalyzer to increase the rate of H2 production.
A. Are Mg and Al cheaper
B. Toxicity vs. Petroleum, is the "goo" produced
C. What is the magic catalyst?
This whole thing seems like a japanese or european concept car, with maybe 30-50hp and more a replacement for an electric car than any competitor to current models, at least not in America.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
100kg of aluminum costs around $200 at ~$2/kg. Looking at the graph on this page for Aluminum manufacturing costs, about 75% of the cost is raw materials and supplies (mostly the aluminum). So that's at least $50 net to fill up your "tank" assuming perfect effeciency in converting that aluminum.
Neglecting the costs of taking the recycled aluminum oxide out of your car and turning it back into Al rods, the maintaince costs for the fuel station, infrastructure costs to build all this, and so forth. Shipping costs will of course astronomically climb since metal can only be transfered in by train, truck or ship unlike cheap pipelines and is also no longer an easily moveable liquid. Nevermind the cost of your aluminum powered car itself, or the engineering difficulties inherent in moving a 100kg metal coil into your engine, this "upgrade" is already going to break the bank.
I think I'll leave the hydrogen production outside of the vehicle, thank you. Nice try, but no dice.
So, this steam is just going to "appear". For this to work you're going to need a pretty hefty input of energy to boil water to create that steam.
So either you need a solar energy source (which won't work on a rainy day), or you'll need a bunch of batteries, which are bad, or you have to burn gasoline/other fossil fuel to boil the water to create steam to make this elecrolysis efficient enough.
This is not a solution. I much prefer honda's solution mentioned earlier (an electrolizer/storage solution for your home that runs on natural gas, and heats your home). Hook that up to solar power at your home (in alot of places) instead of the natural gas, and you've got a closed loop no emmission solution. And because it stores the hydrogen, if you have a rainy day, you still have fuel for your car.
Sounds better than the Air Car
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
It is just my speculation, but this looks a lot like a device for making home-made vodka. My guess is that the guy discovered this after having one too many shots. More power to him! Hmmm... Fresh-made vodka right in your own car... I wonder what kind of an effect this will have on the DUI rate.
-Palal
the car runs on the driver's inflated sense of self-importance.
... I've ot a bridge to sell you.
One thing I've learned over the years: Slashdot editors aren't much interested in science. The publish a lot of pseudo-science articles, or nonsense science articles like this one.
Well, imagine a middle school student with 3/4 lb of magnesium and a lot of time on his hands.
Aside from the obvious hobby of burning it, I also derived a number of methods of hydrogen generation from it. The simplest (and slowest) was to soak it in water. However, this takes a long time. I assume that the aluminum is used to create an electric circuit (like a battery) thus speeding this process.
However, more practically, I found adding viniger to the magnesium was a good way to generate small but usable quantities of hydrogen... Aside from one of my later explosions (a failed hydrogen torch-- loud bang and destroyed model, but otherwise no real damage), it was a lot of fun...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
And it's completely emission free.
Ah, so the processes for gaining the aluminum and magnesium are completely green! The mining does no damage, getting the the metals out of the ore releases no pollutants and the process takes no nasty chemicals or fuel.
What a revolution!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The usually close proximity between electric power plants and alumina processing plants. I wonder where this magical energy from aluminium comes from....
Water vapor holds a tremendous amount of heat (anyone every been scalded by steam from a boiling water before?). Because of this it is much worse in terms of green-house gasses than carbon dioxide, which is produced by all fossil fuel engines, along with water vapor. Really, the only thing that's going to solve any of our global (warming/polluting/whatever) problems is to have less people. Hello H5N1!
"A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was recently developed by an Israeli company."
Seems like Mg and Al wouldn't be such inexpensive metals if some country with a lot of drivers tried to pull this off. And what are they refined with again? Some process using fo..., fos..., fossils fuels, most likely.
Nice refs, thanks for the link.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Not to mention the fact that I don't really believe in this aluminum oxidation reaction. Aluminum doesn't spontaneously oxidize when you leave it out in a 21% oxygen atmosphere, does it? Why would it do it when you expose it to mere steam? Unless the steam is exceedingly hot, way hotter than is convenient to generate in an automobile.
Now magnesium I can believe. But the price of pure magnesium is a even higher than pure aluminum, I bet.
This one kind-off involves kevlar, or, well its bullet-proof anyway :-p
3 1/1531231&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/
when I see on /.:
car created that runs entirely on smog!
scientist have devised a way to use concentrated smog to run an engine. the smog is cooled with liquid helium until it become sa solid. these smog pellets are inserted into the engine where they are moved into the cylinder and heated with glow plugs, common in some diesel engines, to produce an expansion. the smog is then exausted into containers for storage until it can be removed the next time you need to re-smog. It actually "helps" the environment!
It reminds me of a system I ran onto years ago that a company was selling on the internet. Basically they were selling you sodium in ball form covered in plastic. It had a metal container filled with water and it sliced the pellets and dropped them into the water to split out hydrogen. Gee I wonder how much a kilowatt that process would cost? If you had a cheap source of sodium great. Then again if sodium was cheap and common this type of system would have been in every home years ago. It's the problem with fuel cells, they generally use platinum which is currently running twice the price of gold per ounce. They claim the price is competitive but 220 lbs of coated wire is going to run well north or $1 a lb. Even at a dollar a pound it would cost $220 a tank. The real price would likely be a grand. Sure you get part of it back as surplus wire to be reprocessed but it's hardly a cheap efficent system.
The entire freaking Sun is filled with metal oxide.
It is? Which metal oxide?
Interesting that the Weismann Institute was originally studying the possibility of "nonpolluting solar hydrogen" throught direct solar thermal decomposition of ZnO without the use of carbon as a reductant.
Unfortunately for them, the direct process was not feasible using current technology due to the high temperatures needed (1700 degrees Celsius vs. 1300 degrees Celsius for carbothermic reduction). They also had serious problems separating the reaction products from one another (gaseous zinc and oxygen) without having them recombine upon cooling. I think they were trying to rapidly quench the products using a supercooled stream of nitrogen or argon, which of course had difficulties of its own and was not scalable.
Their press releases now mention that they use a "small amount of coal" in the reaction, which is complete BS. What they fail to mention is that they are probably producing 1 mol of carbon monoxide pollutant for each mol of H2 generated... thus despite the laudable use of a solar process they are not much different from other technologies that swap carbon for hydrogen.
Mods:
+1 funny
not
+1 informative
sheesh, and we let these guys mod because . . . ?
2^3 * 31 * 647
Water is actually in the basic form H-OH, not H-H-O, so really, this process still throws out half of the potential hydrogen???
... if you were to volunteer yourself as a fuel source. Hoi. Speaking of embarrassing.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
The article says 100kg of aluminum would be required to get the equivalent of a full tank of gas. Aluminum costs about $2 per pound. So it would cost $200 to fill it up all the way. My mini-van only costs $60 to fill all the way.
Aluminum plants are being demolished at an amazing rate. A plant in Troutdale Or. I had done work for in 2001 was leveled. Likewise most of the existing aluminum plants in the USA have been flattened due to energy costs. Sounds like a great way to save energy, reduce alumina to aluminum and then reduce aluminum to alumina.
I doubt there is enough smelter capacity to supply beer can and airplane part requirements without recycling the metal that is in the system.
BTW: Beer can metal is a top grade alloy. Last I heard, 27 cans/Lb.
An excellent and useful summary, I think, except that you should also add that magnesium, unlike petroleum, cannot be simply dug out of the ground, but must be reduced at large energy expense from various ores. Where does that energy come from? Petroleum, currently.
So not only the hydrogen but also the magnesium is a "transitional form." Neither can be appropriately considered a fuel in this device. (The article notes that magnesium is a "common" metal, but this is disingenuous. It's "common" only in the sense that it's all over the place in crustal rocks, but it's also always chemically bonded to various other elements, so it's hardly "common" in the sense of "easy to get." You might as well say hydrogen itself is very "common" because 90% of the Solar System by mass, i.e. the Sun, is hydrogen.)
Also to point out: one of the reasons we use petroleum as a fuel is that the reaction products are all gaseous, so we can just dump them out of the car as we go. In this car one of the major exhaust products (the MgO) is solid. So you've got to carry all your exhaust around with you. That means your car needs two tanks, one for the "fuel" before it's used, and one for the "fuel" afterwards.
Geez, if you're going to go to that kind of trouble, you might as well just install scrubbers on the tailpipe of an ordinary gasoline engine and pull out all the undesirable CO2, CO, NOx and whatnot, leaving only the water I presume, and send the lithium hydroxide or whatever's inside the scrubber back to the factory to be regenerated every now and then.
O2 is an emission too! All those evil plants are polluting our environment, gradually eroding and destroying the planet's pristine, original CO2 atmosphere.
A plant in Troutdale Or. I had done work for in 2001 was leveled.
I have more information on that.
The plant operated with reduced energy costs. They bought excess BPA power wholsale, not retail. This included shutting down operation when surplus power (spring runoff from hydro power, low residentual heating demand, not yet heavy AC season in LA) was in short supply. Even with cheap energy costs, the cost of operation finaly failed to make economic sense.
Sounds like a great way to save energy, reduce alumina to aluminum and then reduce aluminum to alumina.
If anyone thinks aluminum and other metal prices are not related to the rising price of energy, they have not been paying attention.
When gas prices then electric prices go up, so does smeltering costs.. This is not a breakthrough in high fuel prices.
The truth shall set you free!
TFA smells like an herbal-medicine/magneto-therapy pseudo-science site. Just the font and the wording immediately peg it as not being peer reviewed by geeks who know their biz.
I in no way disparage herbs. I'm a big fan of bay and cilantro. But, come on.
9:48pm up 426 day(s), 6:01, 16 users, load average: 220.60, 138.45, 63.50
Man, are you stupid. The entire freaking Sun is filled with metal oxide.
Sorry, there ought to be a Godwin's law about calling people stupid.
My grandmother was G. R. Caughlin (as in Fowler, Caughlin, and Zimmerman-- the authors of s seminal paper on the generation of elements in stars). Some of their figures have been refined by others but the general theories seem to hold. So while I may not be an astrophysicist, I am not entirely unfamiliar with the field either.
Part of the problem with your theory is that metal oxides don't exist in the sun in any way you might think. First, stars are powered by fusion of hydrogen and helium (in terms of alpha capture-- you have the possibility of three helium nuclei fusing to form Carbon12). C12 can then capture another alpha particle (helium nucleus) to form Oxygen. Although I don't really understand the rest of the physics, I gather that many of the heavier elements are generated in the stars through other processes as the star ages. So for the sun, I would expect most of the sun to consist of Hydrogen, Helium, Carbon, and Oxygen.
(Hydrogen is fused into helium, 3 heliums become carbon, carbon + helium becomes oxygen. The Oxygen does not seem to fuse at these temperatures though one wonders about neutron capture.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
cant believe I'm dignifying this with a response but.... WHAT the HELL are you talking about? why would the sun be full of metal oxide? why would anything in the sun not be in elemental plasma form? why would much of anything heavier than the byproducts of hydrogen fusion be present in the sun (obviously small amounts, but "filled with metal oxide"?)
Aluminum costs about $2 per kilogram.
Hi, A bit old, but an article about some high school dropout that came up with a cheap way to make hydrogen: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/01/19/hydrogen04011 9
Water vapor holds a tremendous amount of heat (anyone ever been scalded by steam from boiling water before?). Because of this it is much worse in terms of green-house gasses than carbon dioxide, which everybody knows is produced by all fossil fuel engines, along with water vapor. Really, the only thing that's going to solve any of our global (warming/polluting/whatever) problems is to have less people.
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/bingofuel/pmcjlnen.htm
Yes, thank you, I knew that. I was referring to bulk Al, not the powder. It would be a bit tricky to transport freshly-finely-divided Al powder to fueling stations, yes?
A fair amount of oxygen and lithium, yes. But together as an oxide? At 5500 kelvins? Surely you jest.
Not to be too pessimistic, but has anyone else detected a spike in BS from Israeli companies? There was the vocal lie detector, the compression algorithm that could compress arbitrary data, unbreakable encryption, etc, etc. Are Israeli companies earning a bad reputation, or is it just a Slashdot filter?
The ______ Agenda
...where the people take apart a wooden steamship to feed the boilers so they can keep going...
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16981962-137
More information about that?
Also there is an interesting and detailed site about using boron as an energy carrier (quite like TFA?)
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
Nay saying folks-- please rtfa again-- the metals are used in very small quantities to catalyze the reaction to produce hydrogen. Instead of spewing waste ino the air, the post-reaction catalyst is retained for processing later. It sounds like the processing wouldn't take a whole lot of energy, plus it could be done at a site which uses a renewable energy source. Before poo pooing this tech, please realize that it takes a whole lot of energy to get your gas to the pump to begin with.
No problem. Welcome to -1.
from the auxiliary gasoline engine and tank, silly!
but this is likely to be very energy-intensive also.
Um, yes. The first source I came across suggests a bulk price of $30/kg for the pure metal.
Also, whether you need one or two or twelve real tanks was not my point so much as you need a second conceptual tank to carry your exhaust with you. That is a wholly novel concept from the point of view of combustion engines. And, as I said, if you're willing to pay the (large) penalties of carrying all your exhaust with you and having it recycled centrally, instead of just dumping it into the atmosphere -- why not consider the same with existing gasoline technology?
The point of an H2 engine is to use O2 from the atmosphere (so you don't have to carry your oxidizer) and generate gaseous products (so you don't have to carry your exhaust), and generate an exhaust which, unlike that from hydrocarbon combustion, is neither a pollutant nor a greenhouse gas. There really isn't any other point. If you're going to carry your own oxidizer and give up gaseous exhaust, and just have a closed cycle, there's no particular reason I can see to consider H2 as a fuel at all.
Is ScuttleMonkey an employee of the US Patent Office?
:wq
Assuming that this would be viable... One little problem that the article fails to mention is that the 'revolutionary' and 'clean' process for getting all that ZnO into useable Zn using only the sun is... *Carbon Monoxide*. Israsat calls that a 'minor byproduct'. They might have a bit of work to do before this is called a clean source of energy if you ask me.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Not only that, but making aluminum or magnesium is very energy intensive, not especially efficient, and we release all sorts of good stuff in the process. Sometimes, chlorine gas is bubbled through the molten metal to remove impurities. Further, aren't they draining the Dead Sea over in that direction, just to get at the mineral salts to actually produce the Aluminum, in the first place? Unless great blocks of metal fall from space, this is just as moronic as hydrogen power from conventional sources. I hope they actually try next time.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I gather that many of the heavier elements are generated in the stars through other processes as the star ages.
IANAAP but I though the heavier elements were created in the massive stars that formed and quickly went supernova in the early history of the universe.
:wq
Well, such vehicle is usable only at environment where permanent temperatures above freezing point of water, because water is what I need to produce steam to make hydrogen to feed the barely 40% effective combustion motor.
Anyway, it's shame to burn hydrogen; using it to produce power via fuel cells could be quite nicer.
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
. Where do you put a large pressure vessel in a car so that if it's in an accident it has the lowest risk of rupturing? If you've ever seen even a small tank of high pressure gas rupture, you'll realize some of the danger. Now, make that gas highly flammable, and you'll be even more unhappy.
This is actually the least of the issues with hydrogen. First since H2 is very light, it rises quickly. Unless you eliminate ventilation around the leak, you are going to be hard pressed to get an explosion. When I made it a hobby of trying to build small H2 devices powered (simialr to the article) by 5% acetic acide from the supermarket and magnesium from the university where my grandfather taught (I as in Middle School at the time), I only managed to get one explosion of any size and that as somewhat amusing. So here is the story:
At one point I discovered that if you take a glass mineral water bottle and put magnesium turnings and 5% acetic acid in it (destilled white viniger from the supermarket works), you can actually ignite the resulting H2 plume. The result is a flame which is invisible under bright light conditions but can ignite other things. Great way to surprise other people....
Anyway, not content to rest on my laurels, I decided to try for something more useful. I reasoned that if I could increase the oxygen content of the gas upstream from combustion, I should be able to increase the temperature and might be able to use it for something. So I took plastic modeling clay, made a plug with a small hole to generate a pressurized stream of gas, created a tube suspended by 4 small supports creating an air gap for the fuel to become aerated. I tried to light it. Nothing. After a lot of effort I managed to set fire to my model but it didn't really work. Then came the bright idea: Light it in the tube. So I touched a match to the tube and BANG! my model was gone. No trace of it. Vanished. The first thing I found was the plug which was now in the bottle, and the second thing I found was the tube mashed against the ceiling. I never did find the supports.
I don't discount the possibility of a badly designed system providing a hazard of this sort. However, because H2 rises, this is only possible in areas where you don't have verticle venting. Once you add that venting, you need a *really* big leak to cause an explosion. Even then you are likely to see most of the fireball *above* the car.
Compare this to propane which is heavier than air, and will stay at ground level and spread out. However, there are plenty of questions regarding engineering of tanks, etc.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mr Hydrogen! Installation in Delorians may cause the car to consume itself.
IANAAP but I though the heavier elements were created in the massive stars that formed and quickly went supernova in the early history of the universe.
I was reading Fowler's nobel lecture, and he outlines this in general. You are right.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Only up to Iron. After that they're all made in supernovae, as iron fusion is endothermic.
...and if it is true I think we just found out why the middle east countries will attack Isreal in the next 20 years.
Basically, oxidation and combustion combined, oxidize metals, burn hydrogen....
Now, isn't there a way to mix certain oxides to form a combustible (nay explosive) compound?
I say, anyone who alreayd has a name like enginuity deserves lots of investor support!
One question: if this is really as good, why isn't gov pushing cash down their throats... why are they looking for investors?
please type the word in this image: tyranny
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
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That said, this is a bass-ackwards way to do something that was done better at Livermore perhaps 30 years ago ( you can find a reference in the old "Access to Energy" newsletter by Petr Beckmann, if any of those are online ). Some Lawrence Livermore scientists developed a metal-air battery, which produced electricity directly from the reaction of the metal (aluminum or zinc plates, IIRC) with air via some catalytic electrode system. Like the Israeli system, you ended up with powdered metal oxide. Unlike the Israeli indirect-combustion system, the metal-air battery efficiencies were high and direct drive electrical power was produced, so you could control power to the wheels, do regenerative braking, etc. Since the metal-air battery produces electricity directly, the energy efficiency is probably 4X to 5X better than a hydrogen generator feeding a heat engine. With the metal-air battery you also can get the additional efficiency of a hybrid-type vehicle, so my guess is that you have 10X to 20X more energy efficiency than the Israeli Metal / Hydrogen / Internal Combustion / Mechanical Linkage system.
The Livermore engineers did not use magnesium, or sodium, or lithium, or other light metals. These metals pack higher energy density than aluminum. They also easy to ignite and burn very easily, with flames that are impossible to put out in air (sodium even burns in water). Yes, hydrogen burns faster (Hindenburg! Hindenburg! Oooooh scary!). But hydrogen burns UP, while burning metal just stays around and does a thermite/napalm number on you and your car. A magnesium slab in a car is NOT safer than a hydrogen tank in a car.
Even with the much better efficiency, Air-Metal batteries are not practical. It takes far too much energy to refine the metal, and handling metal and debris, cleaning the system, etc. are all far too much work. Now divide the value by 20, and wonder what those Israelis are smoking ...
P.S. Some researchers claim that the Hindenburg caught fire because of the ignition of the highly volatile doped fabric, which in turn set fire to the metal in the dirigible frame. The hot hydrogen vented upwards, remember, heating up the air far above the Hindenburg, but not affecting the passengers underneath. They got roasted by the burning dirigible body.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
What is it about sketchy Israeli "startups" (quotes because I doubt most of these are even legitimate companies) that convinces slashdot editors of the legitimacy of whatever vaporware they are pushing, as opposed to their seemingly effective BS filters on sketchy PR releases from US companies? Sure, Israel is home to lots of technological innovation... but for every legitimate company, there is some guy in his basement trying to get 'VC funding' from private individuals who don't have effective spam filters. This is true of EVERY country.
There should seriously be a dedicated "science" editor who has at the very least a demonstrated knowledge of chemistry and physics, and has to approve all articles of this nature before they are posted (unless the source is, say, Nature or Science).
There may be many stupid ideas coming out of there, but there are also many good ones.
Checkpoint completly revolutionized the firewall market after commercializing the work Gil Shwed and friends did in their service in the Israeli intelligence corps (actually in a sense CheckPoint invented this market, compared to the firewall technology before it arrived).
The Engenuity company (the one which claims this invention) was invested by Ormat - an advanced maker green energy power plants.
The colonel who co-founded Engenuity also founded before that the Silver Arrow which, as far as I'm aware, took major part in the Israeli fighter plane and missiles electronics.
ICQ, VocalTech are some of the wholy Israeli companies I can remember right now which made a splash on the international media.
Gurunet (the company which makes the definitions for the "define:" keyword for Google) is an Israeli company.
Lempel-Ziv (yes, the ones from the compression algorithm) were professors in the Haifa Institute of Technology (the "Technion").
Mosix came out of professor's Amnon Barak lab in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Moshe Bar, the CTO of Xen Source, is an Israeli who completed all his degrees at the Hebrew University, including a Phd with prof. Amnon Barak.
Zend (makers of PHP) is an Israeli company founded by former masters students in Weizmann institute.
Many multinationals hold development centers in Israel - Microsoft, Motorola, Intel, Sun, IBM are a few I can remember right now.
Check out Oracle's and Cisco's company takeover list over the years and you'll see that they bought multiple Israeli startups.
The amount of venture capital investment in High-Tech in Israel (in total terms, not mentioning the per-capita) was second only to the silicon valley according to the most recent stats I heard.
it's right in front of these idiots but they're too caught up in politics to see it.
the hemp plant can be farmed in cracks in rocks and 50% of it's mass can be refined into combustible fuel.
vegetable oil is already being used in existing engines by enterprising brits, as a side benefit their cars smell like delicious fish and chips.
in all seriousness though, alcohol and plant oils are renewable and far less damaging to the environment than refining metals.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm GUESSING that using that metric, this car will probably be in the "more than $20/gal equivalent" range, sorta like hydrogen cars are today.
The only thing that could possibly save this (and the hydrogen boondoggle) is the development of nuclear power plants that are an order of magnitude cheaper than they are today. That is possible, but until that can be implemented, this is all nonsense.
In conclusion, I'm glad that they solved all those problems, they just haven't solved the problem of making it anywhere near being economically viable.
If money is no object there are so many problems you can solve!
On another topic, Slashdot needs to have a "bullshit" category for things like this, or the battery life extender sticker. This is just painful.
IIRC, the ones after iron eventually decay back into iron (or elements before iron).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Unless you have any idea of how aluminium is being produced of course.
BTW: Beer can metal is a top grade alloy. Last I heard, 27 cans/Lb.
You mean the day may arrive when I can tip my beer cans into my very own Mr Fusion?
a) The metal industry will need energy to make the wires. Al, for one, uses a hell of a lot of electrical energy to be produced (not sure about Mg). Where does the electrical energy come from? Some more nuclear power plants? Thank you. (1)
b) What about the infrastructure needed to carry the wires along? More trucks on the road? Powered by what? In Europe: Thank you.
c) How much water is needed to make enough Hydrogen to get the power of a conventional car? Has this amount of water been added to the additional weight and size of the car? Even if the weight of the coil does not affect the performance of the car, the coil and the water will add to the weight, and hence reduce the overall efficiency.
d) What is the efficiency behind the in-car process?
e) What overall ecologic efficiency can be reached, as compared to other technologies?
I admit the metal industry and the large energy corporations may not be that interested in answering all these questions. The photo of the car on the web site suggests this technology is ready to go. IMHO it has a LONG way to go.
OK, let's move on.
(1) And an excellent idea for the developing countries as well, where the track record of safe nuclear power plants is that long.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
We are in an age of confidence tricksters and in many places led by those who rely on inner circles and are thus easily tricked by such types - so unless some details are available and it can be reproduced elsewhere by disinterested parties it is safest to assume it is just another confidence trick.
In Soviet Russia, car makes fuel.
It works too. It was used by the Nazis to produce hydrazine for a rocket propelled plane.
That counts as irony.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Unless this is a nuclear reaction, the Mg doesn't go away. It'll still be around, probably in the "spent reactants" tank (i.e. the non-gaseous "waste" tank.) The fuel infrastructure will certainly want to collect and recycle that material (assuming that it's a more economical source of Mg than strip-mining some remote town.) The "no emissions" part of this article's claim just makes this stink like a scam.
It stops on a dime and picks it up.
Why don't you Read The Fucking Article!
This looks like an attempt to get investors interested, nothing else.
from somewhere... oh yeah! That's clearly a lifted picture of the Shelby GR-1 concept car at the top of their "press release."
Here's a desktop version from Serious Wheels.com for you car nuts.
Laugh!
"Why is it that every time I need to get somewhere we get waylaid by jackassery? PANTS!" - Doc Venture
just put it in a jar of HCL!
or hell, even sodium with water. But the cost of refining these metals in the first place is very high.
There are many places in the world where intense sunlight is available pretty much every day, all year round, and which also possess a coastline. Many countries already run water or salt extraction plants in such locations. (I've seen one myself.)
In principle, such sites can provide an inexhaustable supply of sodium from salt-water, and a "free" source of energy from the sun to power the extraction. (And salt-free water as a byproduct is often highly valuable too.)
So, what you say needn't be true in the general case. What's missing though is the right combination of technologies to harness this, especially a sodium-based fuel technology. However, despite saying that, I think that all such fuel-based ideas miss the point.
If solar energy is free in the sense of supply cost, then forget the intermediate fuels and just store electricity directly. We "simply" need better batteries, or indeed flywheels or other energy storage mechanisms. That's the future, in my opinion, whereas transporting physical fuels is not.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Here is the link to the Article the Parent Submitted. Note that at the bottom of the page, it says that the posted was not the original article, and links to the original - which was the one that the Slashdot editor used.
A community-oriented lyrics site
Man, are you stupid. The entire freaking Sun is filled with metal oxide.
Moron.
The sun is considerably too hot to allow for the existence of chemical compounds.
Either that or very secure
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Definitely a "stolen" photo.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, I'll help you out here a little, as the guy is even dumber than you think. Metal oxides don't exist in the sun *at all*, because molecules can't exist in the sun. In fact, neither do atoms. The sun is a plasma - a bunch of nuclei and a sea of unbound electrons. So you have metal nuclei, oxygen nuclei, and electrons, but no metal oxides.
What energy source are they using to heat the water? I would be willing to bet that the heat of combustion created by the generated hydrogen is less than the heat added to the water at the beginning of the process.
oh wait, that's because almost 3 and a half years ago slashdot reported about a car that ran off methanol, which was hydrolized in the car to fuel a 75Kw fuel cell. It was called the Necar5.
Not to belittle the Israeli work, point is that hydrolizing a source at-need and thus preventing the requirement of carrying around a big bomb (large tank of lyquid hydrogen) has been done already.
I am looking forward to hopefully being able to get a car run off fuel cells by...I dunno, 2010 or so. This just isn't a new breakthru in fuel cell usage that it's being sold as.
Aluminum can be used more or less directly in an aluminum-air battery, but you've got the same problem with regeneration of the sludge (expensive and can't be done with water-based chemistry). The thing you want is something like zinc, which works fine in zinc-air fuel cells and can be regenerated easily and cheaply by a variety of means.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
How do you heat the water in the first place?
Obtaining hydrogen from water is a very energy inefficient process. What they appear to be proposing here is just shy of a perpetual motion machine.
So where does the waste from processing magnesium or aluminum go? Everything gets converted to 100% hydrogen? Is this the same company that successfully developed the perpetual motion machine?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010929.html
With the planets past mars being gas or ice, the 4 inner planets being rock and iron, WHY would anyone think that the sun is all gas?
If the gas elements were spun/pushed to the outer limits of our solar system and the heaver elements combined to form the inner planets, if the sun was all gas it should be out where Jupiter is??? Why can't people understand that???
I only made it through high school and just barely and I can freeking understand that.
Now the sun may have a hydrogen and heilum shell, but Mercury, Venius, Earth and Mars have rock outer shell. Mars itself would have an atmosphere if it had a magnetic core to protect it from solar wind.
Why is it so hard to understand the the sun is iron?????
Nathan
I work for G. R. Caughlin.
So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.
Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.
But trust me.... You don't.
I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.
This is how bad info gets passed around.
If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.
Cuz some Farkers belive anythng they hear.
Err.. actually metal oxides (e.g. Titanium Oxide) do exist in the atmospheres of certain cool (3800 K) stars. But then I wouldn't say that they are filled with metal oxide... ...yeah ok..... he's an idiot.
Wow, that comment took a 180 degree turn from cogent to Anti-Semetic.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
Then why did you post as AC, and why didn't you explain anything? If you want to dispel bad information, spread the truth. Post some links to some articles if you're too lazy to explain it yourself. Don't just call bullshit if you're not going to back it up. You're just as bad as the rest of them.
i dunno about you, but 100kg's of magnesium, and aluminium, im guessing which would need to be powdered, sounds like Anarchists Cookbook reader's Wet Dream
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
What's scary is that it produces hydrogen INSIDE THE CAR.......was there no other place to put the exhaust pipe?
The whole claim of zero emissions is ludicrous.
/gg
The metal is heated in the presence of carbon to produce refined metal and carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
These happen to be greenhouse gasses.
QED
Both Arabs and some Jews are Semites. Being anti-Semitic would be against both of them. Less than 10% of Semites are Jewish.
Jews call people who are against Jewish policies "anti-Semitic" because they don't want people to say "anti-Jewish". That kind of indirection confuses the issue. The confusion is necessary because, in fact, Jewish violence is not better than the violence of other cultures. If people began examining the reasons people are against Jews, they would discover that Jews have often corrupted the cultures around them for their own advantage, as they have done in encouraging the embezzlement of U.S. taxpayer money discussed in the grandparent comment.
Most Jews are not Semites. "Ninety percent of the world's Jews are descended from converts to Judaism, mostly the Khazars in what is now the southern USSR. The Khazars accepted Judaism as their monotheistic faith. They did not have the remotest connection with the Semites of the Holy Land."
rofl, you just got trolled by the latest cliche at fark.com. Go look at most of the stories last week there.
The problem is that hydrogen is a _manufactured_ fuel. In this case it is to be made from magnesium which is produced by a process that requires immense amounts of electricity. SO all we do is lose some effiency.
While producing Na from NaCl, what do you do with the Cl? Send it back to the ocean as Hydrocloric Acid? That'd do wonders for the beachwear, surfboard, and shipbuilding industries.
"Good beachware is basic."
Perhaps a stupid question, but fresh water is getting harder to come by. Anyone living in the Western U.S. knows what a problem this is becoming. I realize that the Earth is 70% water, but that's mostly sea water. It seems to me that such a vehicle is going to need distilled water to avoid a significant buildup of minerals. That means a lot of desalination plants, and a lot of energy going into making fresh water.
Proverbs 21:19
It's a steam-power 10
The frame is out of Glasgow
The tech is Balinese
It's not a freeway bullet
Or a bug with monster wheels
It's a total biosphere
The farm in the back
Is hydroponic
Good, fresh things
Every day of the year
In 1987, a gentleman in Cornish, UK developed a system (patented under US patent 4,702,894) that basically oxidizes aluminum welding wire in water, liberating hydrogen gas and precipitating an aluminum oxide powder into the water.
He sent a prototype to BMW in 1981, who ran a 2.0L gasoline engine for 70 minutes with no noticable problems, save for the problem of eliminating the oxide powder from the water.
Here's a link to a current mirror: http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
Read it, tear it apart. Only thing I noticed is that there's a minor error in the reaction formula.
It takes liquid gasoline and aerates it to produce a 16:1 gas-vapor/air mixture which fuels the engine.
The engine does not run on liquid gasoline; using the logic of this posting, I am making my own fuel!
Howdy, Howdy, Howdy, I'm a real cowboy now!
"The basic idea behind the technology is relatively simple: the tip of the metal coil is inserted into the Metal-Steam combustor together with water where it will be heated to very high temperatures."
Heated to very high temperatures by what?
A complete joke, folks. Not worth discussing - but hey, what am *I* doing, eh?
Creeble.
, , ,-now all we need to find is someplace where fairly-pure hydrogen bubbles up out of holes in the ground. I understand Neptune is a good prospect.
-Or, in this case, a place where magnesium and aluminum bubble up out of the ground. -Or I suppose (since we are engaging our imaginations anyway) where already-formed wires of them squirt up out of tiny holes in the ground. Yea, that would be perfect.....
Why don't we power the cars with that belove Grey Goo(tm)?
alluminum isn't very common, and is very expensive, and hauling enough alluminum around would kill efficiency. Definately dumb.
-JNY
They're not suggesting using the Al or Mg as an energy source, the way oil is. They're suggesting it as a way to move energy from a central source to individual vehicles.
That central plant could be coal- or oil- powered, or nuclear, solar, wind, whatever. That powers a chemical factory turning aluminum and magnesium ore into wire, which is then dropped off in each car. I assume that most the input is actually magnesium or aluminum oxide taken out of cars that have used their wires, once the process is bootstrapped.
The same outline applies to the various hydrogen-based solutions: there is no free hydrogen on earth, but it may be more efficient to manufacture it in a central place and distrubute it. It's not getting us any energy, but it is replacing our dependence on oil with renewable resources (wind, hydro) or home-grown (coal) or at the very least not dependent on volatile Middle East politics (nuclear).
Petroleum is convenient because it is an energy source AND a distribution medium, after some processing. But it's also a political nightmare and environmental nightmare, so one possibility is to break petroleum's two functions into two separate entities, then solve them individually. The power-distribution one has all sorts of problems; liquid petroleum-based gasoline is nicely energy dense, easy to pipe, and doesn't require pressurization. This is yet another take on that problem. Probably not a good one, as numerous other posters have pointed out, but it's an interesting idea.
What kind of emissions does it put out if it explodes? Thats not very green.
I am must confess I am in the market for another car. My el cheapo civic is adiquit, reasonable feul efficient and does all that I can want it to do. Problem is that it's also 19 years old, and experiencing some of the problems a car that old will experience. What I want, and doubt I'll get is: A smart car esk design, with anolog dash, and a eletric/hydrogygen hybread why? Some of them electric cars are very nimble , they get decent speeds (65-70+). So why not get the perks of both kinds of technology?
It depends on what we use for those power plants. Currently, cars aren't repsonsible for mercury contamination of the Gulf of Mexico like coal power plants are. Cars also don't spew minute amounts of uranium and thorium like some coal plants either. Currently, coal is the easiest and cheapest source of power that we have available, and coal will be the fuel of choice for the next 50 years at least unless nuclear takes over. Gas and oil are what we're trying to get rid of, hydroelectric, tidal, and geothermal aren't practical everywhere, and no one will invest in solar and wind enough to make them pratical. Plus, coal mining has a strong lobby behind it in the US since it's a domestically produced resource. Coal can be altered to produce less greenhouse gasses than individual cars, but it carries a lot more pollution burden.
So, no, I don't buy the line that hydrogen or metal powered cars will lead to less pollution since it will just lead to more of the same energy bills as the latest one that relaxed most of the Clean Air Act requirements on the construction of new coal plants.
We have 4 choices:
1) Stick with the unsustainable status quo.
2) Invest in renewable resources against the wish of the status quo's lobbyists.
3) Invest more in coal.
4) Invest more in nuclear.
Guess which one your tax dollars will go to. (Not the energy industry's profits. Your tax dollars. Here in America, we privatize profit and socialize risk like any good "free market" economy should.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why take us such an all-or-nothing argument? You could own a car, but only fire it up when you need to (ie when hauling groceries or going to work with tools).
The rest of the time - if you have a quick way to bike to public transportation - you probably should. The issue right now is that such easy routes do not exist is many places. Even if you wanted to bike, you couldn't.
And that's the problem.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
The sodium would crack the water at room temperature, yielding sodium hydroxide and hydrogen and heat. The sodium hydoxide solution would attack the aluminum, yielding a sodium aluminate and Alx(OH)y slurry and more hydrogen.
Basically, I was using hydroxide to attack the protective Al2O3 oxide coating on the aluminum, so it could react with water to produce hydrogen, instead of requiring operation at an elevated temperature, though in a car, heat is probably plentiful.
As for the high energy required to refine aluminum from oxide, as another poster noted, this is (a) a good thing, and (b) can be routinely done where there is cheap hydroelectric, or less desirably, nuclear power.
In Canada, aluminum smelters are often located near sources of hydroelectric power, for this reason. Imagine a hydroelectric dam producing electricity to refine aluminum from oxide at it's base, with the refined aluminum and water loaded into such cars. Eventually the cars return (directly or indirectly) their slurry back to the smelter for re-refining.
The car "burns" aluminum to release water to the atmosphere which eventually drives the dam that produces the electricity to refine the "burned" aluminum (while some of the water might be recycled in the car, this will not be perfect).
The whole thing is driven by the Sun, of course. The big question is how efficient can the process be made? It strikes me as having too many steps (with losses all along the way).
You could've hired me.
I work for G. R. Caughlin.(emphasis mine)
Note the present tense. You are clearly a troll and don't even know enough about G.R. Caughlin to know that she passed away in 1993. Either that or we have a ghost on Slashdot.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I clicked on the link that says "Zinc to produce Hydrogen" and it appears (according to the diagram that in the first stage the Zinc does separate from the Oxygen, using carbon... which then appears to make CO (or carbon monoxide)as a byproduct... I can't imagine there being a good use for THAT substance anywhere...
Gasoline weighs 6.35 lbs per gallon and costs ~$3 USD
Aluminum coil to achieve the same distance (3x according to their own estimate) weighs 19.05 lbs and, at current COMEX Aluminum price is $0.87/lb, thus costs $16.57 per gallon of gas equivalent.
Wow, sign me up!
Aluminum is cheap - for a metal, but it very expensive compared to gasoline.
Anarchists never rule
Only up to Iron. After that they're all made in supernovae, as iron fusion is endothermic.
I suspect you are right. But the parent said stars that quickly went supernova. So you are hardly correcting him.
However, just for interesting related reading: Composition of Solar Wind
Willie Fowler's Nobel Prize lecture
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
With the planets past mars being gas or ice, the 4 inner planets being rock and iron, WHY would anyone think that the sun is all gas?
Spectroscopy, measurement of composition of solar wind, etc. But why measure when you can guess wrong?
If the gas elements were spun/pushed to the outer limits of our solar system and the heaver elements combined to form the inner planets, if the sun was all gas it should be out where Jupiter is???
Hint-- you have your horse *pull* the cart.
Maybe it was the gravity of the newly formed sun which brought the heavier elements in towards the center of the solar system. After all many of Jupiter and Saturn's moons are made of ice and rock. Heavier elements didn't just get into the center of the solar system. They were pulled there by the the sun.
I only made it through high school and just barely and I can freeking understand that.
Ok, you are a troll.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Seriously, where does the energy come from to heat the water
to create the steam that is used to extract the hydrogen from
the metal that is put into the heated water?
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
I could point out that this car will produce many times more polution than a conventional car given how much coal-generated electricty it takes to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum, but I think this subject is dead.
The Hydrogen Economy is a myth, and it's a dead myth.
Pretending you can get rid of fossil fuels by storing fossil-fuel-generated energy in hydrogen is rediculous. It's like claiming you can get a free lunch by converting all you dollars to Euros (and pay a 200% fee in the process) and then buy a lunch with those Euros. You didn't spend any dollars, right? So it must be free.
As you point out this is no real break through. It may be a good idea in one place.
Iceland has electricity coming out it's ears. The joke is that the only "cheap" things in Iceland are fish and aluminum.
This may work for the Icelandic fishing fleet.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
100lbs of Magnesium wire will bring an entirely new meaning to the word "CAR-B-Q".
Fiid - Ryhmes with Squid. Software Engineer
All of the questions of chemistry have been discussed, but how about a simple problem. How the hell do you refill it with a 220 lb coil of Al wire. Is my wife gonna push a 220 lb piece of Al into the trunk? Or will all the "aluminum stations" have big burly dudes to do it for you. Also they mentioned little need for changing infrastructre. Thats a piece of bull$#!^ if I ever heard one. Lets rip out all the gas stations and put in places to refuel Aluminum metal. And nevermind the increased capacity needed to mine and extract the ore. If anyone gives money to these idiots, well , a fool and his money are easily parted.
This story is barely plausible, in my opinion. Energetically, what they are talking about would work, and be emission-free (in fact, as described, it is reverse-emissive: the car would get heavier as it used up its "fuel".
The reactions involved are:
Mg + H2O --> MgO + H2 + heat
Essentially, they are burning the magnesium under water. The heat of reaction splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen preferentially combines with the magnesium. This is a very energetic reaction, and in this case the heat would cause some of the remaining water bath to turn into steam.
The engine then feeds this mixture of high temperature/pressure steam and hydrogen into a combustion chamber, where it is combined with oxygen with the whole 2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O + heat reaction, yielding even hotter steam.
This works against a piston, driving the system.
Basically, it's a steam engine that burns magnesium for a portable fuel source.
All I can say is Fuck Israel.
Thanks in advance,
Kilgore Trout
The atmospheres (not "the entire freaking") of cool stars* (not the sun) contain trace quantities (not "filled") of metal oxides. Although a small proportion of the mass, they dominate the spectrum.
* Except fairly rare "carbon stars", which have trace quantities of metal carbides dominating their spectra instead.
So, yes, GP is an obnoxious idiot. Had they been polite, they would have merely been ignorant.
In the sun, the fusion of hydrogen to helium is principally via the "p-p chain" - it starts with to hydrogen nuclei colliding to form deuterium (and this is the rate-determining-step.) The CNO cycle, which uses carbon/nitrogen/oxygen as a catalyst, predominates in more massive stars. It uses pre-existing carbon. The three alpha reaction to create carbon occurs at a later period of stellar evolution (asymptotic giant branch) and some of it gets recycled into the interstellar medium, where it can be incorporated into the next generation of stars.
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I think the best use for this is as a car bomb! Make the Hydrogen while idling in front of the target and then blast it. Anyone remember how explosive Hydrogen is?
An easy way to discourage driving is to end the enormous government subsidies on oil. Right now, the federal and state governments spend huge sums for things like roads, freeways, stoplights, military interventions in the middle east and elsewhere to protect the oil supply, and other oil-related expenses. Gas taxes are nowhere near high enough to cover the real cost of oil, so in essence, the government is taxing the citizenry to subsidize oil.
Fixing the problem is conceptually simple: internalize the true cost of oil in the price of gasoline. Simply lower income taxes, and raise gas taxes, until gas taxes are high enough to pay for all the costs of oil, including military interventions to assure its supply. If that were done, taxes would be much lower, and gasoline would probably cost more than $14/gallon this year. Alternatives would quickly be found.
Not only did this avoid the need for a massive hydrogen production and delivery infrastructure in favor of an electrical supply grid that already exists, but the overall end-to-end energy efficiency of the process was vastly greater than the proposed "hydrogen economy" can ever be.
The car in question was the GM Gen 2 EV1 with nickel metal/hydride batteries. I drove one every day from 2000-2003, when GM pulled them all off the road and sent them to the crusher even though everyone who had one would have gladly continued to pay real money to drive them.
The hydrogen-powered car is pure hype. In every respect (cost, range, energy efficiency) it is inferior to the battery EVs that could be had now. So why have the automakers pushed the hydrogen fuel cell so much? Simple. California had a mandate on the books that 2% of cars in the 2002 model year would be zero emission (that mandate had already been delayed from 1997). Automakers like GM, as well as the oil companies, loathed that mandate, but they couldn't say so right out loud. So to a gullible public they dangled the promise of "something even better" -- hydrogen -- at some indeterminate time in the future in exchange for killing the mandate that was here and now. And sadly, they succeeded.
Just one of the many benefits brought to you by a horrific degree of scientific illiteracy among both average Americans and their leaders.
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I give this a bit of thought, and what it comes down to is a circuitous way to burn metal for energy, then later reform the metal from oxide (well understood since that's how we get aluminum).
Of course, as long as you're doing that, why bother with the H2 and internal combustion engine intermediate steps? Why not run a stirling engine on burning magnesium and skip the water?
And the result of that would be... what exactly? It's called "preaching to the choir," a.k.a. navel gazing. Somebody posts some garbage, we all stand around poo-pooing and showing off our freshman-level physics knowledge, and you call this socially important?
How much fun would an article be was bullet proof? There would be nothing to say about it.
You mean, you don't want to be exposed to ideas which are far enough beyond you that you can't easily criticize them. Is "Tearing the researchers a new asshole" the only mode of discussion that entertains you?
Being endothermic is not the same as being impossible. Dissolving salt in water is endothermic yet somehow it occurs.
Iron (and higher elements) are formed in stars, but in minute quantities compared to the much higher energy environment of a supernova.
Although I suppose you could claim that it was because of the Sun's gravity that all those rocks came together in the first place. But by that logic, since the materials that are used to perform nuclear fission were created from the remains of stars, we only have one energy source.
It looks like heavier elements (past Iron) were largely formed earlier in the history of our galaxy. As best we can tell, the first stars to form in our galaxy were supermassive stars that quickly went supernova. Then we see stars with masses 8-10 our sun going supernova and creating more heavy elements.
t ml) indicates that the current epoch shows a gradual addition of Lithium but the source is unknown.
Eventually we see stars with masses 3-7 times the sun which create strontium, barium, and some lanthanides, but not by supernova.
Finally up until 10 billion years ago, it looks like supernovae from white dwarfs was responsible for adding more iron to the galaxy. The article I got this from (http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr00/pr0004.h
I am not an astrophysicist, but it seems to me that given that there is no stable isotope at mass 5, the only ways you could get to mass 6 or 7 is either by beta decay from mass 10 or 11 (most likely Boron, though Boron 10 and 11 are both pretty stable) or by fusing Helium-4 with Hydrogen-2 (as a final and perhaps trace stage of the PP chain). Lithium-6 could then fuse with Hydrogen-1 to become Lithium-7. The other option might be for larger stars (red giants) to create, as an alternative to the triple alpha capture resulting in Carbon, a two-alphas and a Hydrogen2 capture resulting in Boron-10 (through the same beta decay which is involved in creating Hydrogen-2 from two protons). Boron-10 could alpha decay into Lithium. It seems that these are the only two logical ways that Lithium could be created at masses of 6 and 7. I would argue that the former mechanism seems far more plausible than the latter. Lithium could then be fused with another alpha to create Boron where necessary. In this model, Lithium 6 and 7 become the precursors to Boron 10 and 11, and probably don't relate much to anything else.
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Spot price of Aluminum...88 cents per pound....220lbs of aluminum for a 'fill up' $193....seems like a problem...
... that hides the real cost of the scheme. EVERY form of stored potential chemical energy has an initial and equal, or even greater, cost in energy to store it in the first place. This was true of petroleum, though we didn't have to expend that energy ourselves, the Earth's geologic processes expended it for us over millions of years.
It's also true of this process. There's only a single sentence in that entire article that hints at that cost: "The solid waste product of the process, in the form of metal oxide, will later be collected in the fuel station and recycled for further use by the metal industry."
What that means, properly interpreted, is that more energy is going to have to be expended behind the scenes in a factory somewhere to convert the metallic-oxide "waste product" back into usable metal. Where's the savings?
This reminds me of the nut who thought he was being environmentally conscientious by installing $3000 worth of batteries in his Prius to cut down on the gasoline that HE had to burn personally... never mind the fact that it meant that some POWER PLANT somewhere was having to burn an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel to create the electricity that would travel down the wires - at considerable attenuation - to allow him to recharge those batteries.
This is all a song and dance designed to make us "feel good" about continuing to be Good Little Consumers.
After looking at the information presented in the article and supposed inventor's website, I certainly wouldn't be convinced to invest in this idea. It looks too much like a hozx to me.
Basically you carry the water with you, and you convert the water to H2, then burn it back to WATER. If (ideally) you don't waste any water in this cycle, e.g. you recycle it, then you don't need to count the weight of water at all! Instead, you should count MJ/kg of the Al you used to convert water to H2.
You seem to have missed my point. I never claimed this was the only type of acceptable article. I was simply pointing out that it is a deliberate choice to post articles like these.
.: Max Romantschuk
The price of stuff made of nothing but scrap iron (rebar, fence fabric, farm panels, etc.) has nearly doubled in the past couple years. I take this to be partly due to direct increases in manufacturing costs, and the rest due to *massive* increases in distribution costs, since most such stuff is ferried to retailers by truck.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
My father once tried to patent a car that had a wind-turbine on top to generate hydrogen for power. I knew that it wouldn't be self-generating but the idea that you could reclaim some of the energy somehow was valid-- and today, we have flywheels and regenerative braking in ugly little bloated flea-looking foreign made cars.
Perhaps the Make: people will challenge Makers for a drive-by-wire electric car-- why in the hell not? The Maker's Bill of Rights says nothing about makers not making Big Things like cars. I've always pondered why are there still recalls in the automotive industry when it's been around for what, over a 100-odd-years? Surely, the industry has accumulated enough patterns to avoid making those mistakes by now.
Reading the DOE primer on lead-acid batteries isn't a bad idea if you think that it would be fun to build an electric car.
Okay, that was wonderfully veering off topic. I'll go away now.
I have a fire starter made by Doan Mach & Equip Co. Inc Euclid OHe starting-tool.htmlT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =8&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=4,188,192&OS=4,188,1 92&RS=4,188,192
http://www.1sks.com/store/doan-usgi-magnesium-fir
NSN 4240-01-160-5618
FSCM 6251 MFR/PN 8702
FIRE STARTING TOOL
MAGNESIUM
U.S. PATENT NO. 4,188,192
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
This will set most anything on fire in a controlled manner. I keep one on my keychain and have for over 10 years. I was challenged that the magnesium would ignite or spark if put on a grinder and it didn't even spark and as the metal is removed it pulled enough heat away to keep the bar cool. The 'flint' side however creates spectacular sparks with a grinder and adequate ones with a knife.
This will start wet paper or wood easily.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty