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Hydrogen Fuel Balls from a Gas Pump?
navalynt writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Energy has filed a patent for hydrogen fuel balls. From the article 'The proposed glass microspheres would each be a few millionths of a metre (microns) wide with a hollow center containing specks of palladium. The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter.' They are supposedly safe and small enough to be pumped into a fuel tank in the same manner as gasoline."
Isn't is a bit disturbing that the government files patents to prevent us from using stuff that we paid them to invent?
So what happens to all the bits of glass and palladium after it releases its hydrogen load?
I guess ideally, it would get saved somewhere for recycling - but presuming that doesn't happ
en - is it going to be OK to breath microsopic bits of that stuff?
www.sjbaker.org
You said balls.
My balls run on diesel. I guess I'm doomed to a life of ball-ular pollution... Plus if I use the wrong grade, they knock.
What keeps the glass from breaking, and how do you get them out of you car's hydrogen tank?
I don't preview or spellcheck.
big balls?
Great balls of fire!!
The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter
Just what we needed. DRM for our gas.
Say everybody, have you seen my Hydrogen Fuel Balls?
.
They're big and salty and brown.
If you ever need a quick pick-me-up
Just stick my Hydrogen Fuel Balls in your mouth.
Oooh, suck on my chocolate, salty Hydrogen Fuel Balls
(Put 'em in your mouth!)
Put 'em in your mouth and suck 'em...
you're showered with glass splinters instead of smoke?
I didn't understand what the palladium was for. But from the Wikipedia entry:
Pallaium has the uncommon ability to absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen at room temperatures.
The page includes lost of other tidbits, too. I had no idea it was such a useful metal.
Cheers.
Well, at least it's got some people THINKING about alternatives. Now, if anything pans out, that is another thing...
Great Balls of Fire!
C|N>K
Actually, it is far safer than gas to transport and store compared to gasoline. Why? A)It requires a stronger fuel:air mixture than gas to ignite B)It is incredibly light, so except in buildings with sealed ceilings, the stuff just isn't very dangerous (gasoline vapors are heavier than air, hence why you should NEVER store it indoors) C)It is 100% non-toxic and disperses instantly (say, in an accident.) If a tanker full of gasoline crashes- you've got a HUGE fire hazard, a major environmental disaster so you have to do something about it fast (especially if the gas contains MTBE), and the fumes are pretty toxic (and flammable, and hug the ground.) If a hydrogen tanker cracks open on the highway, the fire department just has to stand around and watch until the stuff finishes leaking out. No fire hazard since the stuff rises away almost instantly.
The biggest technical hurdle for hydrogen in a distribution network is with seals and hoses; H2 is so damn small that keeping it from escaping through seals and the walls of hoses is very difficult (same reason helium escapes so quickly from balloons, except H2 is even smaller.)
The REAL problem with hydrogen, which everyone loves to ignore, is that there IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to produce hydrogen efficiently, from a renewable resource, without leaving toxic byproducts; current methods either involve hideously inefficient electrolysis, toxic catalysts, or non-renewable resources. Guess why Bush is so hot to trot on Hydrogen? Natural gas is the current "favorite" source. Except you've got to do some nasty processes to natural gas to get the hydrogen, and you have to do something with the carbon leftover when you remove all the hydrogen atoms. The whole point of going OFF hydrocarbon fuels is to get off the CARBON which usually ends up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide! Not to mention, natural gas is NOT RENEWABLE!
"Fuel cells!" you say. Except they're very expensive, have toxic catalysts in them, and have a very finite lifetime unless you use very, very clean water. Distilled/deionized water takes a lot of energy to produce...
Please help metamoderate.
...because I thought, just as wikipedia states in its citations, that all work by the United States Government is automatically in the public domain.
Sig: I stole this sig.
(give or take a few neutrons, anyhow)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The technology is probably similar to current "sponge" type hydrogen tanks; right now you can buy a hydrogen storage tank that uses some sort of metal hydride (I forget which) that can soak up a huge amount of hydrogen, similar to this. You heat it up to release the hydrogen stored or to recharge it, similar to how you 'recharge' that volcanic rock that absorbs odors.
The stuff theoretically wouldn't leave the "tank"; this wouldn't be like going to the gas station and filling up with little 'balls' of hydrogen. Still, I agree, it's worrying. What happens when a car is involved in a serious accident that breaches the tank, and the stuff gets all over the place? Or the stuff gets contaminated with impurities and needs to be recycled?
Carbon fiber seemed like a great idea for race cars, until track workers had to start picking up bits of the stuff. Guess what? It's the same color as asphalt, and it tends to break into very sharp shards, and the particles are really nasty if you breathe them in. Ask any track worker- the stuff is a BITCH to clean up, and if you miss any, it -will- cause someone to blow out a tire.
Please help metamoderate.
Considering the current cost of palladium (~$338 an ounce), you'd hope so.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Hydrogen is theoretically the most effective and clean fuel, but practically it is a nightmare.
Forget hydrogen. There is an abundance of alternatives out there already that can utilize the current infrastructure and car fleet with little or no cost, like ethanol and SVO and RME and so on. My personal fav would be hydrogen peroxide, but then again I am just a geek.
Governments and universities and car manufacturers like to speak of big, expensive and complex system changes because
1 - they won't happen. Keeps the oligopoly happy.
2 - they make politicians look smart and progressive.
2 - they require aeons of scientific funding to universities and such.
3 - they require us to purchase a new car from the manufacturers.
Thus, simple infrastructure changes such as using ethanol or RME aren't favoured because they are cheap and simple and only benefit us, the plebs.
Considering how much energy is required to create hydrogen alone now add another energy to fit it into this kind of containment and you end up using a hell lot of fosil fuels to create this "clean" fuel.
I know this is just a tentative thing - they won't be implementing this tech immediately - but how expensive will these glass/paladium spheres be to produce? Let us also consider the volume of fuel the USA et al consumes. And then of course, there is the issue of disposing of or recycling them. IMO, the idea behind the patent raises more questions than it answers. Of course, TFA was fairly brief, perhaps there's more to the idea.
At any rate, the only reason we come to expect the conveniences of today's fuel and transportation tech is due to the fact that we can just pump up the fossil fuel and dump it in a container for later use. However, said fossil fuel could rapidly grow scarce, and emulating that convenience with other fuels may prove to be too expensive to be even remotely practical, at least in the near future with our current tech.
(This is not to say we shouldn't keep researching! There are solutions out there for sure... I just doubt this glass sphere idea is one of them.)
That was a highly factual post (and a great point, severaly underreported, about the *environmental* impact of making hydrogen), except
>It requires a stronger fuel:air mixture than gas to ignite
Hydrogen is remarkable for the wide range of concentrations at which it will go boom. CERN's safety page lists 4% to 74% concentrations in air as the explosive range. Gasoline is much more finicky: before microprocessors and smog controls, cars had elaborate mechanical computers called carburetors to keep the mixture in a range that would sort of burn.
I am not a doctor, but for some reason the thought of millions of micron sized glass shperes does not seem very healthy to me. What would the effect of these glass bubbles be upon their entrance into a cut or other opening in the human body?
I once dropped a glass on my bare foot, and it shattered into thousands of incrediblly tiny shards. At the hospital, it took them hours to remove *most* of the pieces. Almost 20 years later, I still have pieces of fine glass sand in my foot. Now take this type of tramua, and miniturize it down even smaller. A powder so fine it acts like a liquid...Liquid glass. My foot throbs just at the thought of it!
Again, I have no idea if my experience is even relevant to this new technology. I guess I just wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this matter.
"The glass spheres should be so small and slippery [...] there would be no risk of explosion or fire if a leak occurs."
I sense, "slip and fall" litigation rate on the rise. Harvey Birdman, where are you?
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Well, just wait til people start trying to mix these palladium balls with 50% restaurant grease.
Lardy lardy, my sticky balls are cloggin' my fuel injectors.
It'll be messy.
But, maybe it'll won't be as messy as trying to extract fuel from the politicians...
(hides behind desk after hearing agents knock on door..)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
When I last checked palladium was USD338 per ounce.
;).
If the palladium required costs more than the hydrogen it carries then you have one of the following problems:
a) People paying for the hydrogen at the fuel station, but not returning the palladium.
b) People not being able to pay for both the hydrogen and the palladium and thus not using your fancy new fuel.
If it turns out you can squeeze so much hydrogen into your palladium you might end up replicating the cold fusion thing by accident.
The argument is that hydrogen uses a completely new infrastructure for transport,storage, generation and end user while hybrids only need incremental improvements to battery technology. Hybrids also create the huge distributed electrical storage grid that allows conventional generator capacity to be used more efficiently (in the US, power stations have spare capacity at night in summer because of the need to meet daytime air conditioning load, and this capacity can be used to charge hybrid vehicle batteries. Smart chargers such as the ones already in long term marine use could be remotely controlled to supply current according to spare capacity, meaning that generators can run at constant output.)
Hydrogen is popular, I suspect, because it is a technical fix that appeals to some engineers (gee whiz, new technology) and to the oil industry because they get to retain control over the power infrastructure instead of those boring electrical utilities. Whereas a vehicle economy running mainly on electrical utility power and biofuel would take away a good part of the power over consumers currently enjoyed by Exxon and the like. A farm cooperative could easily produce its own biodiesel and bioethanol with a surplus for sale.
Every time I make this point I get banged on by somebody who claims that the likes of Exxon only do what they do to make shareholders happy. It's good to know that oil industry PR people can not only read but can navigate Slashdot, but at the end of the day a hydrogen economy just hands over too much power to the technocrats, whereas a mixed hybrid electric/biofuel economy leaves far more power in the hands of communities. The shareholders are happy when they can see no way that their monopoly can be challenged or dismantled, because it guarantees a continued revenue flow. If that means distorting markets, they are all for it.
Pining for the fjords
I just saw "glass spheres" and thought about bumping around in a fuel tank while you are driving. Just a-wondering how tough a glass sphere one buhzillionth of an inch would be.
To *me*, and I readily admit I am skeptical and suspicious when big business and government collide (and collude), but the "hydrogen economy" seems designed on purpose to keep the same billionaires and their corporations...billionaires and "in control" of transportation and energy.
I think I prefer right now and for the near future just normal liquid biofuels. We don't have to do any radical change to either vehicles or fuel delivery infrastructure, a pumpable liquid is a pumpable liquid after all. And the tech is here and it works, we really don't need a lot more government and industry billion dollar "studies", we just need the fuel produced in larger quantities and shipped. For example, using existing gas stations, just trash midrange, keep low test and high test, and use the midrange tanks for E-85, done, maybe swap out a bit of the plumbing perhaps, but nothing like setting up hydrogen production facilites and massive miniature christmas tree bulb factories, etc.
Then we need a switch (an option at the car dealers at all the current various price ranges, same as the "normal" cars) to "plug in" hybrids, which they could make right now if they wanted to, a lot of backyard gadgeteers have built them already to prove it is possible. This could offset a large part of the transportation load, especially for short and mid range commuters, drastically reduce the concentrated pollution in the urban areas, the fuel part would be almost all carbon neutral, and a lot of the battery part can be addressed by such things as home solar panel arrays with overnight charging to the plug in hybrids from the home battery bank. This would also improve the over-all national "fuel" supply but with little to no impact on the normal electrical grid demand. The Sun is practical fusion power,the only one we have really, we have the existing tech to use it directly, and plants use the same fusion energy to grow and we can get a large percentage of the fuel we need from them. What's not to like?
An individual can now purchase and own a vehicle,but you'll still pay "rent" forever on making it run, and the rent money goes to already uberrich guys, who already have enough political and economic power, IMO. Remember that picture of the exxon hog jowled CEO giggling as he testified in congress over the massive petroleum price hikes? The dude who got hundreds of millions for selling gas, like that's a problem right now? Do we really need to keep paying that guy and dudes like him like that, letting this energy cartel just keep dictating prices to us and how we do our transportation? I think *not*, we can do better, and right now.
It would be nice to start to become your own fuel producer. Even just some significant part would help your wallet, the economy, and the environment. The Sun -practical fusion power- helps solve these problems with tech we have today.
...will have attendents that will pump balls. Heh Heh Heh.
Libertas in infinitum
------------
Diesel Car Forum
The problems with hydrogen are many, and handwaving some in, some out, just seems weird.
E.g., energy density is a real problem. While H2 does have 3 times more energy density than gasoline per weight unit, it's about 10 times lighter than gasoline even in liquefied form, and thus has worse energy density per _volume_. (And hideously less energy density if you use it as compressed gas.)
But transporting and storing it liquefied is harder than you'd think, because it boils at around -253 Celsius. That's cold enough to _freeze_ air on contact. It's also going to be a pain to keep it that cold, and even in the best insulated tanks it's going to constantly evaporate. In fact, a lot of it will evaporate every day.
And unlike natural gas, you can't just compress it until it stays liquid at room temperature. If you look at its phase diagram, a liquid phase just doesn't exist anywhere above -240 C. That's where its critical point lies. No matter how much you compress it, it just won't liquefy above that. So you _have_ to keep it that cold.
E.g., if you want to talk energy, there you go, there's even more energy spent cooling it to those temperatures, and a massive waste of energy when then it just evaporates in a car sitting in a garrage for a month.
E.g., energy density isn't really helped if you have to pack it in a massive tank, either to hold it under pressure or to keep it cold. If the tank itself adds an extra half a ton to your car, you haven't really won much. (Rememeber the lower energy density, so the tank will also have to be bigger to get the same mileage out of it.)
E.g., if you want to talk safety, you don't want to be the guy that gets splashed by liquid at -253C when the tank ruptures in an accident. Or yes, when a tanker ruptures on the highway. Yes, it will eventually just rise up, but in the meantime it will instantly kill anything it spills onto.
E.g., yes, a problem is that it leaks, so you'd have hydrogen constantly leaking in your garage. Whether your roof is sealed tight or not is a moot point when you have a couple percent of your tank's capacity evaporating daily in it. That's a _lot_ more vapour produced than gasoline produces. And you can't just seal the tak shut to keep the vapours in, since the resulting pressure will eventually be tremendous. So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.
E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell. Sure, it's _unlikely_ that you'd find the room just full of it, but do you actually want to take that risk? Plus, when you talk hundreds of millions of cars, some poor bugger may blow himself up every hour. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you. Probabilities are funny like that when they involve large numbers.) Do you want to be the car manufacturer hit by the lawsuits and negative PR of that?
E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.
And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?
And conversely, hand-waving the energy and carbon concerns as some global catastrophe is... uninformed, to say the least.
E.g., yes, we already knew that on the whole you don't get more energy from burning hydrogen than you put into splitting the water. That's obvious. The problem is that while we're damn good at producing electricity, and outstanding at making electrica
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We don't need to ask misleading questions when it has already been defined; the difference between a body politic from a body corporate is evinced in the Law of Nations. Where we begin is the first book, which clearly details that "A NATION or a state is, as has been said at the beginning of this work, a body politic, or a society of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by their combined strength." If anyone could comprehend that the people are inducted into a state known as "California", where is prohibited a state within a state yet a foreign CONGRESS libel the people/state "California" to be nothing more than territory in its records -- and CONGRESS creates a state simply called "State" within the verry territory that it libeled. "State" of California is the feud of CONGRESS, whereas California is a state, yet "The State of California" is a corporation. Doesn't that sound fishy? In the "Bill of Rights" at the 10th Ammendment, it determined a federal State that allowed the people/organic-state to induct into the federal State; insofar as acknowledging the several states/people are "respectively" preeminent to the federal State.
"Department of Energy" is a corporation chartered from Washington's District of Columbia. It is corporate, not politic; meaning its agents are idolaters trying to coerce politic into their private trust.
Government is a "public trust", not a private trust as evinced by that DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.
[See: 22 U.S.C.A. 286(e)] lays down its sovereignty and takes on that of a private citizen. It can exercise no power which is not derived form the corporate charter.
When an agent of a corporation conducts negotiation, it presumes a corporation with the same name to subject the politic, but the politic is layed dormant by its name being inducted for that verry name of the corporation. Securities necessary for inducting the trust between the politic and the government "public trust" are secured by credit as a bank note titled "Certificate of Birth" and the private trust is secured by debt as a bank note titled "Certificate of Live Birth" with the entity in all-upper-case letters "JOHN QUINCY DOE"
Show a colorable Name for a person that isn't to a aaman (politic: human, woman, german, roman, etc), and by that truth is it proved nothing more than a corporation.
without prejudice
"there IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to produce hydrogen efficiently, from a renewable resource without leaving toxic byproducts;"
I'm not sure where you got that idea. High temperature electrolysis, for example, just uses really hot water and electricity. It's about 70% efficient.
"you've got to do some nasty processes to natural gas to get the hydrogen"
Well, there are a couple things wrong with that statement. First of all, hydrocarbon reformation could hardly be described as a "nasty process". You put you hydrocarbon in with some solid catalyst, hot steam, and that's all. Second of all, it can work with virtually any hydrocarbon. Thirdly, natural gas is primarily methane, which can be produced in other ways.
"Fuel cells!" you say. Except they're very expensive, have toxic catalysts in them, and have a very finite lifetime unless you use very, very clean water. Distilled/deionized water takes a lot of energy to produce...
Fuel cells do not have toxic catalysts in them, they have platinum, which is just about as non-toxic as a material can get. Though they are expensive and short lived.
The idea behind hydrogen is that it can be implemented now, and is compatible with existing infrastructure. Automobiles and power-plants that exist now can be converted to use hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced using conventional energy inputs, but can also be produced using many other inputs. So the advantage is versatility, and the potential to operate industry without producing CO2. Of course, it's not ready for prime time yet.
(like most else on Wikipedia) it's riddled through and through with errors of omission, scope, and categorization, not to mention misplaced emphasis and outright factual mistakes.
Wrong. What you mean is, "like a few things on Wikipedia", but then that's a property of everything around us. Surely you don't believe everything your government tells you too, do you?
Your post is just Wikipedia trolling, dear AC. It's as good as most things, and only a fool criticizes it for lack of perfection.
AM2 (Anti-Matter 2) was a power source used in the Sten novels by Alan Cole and Chris Bunch. It was anti-matter contained in a non-reactive coating. Very similar idea to what is here. How to move a volatile substance and still retain usuability.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What happens if you inhale these little suckers? You know it will happen. How do they break down over time and how do they break down in a catastrophic accident? Spill cleanup? Do I just vacumn them?
Lots of promise but all the negatives are curiously missing. This sounds more fantasy than real, the old "patent the idea" and then try to make it work.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Making society independent of fossil fuels - Danish researchers reveal new technology
d =%7BE6FF7D39-1EDD-41A4-BC9A-20455C2CF1A7%7D
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.
http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News.aspx?gui
This i do remeber from at least half a year ago. Never got much press though. Did even submit this to the Green Party over here in Antwerp, no effect. Sigh.
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
Indeed, H2 is only an energy storage medium, and up till now there is no way to generate H2 from a 'renewable' source. But, quite some new nuclear reactor designs (especially G4) are specifically designed to produce H2 next to electricity. Not renewable, but as fuel efficiency increases dramatically, as some designs only produce waste with a very short half-live (in the order of tens of years) and as promising new ways to treat classical nuclear waste are being developed, this seems like the way forward to me..
Palladium preloaded with hydrogen would make a GREAT hydrogenation catalyst for use in illicit drug labs. Meth, MDMA, or any of the more exotic phenethylamines could be easily produced using this stuff. Currently, powerful reducing agents (LiAlH4, etc.) are pretty closely watched by the DEA, but if this stuff is going to be as close as your local gas station, expect a upturn in illegal drug production!
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Or unsupposedly? Which is it? You know, I'm already riding around on a half-tank of gasoline that will kill me just as fast as a tank of hydrogen if it were to ignite. I don't think this hydrogen process needs to be this complicated to work. The 'safety' claim is just going to be used to proprietize the technology.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
If you scroll down a bit, You'll find other wonderful DoE inventations.
Like this one
With inventations like that, who needs cars??
Ben
Seems the white-haired children of the scientific-industrial-complex are at it again. Teflon has been found to be in the blood of practically everyone since that bright idea made it into cooking ware. Entropy tells us that these posionous balls will end up in every cell of the human body. What happens when depleted balls start sucking the hydrogen out of your lung cells? What would say, palladium oxide or nitrates of palladium (if these are real compounds) do to living creatures? Haven't we banned lead from gasoline? And MTE? And a tank of palladium-ball hydrogen for 30,000 dollars a fillup in a 500,000 dollar car is hardly a solution to the energy problem. (Conservative amounts?)
E Proelio Veritas.
Stan Meyers had a water powered car back in the 1970's.
Of course the government came in and stan was poisened and we will never see the car again. So of course the government is going to try patent anything that controls people.
Stan Meyers had a water powered car back in the 1970's back when gas was 25 cents a gallon.
Ahh remember those days, 25 cents a gallon, you could fill up your 1972 (anything) and light em up down the street.
in other news..
So how are all you 26 million veterans feeling about your private information stolen this morning?
Not.
Nuff said.
$346US/oz, as of 8:35am EDT, May 23, 2006.
Assuming a slurry of these spheres would be a wildly optimistic 50% glass, 25% hydrogen, 25% palladium by weight, that means the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline (~36,800 Watt*hrs) would require that around 1 kilogram of hydrogen. 1 kilogram of palladium is 35.2 oz, or $12,179.
US cars can hold anywhere from 10 to 30 gallons of gas, or the equivalent of $121,790 to $365,376 worth of palladium to get the same energy density.
A quarter of a million dollars worth of palladium.
In every single car on the road.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Hydrogen diffuses readly through steel, but not through aluminium. The hydrogen diffusion coefficients of steels are greater than 10-6 cm2.s-1, whereas the hydrogen diffusion coefficients of aluminium alloys are approximately 10-10 cm2.s-1. So don't use steel. (If you have to use steel, put down a layer of copper or aluminium to slow the diffusion.) Hydrogen gas can readily disociate on the metal surface, then you have two protons, which can readily move through the 'Fermi sea' of electons, especially in something as grainy as a steel.
Think global, act loco
"Like there's this guy who invented this car that runs on WATER, MAN!! It's got a fiber glass air-cooled engine and it RUNS ON WATER!!!"
Glass is actually very strong and elastic in the absence of point defects. Think about the glass in fiberglass or the fibre used in fibre optics. It is only brittle because of microscopic cracks that spread. Water greatly reduces the energy needed to break the chemical bonds in the glass. I'm guessing that the balls are so small that it will not be energetically favorable for the cracks to grow, even if they are wet. (Read about Griffith's theory on fracture mechanics to see why.)
Think global, act loco
In the future, please submit /. articles which link to the permalink contained in this, and most other blogs. Because after the next big scientific breakthrough hits the presses, the link in this article will take you to the top of the blog, forcing us to scroll around and find the item of interest discussed in this posting.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
How many catalytic-converters-worth of palladium are there in one gallon of hydrogen-fuel balls?
What do you put in the engine so that all that palladium doesn't get squirted out into the atmosphere as particulates... and while I don't think palladium itself kills, the consequences of squirting finely-divided catalyst into the atmosphere might be interesting. (As techology cheerleaders always say, "for all we know, it might be beneficial.")
If the palladium can be recovered, what percentage of it gets recovered and reused? 80%? 99%? 99.9999%?
Do we pay a deposit of $500 when we fill up, then get it back when we bring the "empties" back to the redemption center?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why not build an Integral Fast Reactor (FAQ), and use the electrical output to electrolyze water, or use the thermal output of a Lead Cooled Fast Reactor to thermochemically crack water into oxygen and hydrogen.
As far as waste is concerned, the Integral Fast Reactor waste products have a relatively short half life. From the Wikipedia article: "The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements."
Great, now all we need is a ready supply of hydrogen. Crack water, you say? Well that takes energy to do, but if we are going to go that route then we should build more nuclear plants. Hydrogen is pretty inefficient. Outside of finding some raw hydrogen, the net effect is for hydrogen to become an energy transport medium. One less efficient than electricity, gas, or ethanol, etc.
"Many other fuel gases lack a perceptible smell, too. Trace amounts of an odorant chemical (ethyl mercaptan) are added to propane and to natural gas so that leaks can be detected. This is very much a solved problem."
What works for propane at room temperatures, doesn't work for hydrogen at 20 Kelvin. If you put ethyl mercaptan in it, it would _freeze_ at that temperature. And when some hydrogen boils off, the odorant probably won't boil off too, because it's not just below its boiling point, it's outright below its freezing point too.
In other words, congrats, you've just discovered distillation. Because that's exactly what's going to happen there. You'll just get the hydrogen distilled off the mixture and still as odourless as ever.
So basically wake me up if you can point me at some odorant that has a comparable boiling point to that of hydrogen. Only _then_ can you tell me that the problem is already solved. Otherwise just assuming that what worked for propane must work for hydrogen is... cute, but still stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't think this format is for going into your 'fuel tank'
This is the form that hydrogen would take while being transported to the fuel station and while at the fuel station. Then vaccuum or heat would discharge it into a gas form which would then get transferred to your car's fuel cell, the same way current hydrogen cars work (yes there are some out there).
Even if this were to be the form it was distributed in to your car, it would probably come as a self-contained package... ie: a tube or something that would allow the hydrogen to be discharged to the fuel cell for uptake as needed, then closed off again to avoid evaporation.
In any case, you won't be pumping micro-balls into your current form-factor fuel tank. It's obviously not appropriate for this fuel.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Now we finally know what ENERGON cubes were made of...... and why they were plentiful on Cybertron but scarce on Earth.... palladium.
Man those crazy Japanese animators had it all figured out, way back in the 80s
amazing!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
what happens to the glass? is it just burnt up?
Now let us do a full cycle efficicency calc for the fuel cell. Starting with natural gas heated and cracked into H2, the efficiency is 60%. i.e. the H2 has 60% of the heat content of the natural gas we began with. Fuel cells efficiency is 80%. i.e. 80% of the heat content of H2 is available as electricity. There is no gear box. Electric motors convert electriciy to mechanical energy at >99% efficiency. Over all efficiency is 48% of the heat content of natural gas is available to the wheels of the car. This is already more than twice the efficiency of the gasoline energy to brake-horse-power to the wheels conversion.
The IC engine systems are at the pinnacle of their efficiency over 100 years of research and development and tinkering. The CH4 -> H2 reforming and H2->electricity fuel cell technology has barely started now [*]. Their efficiency will improve over the coming decades. Throw in the assorted facts like, 15% of the energy in the crude oil is spent in extracting it, refining it and distributing it or 80% of US Gas stations can be connected to the natural gas grid and reform CH4->H2 on site. The future of fuel cells is bright. They will win.
How soon can the US SUV fleet switch to H2? Well, in 1940 the entire locomotive fleet of USA was external combustion steam engines (6% overall efficiency energy_to_wheels/heat_of_coal). The diesel-electric hybrid locomotives had overall efficiency of 15% those days. By 1955, steam locomotives were dead.
[*] The principles of fuel cells are as old or even older than IC engines, but the large scale R&D effort has not yet been directed towards fuel cells and reforming CH4 compared to the R&D money poured into IC engines over the last century.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Patenting an idea means that you can [wait for] someone who can raise the millions of dollars it takes to develop a working device, [then sue them] driven by the incentive to make money. This ensures that the initial idea [will be harder to] actually get developed."
Also "I have worked in IP" means "I am not an inventor, but I like to pretend".
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Water Powered Car
I don't want anti-nuke protesters to jump in front of my car.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
[some guy] Hey Louie, here's some hydrogen
[Louie] I wanna DIP MY BALLS in it!
Insightfull- sheesh!
..or else what?
"an energy storage medium instead of an energy source"
Crude oil stores energy from the sun, so fucking what? The only true "energy sources" I can think of are fussion, fission and tidal, none of them seem suitable for a mazda.
"And it better be recharging."
"how many times can it be recharged before it becomes a tank of worthless glass?"
Considering the holes are made to only let hydrogen pass through, then I would say untill the balls wall wears out or breaks. Filtering broken balls with a mechanical sieve should be fairly straight forward.
"fearmongering about the explosive danger of hydrogen"
Hydrogen has a lot to do with why petrol is flamable, look up redox reaction. Hydrogen gas is far more explosive than crude oil and will leak straight through the walls of most pipes and containers. The difficulty and danger in handling IS the major drawback, collecting glass balls is childs play in comparison to storing/transporting hydrogen under pressure.
"Just another article that adds weight to my feeling that hydrogen is a con"
People often feel that way when they don't understand the basics.
BTW: The Hindenburg was not a ballon, the hydrogen was not under pressure, it was simply pumped into the cavity until the ship floated. The explosion was anologous to leaving the gas turned on until your house inevitably explodes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You do not need to file a patent to prevent other people from filing a patent; disclosing the invention publicly (e.g., by publishing it in a journal) is sufficient and far cheaper.
So, when people go through the trouble and expense of filing a patent, it's for something else. A "defensive" patent is a patent you intend to use in a countersuit; but many such patents end up getting used for a primary suit anyway, since once the money has been spent creating them, why not use them to your advantage?
And it is quite common for patents derived from government funded work to end up getting licensed to just one company or a few companies, often in some way related to the inventor itself. Think of it as a perk or retirement plan.
Electric motors convert electriciy to mechanical energy at >99% efficiency.
Bullshit.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Agreed.
The best I have seen is about 98% for a permanent-magnet DC motor.
Typically one can expect >80% for a good motor/controller combo when operated in the high-efficiency regime of the motor.
Still better than IC.
It doesn't matter how safe and convenient hydrogen fuel might become. It still will take more energy to produce it than it will give back when burned.
So someone will still have to find another source of energy for making it.
Hydrogen is just an expensive battery. Now how will we charge it?
But you know, I've always wondered why they don't use big air-cooled heat engines instead of a cooling tower. It adds complexity, but they get to extract energy from the hot water that would have otherwise just been blown off anyways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
but.. it seems like this would be something that vehicle manufacturer would supply, and you would still need to add hydrogen in some manner to refill the balls. So if theyt existed in the fuel tank on a permanent basis and they are recharged with hydrogen periodically this could work... does the palladium run out?
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Electrical Machines 101 was so long ago, I got confused transformers with motors. Sorry about that.
Thing to note is that we are starting from natural gas, another fossil fuel. It is still not the non-polluting nirvana imagined by many fans of fuel cells.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There remains a very strong suspicion that he had no such process, from his enemies, (Oil Corp. Cartels) even though he conducted a demonstration (before this writer and another engineer at the Meyer lab in 1993) of the production of copious hydrogen/oxygen gas from what visually seemed like a small input power. But Meyer was exceedingly paranoid and he flatly refused reasonable requests by us and others to test the performance --- the input/out power ratio, even with the proviso that we did not have to "look into his black box" of electronics feeding his rather simply constructed stainless steel electrode, alternating current and voltage cell.
So basically we're supposed to believe this bozo who claimed to have broken the law of conservation of mass/energy but refused to have his apperatus tested (making claims that reveal he did'nt understand patent law any better then he understood physics). We'll get back to you.
He's not the first, he won't be the last.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Try the experiments.
Well, I'll reserve judgment on whether it's economically viable yet. It's certainly possible, but the economic viability is mainly dictated by whether it's cheaper or not than to buy oil from the Middle East instead. As long as people can save a cent per gallon by tanking on gasoline from Iraq instead of on domestic ethanol, they'll continue to do so. When oil prices will rise high enough, we'll switch to whichever is cheaper than that. Still, yes, alternatives do exist, ethanol included.
E.g., we already know how to make synthetic gasoline out of coal. It's not cheap, which is why people still prefer to import oil from the Middle East instead. But it's certainly feasible. Most of Germany's tank warfare in WW2 happened on synthetic fuel.
E.g., it's possible to reform almost any organic waste (e.g., see the stories about using turkey guts or dead cats or whatnot) into usable petroleum. As long as it contains enough hydrogen and carbon, it can be reformed into something close enough to petroleum. There's no energy won there, but it can convert energy from an uranium reactor into something one can pour into a car's tank.
E.g., we're starting to genetically engineer algae which contain 50% lipids, and can be pretty efficiently processed into synthetic petroleum.
E.g., even the oil resources aren't as close to extinction as doomsday theorists would have us believe. There's for example still plenty of oil left in Siberia and even in the USA. The reason the USA doesn't bother extracting its own oil any more (although once was the world's main oil exporter) is that, basically, it's cheaper to import and refine the oil from the Middle East.
Plus, see the thing above about being able to reform most hydrocarbons into synthetic petroleum. There's a lot of tar and oil shale which is very possible to crack into lighter hydrocarbons. Not cheap, but possible.
So, yeah, we're not really short on options. Doomsday theorists may have a field day preaching doom-and-gloom "society will break down when oil runs out theories", but, yeah, humanity isn't even near bending over that easily. Or needing to.
Still, looking at it pragmatically, hydrogen is another option, and it's always good to have extra options. If plan B turns out to not really work that well, it's never bad to have a plan C, right?
It has a certain hype-able charm about it too. It sounds high-tech, environmentally friendly, etc. And, to a certain class of uneducated retards, it may even sound like it's free perpetual energy. (Hydrogen comes out of water, and water is free, right? There are gazillions of gazillions of tons of it in the oceans, right?) So since those can vote too, there's a certain political capital in promising a hydrogen economy.
But still, with or without that, it is nevertheless an extra option, and it's never a bad thing to explore possible options. _If_ it actually ever works the way it's hyped, and they overcome all the problems, then we can use it, and if not, noone forces anyone to. Heck, even if it doesn't work, some useful new technologies may come out of that.
Which of those options we'll use in the end (or maybe find a new one) will, in the end, be decided by the free market. Maybe it will be ethanol, maybe it will be synthetic gasoline, or maybe we'll finally have good enough batteries for electric cars. Regardless of what politicians may hype for political capital, people will in the end choose the one that gives them more milleage per dollar. That's why we're all importing oil from the Middle East, after all.
So basically I wouldn't really worry about it, or not yet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>>> Isn't is a bit disturbing that the government files patents to prevent us from using stuff that we paid them to invent?
simply filing a patent does not mean that you intend to prevent people from using it...
It simply means that you've staked a claim to it.
More likely is that the government wants the public to be able to use it, so we can develop alternative energy methods... and by patenting it, prevents anyone else from squating on it (and then doing evil with it as you suggest)...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
http://www.e-gold.com/currentexchange.html What I get here is that paladium is a little more than half the price of gold per ounce. That's expensive, yes, but not extremely expensive. You probably pay more than that for valentine's-day flowers, the spice saffron, or Hall-Mark Cards.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This particular implementation probably won't be realistically useful, but it does point to the fact that they're working on the main technology issue preventing us from moving to an H2 economy: storage. We don't know how to store H2 in a way that scales.
Realistically, once this problem is solved, putting the rest together will be trivial by comparison. We already know how to run H2 in fuel cells and even in internal combustion engines. We also know how to make h2 from a bunch of different sources, and this is the major value an H2 economy would provide: the ability to produce your energy in a variety of ways that don't involve drilling for oil and paying 3rd world dictators to be 3rd world dictators.
The real payoff that a switch to H2 would make available is that it can be generated from electricity- and the truth is that we don't generate a hundredth of the electricity we could, simply because we don't have the infrastructure to store it.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
In Australia, we have a government owned scientific group called the CSIRO. They apparantly own a number of lucrative patents that they have liscenced to corporate America. I believe the profits are used to fuel study on further possibly patentable devices. A previous slashdot article relating to the CSIRO's practices can be found here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/0
Its entirely possible that the US Government is using the same idea. Mind you, I'm not an American, so I'm only speculating
You don't need correction.
You where completely right. the typical efficiency of a alternating current motor with 3 phases is > 98%.
And a lot of installations where the motors are running constanlty and don't have to be shut down or started up, have probably 99.5% efficeny.
(( Yeah, I'm only a stupid software engineer, but my last software project was at a company that uses such motors to drive pumps, and my previous last software project was at a company that constructs such motors))
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Where do they figure they're gonna find an endless source for all this paladium? Do they expect to reclaim and reuse every scrap of it? And most importantly, what happens when the so-called "developing" nations, who aren't prepared economically or technologically to take advantage of this proposed system yet, actually are ready to begin using it - after the developed nations have raped the planet of the bulk of palladium and left the difficult unprofitable pickings for the johnny-come-latelys? Who, by the way, are in part johnny-come-latelys because their other natural resources have been plundered before they could develop them? That's how all the superpowers, from Rome to Russia, were born: control of natural resources.
On the surface looks like a GREAT IDEA. It's what's "under the hood" you need to watch out for. Multiply that 4 ounces of H20 water times 250,000,000 worldwide cars times whatever Amount of Total Mileage divided by that 100 miles (per each 4 ounces of water). Then see how fast the world runs out of POTABLE DRINKING WATER.
You have to be a spirit, Bulworth. A spirit is what we'll be once we use up all the water. I know you people are getting REAL TIRED of hearing about "my engines" but at least my liquid air + "negative steam" engine uses PROPERTIES of the water but does NOT destroy it. Plus, the H2O is in a "closed cycle", reused OVER & OVER.
Used, not destroyed. The flash-steamed water is only being used to transport the Heat to prevent the ice cold Liquid Air from freezing the piston to the cylinder wall. There's a lot more actions going on in my engine than meets the lazy eye. I explained the interactions IN DETAIL on http://www.newpath4.com/enginewow.htm . No Matter is destroyed in my enginewow engine, just used as energy transports into the piston explosion chamber, then recycled, a 100% non-fuel combusting engine. No combustion; just explosion of the combined physical properties. My engine dual crossfire of 2 symbiotic catalysts, a complete yet non-destructive engine process. The steam makes the liquid air explode much more powerfully than most people can imagine, the catalyst action working the steam, liquid air cold making the steamed water molecules collapse INSTANTLY, creating a Black Hole-level implosion that draws the piston in toward the approaching liquid air explosion. My engine multitasks. The explosion of the compressed liquid air is multiplied exponentially by the steam-filled piston it is injected into.
However, I am enjoying the obvious Race to not use my engines; I'm enjoying watching it IMMENSELY. Try not to destroy all the water & try not to let any of those damn miniscule lightweight palladium glass balls get dumped or loose released into the wind west of my house please. I'm not too keen about choking to death on an airborne flood of dirt dry glass beads.
btw, the air used in the enginewow engine is re-used also. Translated? Works underwater, works the same no matter what the altitude, works in Outer Space utilizing Outer Space cold to re-liquify the air in the enginewow cycle. May 23, 2006, repeating numerous posts already made since July 2003 > The ENGINEWOW ENGINE PROCESS WORKS IN OUTER SPACE. Sooner or later NASA WILL HEAR ME.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-05/24/con tent_4595131.htm
One thing strange in the story was the plan to capture the carbon and sequester it. But is it necessary? Only carbon coming from fossil fuels need to be sequestered. The carbon from the sugars actually came from the atmosphere and there is no harm in returning it to the atm.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
O dear... Just what everyone needs... Lots of little balls.
Security is but an illusion of the mind
~M45T3R S4D0W8~
[FootNote1] Prof Sankaran, who taught us Elec.Mach.301, graded so strictly most of us flunked and had to take the supplie (supplimentary examination) at the end of summer vacation to pass the course. That earned him the not-so-endering nickname Supplie Sankaran.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact