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Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste
Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Science Foundation is running a story on how corncob waste can be used to created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas. These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars. In fact, these 'briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000.' They can lead to flat and compact tanks and have already been installed in a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. And as the whole natural gas infrastructure exists already, this new technology could be soon adopted by car manufacturers."
Perhaps they could use this technology for the tailpipe, too...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
There may be a production/distribution infrastructure already active, but we still have to wait for gas stations to actually carry this stuff. If nobody sells it, nobody can buy and use it.
Speaking of which, how many have actually seen a gas station that sells E85?
(IANAL)
That's all great, until I go out in the morning and find that the damned raccoons have eaten through my gas tank and drunk all my biofuel. Varmints!
Do we even have enough natural gas for this to work? I thought it was expected to run low about the time petroleum was.
I don't have any scientific reason for saying this, but that sounds...dangerous to me. A gaseous car fuel seems like asking for trouble.
"Hooey, it's hot in here. Hey, bob, what's that popping sound outside?"
"Oh, my God! My car!"
Lots of talk in the article, but no hard dollar facts.
Cost of methane.
Cost of storage.
Cost of transportation.
Cost of local distribution & storage.
Cost of the delivery pump & tankage system in the vehicle.
I for one am still waiting for the day when cars can run on used cans and banana peels. Then I can cruise down the Main Street strip with my homey Doc Brown and impress the chicks.
Compressed natural gas (mostly methane and low C alkanes) has been in use in Argentina for years, it's cheaper and cleaner than gasoline, the autonomy of compressed gas is lower but for city driving it doesn't matter, and cars can still use gasoline because the engine has only minor modifications. This method seems to admit lower pressure in the tank, and might enable to store more gas without need of thick heavy steel was for containing it. Sounds like a good idea to me.
how this all plays out. While the lower cost of natural gas sounds good, will it be offset by a lower efficiency? Are supplies of natural gas plentiful enough for a large-scale changeover? Will the oil tycoons simply create artificial scarcity to drive prices up, similarly to how they currently do with gasoline? How will the use of natural gas effect engines over extended use? As someone else said, there is a lot of talk in the article, but no hard facts. For now, I have a lot of questions as to the long-term viability of natural gas as a fuel for automobiles.
a car completely made of plant matter?
Someone's been watching too much Cheech and Chong.
34486853790
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So why does the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality need a pickup truck? Or is this another technology that requires a larger vehicle to demonstrate any feasibility?
Until you bust out the hover board and ski behind the thing.... then you will get noticed.
Is a movie example of how it can be solved. Corn in, methane out, more or less.
Yep. Corn gives you gas.
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Better stock up while you stil can!!!!
To charge the device does one stick it in a bovine behind?
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...they could be talking about putting hydrogen in cars.
oops.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I hope they also use mesquite in their charcoal. I like my car exhhaust to have that flavor that only mesquite can deliver.
Will the new engines come with a grill?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Like every other single attempt to add complexity for a marginal gain in efficiency, it was not a success. All engineering involves tradeoffs: combining technologies with different metallurgical, thermal, gasflow etc. requirements means that none of the combined technologies ever function with peak efficiency. (The hybrid is a rare exception because the characteristics of internal combustion engines and electric motors are complementary, but even there it has taken something like 140 years of development of IC engine powered generator technology to make it work.)
Pining for the fjords
Coal energy, corncob energy... I think the next space shuttles ought to run on old top-hats.
Here's a neat poster (pdf link) about how these briquettes are made.
It looks ultra simple to do. This poster references only 120:1 storage ratio, so maybe there have been process changes that have improved storage capacity. Maybe this will also help with fuel cells that run on methane to provide portable electrical power too. I think this could be an exciting development.
...you're a bunch of alarmist buffoons.
Anything you can do with natural gas from a well can be done with methane. It's very easy to produce. Here's how it works. You've got a pond with a tent over it. The pond is full of beneficial bacteria. "Fresh" water (can be contaminated) and sewage are introduced into the bottom center of the pond. Over time the system is colonized with algae. The algae and other organisms digest the sewage, resulting in lots of algae (a resource itself), fairly clean water, and methane (mostly.) The methane can be captured and the algae can be harvested; the algae can be used to make either alcohol or biodiesel depending on what kind it is - some have more carbohydrates, some have more oil.
Right now, a lot of our sewage treatment systems, even the ones that look like oil refineries, are producing and flaring off methane. This is stupid. It should be captured and used. In fact a lot of agricultural producers of shit, like pig farms, are starting to use this technology to power their farms - and in many cases they actually produce enough power not only to run their operation, but to actually make a profit by selling excess to the grid. The resulting effluent has been "cooked" to the point where it can be applied directly to the crops as fertilizer. Normally this is achieved by storing it in an uncovered holding pond for months, where the methane simply escapes.
If we simply applied this technology to waste treatment plants and forced it on those who have a lot of animal shit currently posing a health hazard, we could get a lot of power and it would actually save money for everyone involved.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Methane is a gas created by animals and insects (termites). Currently it mostly escapes into the atmosphere where it damages the ozone layer. As other posters have responded, it can be harvested from pig farms or garbage dumps. Methane and other natural gas hydrates are also found frozen at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in massive quantities.
Unlike traditional fossil fuels like petroleum, methane can be generated in very short time spans and as a byproduct to other production activities (bacon). The problem remains that burning anything is not a clean energy source. Natural gas cars will still emit carbon dioxide, which is one of the main problems we're grappling with in terms of global warming. The plus side is that this fuel source might help Americans put fewer of their dollars in Middle Eastern pockets.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
What exactly does this do for alternative energy, i thought we were attempting to avoid oil gas, and coal? How small exactly? Are we talking laptops powered with natural gas small? Or just a minimal reduction in size, either way, i don't see much benefit, couldn't those corn cobs be better used to make biodiesel instead?
In a crash, gasoline will puddle under the vehicle you'd probably be trapped in. A gaseous fuel would dissipate in the air.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Gasoline is relatively safe because it's not explosive as a liquid. So, you pop the gas tank, and it leaks all over the ground, catches fire, and you can run away before the thing goes. However... if you have porous charcoal, there are problems. Impact the charcoal and little bits break off. Hit it hard enough, and significant portions get reduced to a fine powder. Suddenly, your low-pressure, high density tank turns into a high-pressure, high density tank that's only rated for low pressure.
Add to that, the flammability of charcoal powder. And by flammability, I do mean explosive tendency in the presence of enough air. In review: impact increases pressure, adds explosive potential -- tank rupture is now imminent, and a gas / charcoal mixture is sprayed out in large amounts. Scary.
Here is the source... The "ALL-CRAFT" of the University of Missouri. http://all-craft.missouri.edu/
You're laughing, but Henry Ford made a car out of corn plastic and hemp fiber. Obviously parts of it were still metal but not the chassis or body. A famous picture (should be easy to google) has him attacking it with an ax and failing to make more than scuffs. Unfortunately Hearst and DuPont lobbied against hemp to protect their paper and plastics industries (respectively) and thus helped make marijuana illegal - quite a change from the pre-war "HEMP FOR VICTORY" etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow, it's just like Energon cubes, except I can fill them with farts.
In the third movie, Doc and Marty are trapped in the Old West without gasoline to get the DeLorean up to 88 MPH.
"But Doc, what about Mr. Fusion?"
"Mr. Fusion powers the flight circuitry and the Flux Capacitor but the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline. It always did."
While Doc was having the car converted for flight, he could have chucked the combustion engine and replaced it with a motor/generator. Mr. Fusion could have then powered all systems in the car. For that matter, a bigass electric motor wouldn't have been beyond his means in 1855. Course he may have needed longer than that week he had to live but then he came up with those charcoal briquettes from hell for the train's boiler.
Right now, they are probably statically tuned to get more out of Gas, and not so much E85
Logically they'd have to be. Set the compression low enough for standard dino-gas and you burn ethanol inefficiently. Set the compression more for alcohol and you cause detonation, which will damage the engine. Which situation is worse? Thus - they tune it rather heavily to gasoline. Still, Josquint might have something wrong or poorly designed in his vehicle, as every review I've heard of has lower milage with E85 but MORE power.
My mid-term idea for a solution: Have adjustable timing and set the compression fairly high. Require the user, if he's to use dino-fuel, to use premium(or visit the local airport).
I don't read AC A human right
I want a corn cob and pig manure powered Ferrari. :)
Will the new engines come with a grill? Ironically charcoal has been used to fuel cars. Charcoal, Wood and other biomass solids have been gasified into an engine fuel for cars, trucks and motor bikes. This technology was used in Germany during WW2 and reappeared in the united states as a reaction to the 1973 gas shortages.
Some pictures of charcoal fueled vehicles:
http://www.woodgas.com/images/Mel_Strand_Truck_an
http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/werner/Bild313.jpg
http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/werner/Bild120.jpg
http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/werner/Bild287.jpg
http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/rolf_barry_berg/rolf_
http://www.woodgas.com/images/NASMotorcycle.jpg
You could put a grill top on this open gasifier http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/pics/pv2.jpg
This is the chop down the forest approach to keeping the cars running, but it does work on grass cuttings too. FYI the flammable gas mixture is N,H,CO. And there are some tricks to lower the amount of Nitrogen in the mix to get better performance. Staying on topic, it is also possible to convert this biomass derived synthesis gas into Methane or Methanol... And a corncob Methane storage tank might be much lighter to carry around then a gasifier system and wood...
Personally though my favorite alternative fuel system is the wood burning turbine. It's a lot like Doc Browns Mr Fusion device, you put junk in and burn it... Very tempting to build. http://www.gas-turbines.com/nt6/index.html
And wasted old moldy bread dose not seem like appropriate material for making medicine.
Hemp is such wonderfully useful stuff and so easy to grow not to mention that Cannabinol is a nice pharmaceutical. Why TF do governments fight against it so hard?! Cannabis FTW!!One
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Yes, I know it well. I use teflon in only one place: Liquid Wrench. I have a parrot and one thing I learned when looking up parrot-related information is that when teflon burns it kills birds. We used to use birds as signifiers in coal mines and shit like that. People are also susceptible, only less so - but a "teflon flu" is common when people burn the hell out of a teflon pan.
The War On Drugs makes a lot of money for a lot of people. That's pretty much the whole story.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here's a question along that vein I'd love to get an answer to.
If hemp is so valuable of a crop, why hasn't a hemp derived alternative that has no THC been genetically developed.
No THC = no reason to ban it's production
I have wondered this for a long time... seems trivial to me... I have friends, who are by no means intellegent, who have successfully cross bred plants to increase THC content. I'd imagine someone smarter could do the reverse until there was no measurable amount, while still maintaining the commercial benefits of the plant.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
There is no useful amount of THC in industrial hemp. Period. If you don't separate your plants you get a bunch of seeds instead of buds, anyway. (As a historical aside, George Washington recorded the separation of his plants by gender - you don't need to do this unless you're engaged in a selective breeding program, or you're smoking the product of the female plants.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Drinky,
I am intrigued by your carbon accounting system.
The CO2 to make the plants, which became part of the poop, part of which became methane, came from the atmosphere to begin with.
Isn't the oil and coal we burn part of the same cycle?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!