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Diamonds Are a Fuel Cell's Best Friend
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Davis have used nanocrystals made of diamond-like cubic zirconia to develop cooler fuel cells. Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C. This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C. Obviously, this could lead to a widespread use of fuel cells, which could become a realistic alternative power source for vehicles. The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear."
Nowhere in TFA were diamonds mentioned. As numerous posts have already pointed out, cubic zirconia is not diamond-like, it's a cheap diamond substitute. The properties of diamonds have nothing to do with the technology in this article. So why was that added to the summary of an article that doesn't mention it?!?
Slashdot is a meta-news meta-blog site so article summaries are like a game of telephone. A scientist publishes a paper, it is boiled-down for a journalist, the journalist distills that into an article, a blogger summarizes the article, and the article is summarized to Slashdot. Net result: "I found a way to fabricate ziconium oxide at 15nm" becomes "Fuel cells can now become widespread, thanks to diamonds!"
1. No one is saying hydrogen is a fuel. The idea is that you manufacture hydrogen using non-CO2 emmiting technology (nuclear, solar, wind, "clean coal" if that isn't just pure hype), and the hydrogen is essentially a "battery" (for lack of a better term) that isn't totally destructive to the enviornment like current batteries.
2. Unless you plan you coat your fuel tank with powdered aluminum and iron oxide, and then connect that to some sort of static electricity igniter, you aren't going to have a hindenburg style disaster. I mean, geez, you know that cars are full of highly flamable liquids, right now, right? It is kind of like last century when some people chose to stick with gas lighting in their homes because they thought electricity might be a fire hazard.
... and this is contradictory how exactly? Just because it's hot does not mean it is inefficient. Indeed, high-temperature FCs have the highest efficiencies, ranging up to 70% with combined cycles.
They already do. Have been for decades. See PEM fuel cells. The point is that there are bunches of possible FC designs around, TFA probably meant the SOFCs, the only ones to reach 1000 degrees.
As a fuel-cell researcher (yes I have a damn PhD in the field) I am very skeptical of anything surfacing on news releases and containing the "patent" word—It just makes my bullshit detector go crazy.
This technology is still very experimental, there is no working prototype, and if I had a penny for every new fuel-cell design that appeared any year I would have Bill Gates cleaning my toilet with his tongue. Besides, the article is quite badly written: it confuses high-temperature SOFC, assumed when the high temperature range is given, with low-temperature FCs that need platinum, which SOFCs do not need at all. It's like confusing an internal-combustion engine with a steam engine.
I am not saying it is complete vaporware, but it certainly seems overblown. People find new ways to design FCs and their components all the time.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Hint: an engagement gift should have a clear dollar value, and be something that your significant other wants. If she wants a ring, get her a ring -- but don't forget to have a "how do you feel about engagement gifts" conversation first. Maybe she'd be happy with a $200 ring and a new computer, new car, or just a $4000 vacation somewhere.
And not bathed in blood of slave labor. Never forget that advantage.
Not a typewriter
1. Hydrogen's less dangerous than the gasoline we already use
2. Recharge times don't matter if you have a standard tank form and run your system like propane tank exchanges.
3. The price is rapidly dropping from $6 gge when GWB came in office to around $4 today and dropping fast. It's projected to drop under $3 gge in 2010 at which point you're within the realm of commercial practicality. 2010 is not that far off.
4. H2 is created by lots of different creation pathways. Some are very clean while others are fairly dirty. You can change your microbe mix in a water treatment plant to optimize for hydrogen production, for instance, and use the hydrogen to help power the plant.
5. Actually, we do have such an industry, it would just need to be scaled up to handle a mass changeover. But a thin infrastructure with local production of hydrogen in government pumps on interstates would allow people to travel across the country with a hydrogen car and would be buildable for well under $100M. That would let people start creating demand for more pumps and then the market could take over.
6. Since you can make hydrogen from just about anything, I think that centralized production is likely to be much less important in a hydrogen world than it is in a petrochem world.
7. What happens to the H2 tanks is exactly what happens to the gasoline tanks today. Explosions happen. Leaking hydrogen is less of a hazard than leaking gasoline not least of which because hydrogen is very light and will tend to float up pretty quickly, dispersing to harmeless concentrations very fast.
8. Huge tanks are just nonsense. There are companies that have built normal sized tanks that can hold enough hydrogen to go 300 miles. Right now it's a question of getting the price down to the point where it's practical.
9. Fine, name one practical alternative. The key bit about hydrogen is that it serves wonderfully as a middleware energy storage mechanism. Everything else either won't scale, won't work, or is likely not dropping in price fast enough to make it in time.
10. H2 doesn't power the engines in fuel cell cars, electricity does. Batteries aren't getting better fast enough to have electric cars. hydrogen fuel cells get the juice to the electromotors (which I do trust a grease monkey to maintain) and are likely going to start showing up in vehicles in the next 5 years (GM says 2011 which means they're already gearing up car designs today).
Yeah, you thought up 10 reasons why it won't work. They just have the disadvantage of being bogus, every one.
Oh Christ. It's not a conspiracy, it happened. Whether De Beers were fools for pursuing that course in the first place is something I never addressed. That's one strawman.
I don't know what kind of screwed up women you hang out with, but my wife, the women in my family, and my female friends do not shop into debt. You come across as severely misogynistic and ill informed. Women do not like surprises that denigrate their role as a potential partner. They like to be consulted about major decisions. They do not like being treated as unintelligent objects to be showered with pretty baubles, as you seem to think.
Let me quote your post, as you appear incapable of remembering the insults you hurl at others, "Let me guess: next you're going to tell me that half of all voters are disenfranchised because election poll records show that only half as many people voted, as told survey takers they were going to vote." That is a straw man, and deliberately worded as an insult.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, what about people who drive cars running on compressed natural gas? (you know, the ones that have the sticker with a diamond with 'CNG' in it) People eventually get over their distrust for these things and use them. There's plenty of them, just look around you. Aren't you afraid of having an accident with one of those?
Have EVDO, will travel.
IIRC the clean coal initiative in some circles relates to the gassified coal process which for a centralized power plant means that it is quite possible to sequester the carbon emmissions, as well as others like sulfur. They even built a prototype in fla (they being a fla power company) as proof of concept. It irks me that every time I read about gassified coal lately it is in relation to a diesel fuel to be used in cars . . . a complete mis-use of the technology. Why is it that almost every energy technology being developed is immediately applied to the auto even when most if not all of them are most appropriate for large scale power generation? For the time being I feel like we're better off keeping the car on gas and replacing our old coal power plant with newer coal and other "green" and renewable technologies. Once that is switched than the electric car becomes a no-brainer.
1 - Liquid is only a little over twice as dense (heh, "only") and definitely not worth the added issues.
2 - High-pressure gas storage tanks, though, are working now (in prototype form, but still) and fairly safe. (It's not like gasoline is safe. Ethanol isn't very happy either, although it's not inherently bad.)
3 - Getting cheaper all the time.
4 - Depends on how you make it.
5,6,7 - Produce hydrogen on-demand. Several technologies exist. Also several storage technologies exist that make this a non-issue.
8 - Or be shorter-range.
9 - Agreed.
10 - H2 powered combustion engine = normal engine with vastly higher compression. Ford did it with high-compression pistons and an electric supercharger (not an e-ram, something real, they exist, easy to look them up.) Alternatively, fuel cell and electric motor, which is a self-diagnosing system with large, replacable components. So this is not an issue at all. Alternatives include turbines, which have few moving parts and thus will rarely need any unusual service, rotary engines, steam, etc. All are pretty well-known. None are that unusual (well, some of them are today.)
Why are electrics bad? :)
1 - Environmental impact from battery production, which is very high in the case of batteries using significant quantities of heavy metals. Also many batteries are not recycled. If only 1% of the batteries are not recycled, then moving to all electric cars would represent an awful lot of very nasty material that isn't where it needs to be for humans and other species we care about to be happy.
2 - Theoretical energy density of chemical batteries is lower than liquid fuels in use today. This results in many of the same problems as hydrogen in terms of space; it also increases weight (in spite of disposing of the ICE!)
3 - Today, environmental impact from adding electric cars is greater than using biofuels (if we didn't make them from crops which make no sense as feedstocks.)
4 - Cars are quiet and people don't hear them coming
I'm lazy so that's all I can think of immediately.
Why is ethanol bad?
1 - Currently made from ridiculous feedstocks, esp. corn - but any topsoil-based feedstock use is basically wrongheaded barring taking steps to mitigate damage thereof. Example, when plants grow in nature the parts that aren't eaten by someone fall on the ground and become mulch. We tend to burn that stuff, returning all of the CO2 into the air at once and depleting the soil. We then use chemical fertilizers in many cases (esp. factory farming) which damages the soil.
And that's about it :) Actually the energy return for ethanol so far is just piss-poor compared to biodiesel, which can be made from algae, which can be grown in fresh or salt water. The algaes do tend to produce both carbohydrates and oils, however, so if you could efficiently separate them (perhaps with that cyclone machine thingy? I can never find a URL for that any more and I'm on a modem, so if anyone else has a link handy, please comment) you could ostensibly use the stuff to produce a plethora of biofuels. It also makes nice fertilizer. So my argument basically is that we should be using biodiesel from algae. I'd like to see turbine series plugin hybrids which can run on multiple fuels. The problems with the batteries continue to exist, but they're potentially worth it. Ultimately, if you can come up with a clean or even environmentally beneficial system for producing the fuels, and I can make an argument for algal biodiesel fitting that description, then a series hybrid with only minimal batteries may ultimately be a cleaner system than an electric or an etoh hybrid. It does require the use of a fuel cell that does not involve a great deal of environmental impact in its production, or a very efficient engine (again, I propose the use of a turbine) coupled to a highly efficient generator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't understand people. Make something cheap, it simply gets used more. If gas dropped in price tomorrow to half it's current value, in a few years you'd be lucky if cars were getting 15mpg. People literally consume until it hurts.
Ok, imagine a new power source appears. Very cheap, very efficient. GM and Ford switch their engines to use it. What happens to the price of gas? It drops until it's as cheap or cheaper than the new source and as i said, car engines will get bigger, more powerful and thirstier to compensate. No conspiracy necessary, just producers giving people what they want.
Also. Hydrogen fuel cells are a red herring. Ask someone where the hydrogen is coming from, and how efficient the production is. Never mind the problems of distribution and storage.
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