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Chicken Feathers May Hold Key To Hydrogen Storage
pitterpatter writes "A researcher trying to find a use for them claims that after being heated enough to carbonize, chicken feathers hold as much hydrogen as carbon nanotubes do. So chicken feather charcoal might solve the storage problem for the new hydrogen economy. One problem down, half a zillion to go."
According to an interview with a researcher or the lead researcher or something like that, it's not as much as carbon nanotubes or other existing solutions, but it's "enough" and it's vastly cheaper. All existing solutions are impossibly expensive, that's the big deal here. Something like 6 billion pounds of chicken feathers are produced as by products of the chicken industry every year with zero practical reuses.
The same interviewee goes on to explain that there are a number of other possible uses of chicken feathers as a high grade material component, in everything from car body pieces to wind mill blades for wind power. I think it's an excellent effort and I hope it bears fruit.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Indeed. The most efficient way to get hydrogen isn't available to home owners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#High-temperature_electrolysis
Storing in a battery is probably more environmentally friendly and is definitely more efficient - but if you want to be truly environmentally friendly, you could just go with an air powered car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_powered_car
Air powered cars have a few big benefits.
1) They can be made 100% recyclable.
2) Air can be compressed anywhere.
You can use the grid, at home, at work. You can run a compressor off solar or wind power. You can put a big compressor at gas stations without any huge retrofitting costs.
Air powered would be the easiest way to go, except that like all vehicles running on alternative energy, you can't get them anywhere.
the best Hydrogen storage is the Hydrocarbon.
What most people don't seem to understand is that the environmental problem with burning hydrocarbons (gasoline, diesel, etc.) *is not* with the act itself. My point being that the principle of the Internal Combustion Engine isn't the problem.
The problem is where the hydrocarbons come from. Right now, the feedstock for hydrocarbon based fuel production is petroleum. That petroleum is happy underground and would stay that way virtually indefinitely *if* we didn't pump it to the surface.
That brings us to the problem: When we burn hydrocarbon fuels based on petroleum, we are adding carbon to the atmosphere that was locked underground. However, *if* we burn hydrocarbon based fuels that are synthetically created using (among other things) recaptured Carbon from the air, then we are *not* adding to the CO2 load of the planet and therefore can focus on more immediate environmental problems.
It's going to happen sooner or later. However much petroleum there is in the ground (20 years or 200), it is for sure and certain that *one* day it will run out. We're eventually going to have no choice but to switch to a hydrogen economy and I've seen *nothing* on the drawing board (even far flung into the future) that matches the energy potential of hydrocarbons.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Feathers are carbohydrates, meaning they are carbon structures with hydrogen and a small portion of oxygen. The Carbonization process cooks off the hydrogen and oxygen, leaving the carbon structure. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form H20, which is certainly exothermic. My guess is that it produces more heat energy that was consumed to bring it up to carbonization temperature in the first place.
So little or no energy is wasted -- unlike as with solar cells that take 5-10 years to generate as much energy as was used to make them.
Physics: learn it, use it, benefit from it. (hint: application of kinetic energy would be a starting point to understanding this)
I don't think it's as simple as that.
I'm no physicist but I would suspect that there is a great deal of difference between firing a frozen chicken and a thawed chicken at something. With enough velocity, of course, the differences in outcome will not be very much. But if you give the chickens progressively less velocity at impact, I think you'd find the frozen chickens still penetrate the glass at some levels of kinetic energy where the thawed chickens would not.
My reasoning for this has to do with differences in how the kinetic energy of the chicken is imparted to the windscreen, both through time as well as the area of impact.
The body of frozen chicken will "give" much less than the body of a thawed chicken, so the windscreen has a much shorter period of time to absorb kinetic energy of the chicken. Also, due to that lack of give, the kinetic energy of the chicken's body will be spread over a larger area of the windscreen.
If I drop a 5 kg bag of laundry on my car's windshield from my roof, it will bounce off the windshield and leave it intact. If I drop a 5 kg pipe wrench from the same height, it will most likely shatter the windshield. It's the same idea. With the bag of laundry, the windshield gets more time and more area to absorb the kinetic energy, with the wrench, not as much. Though maybe if I dropped both from a 10 story building, the windshield might not survive it either way.
This isn't simply a matter of an application of equal amounts of kinetic energy. There are a lot of things going on at the point and time of impact that can alter the outcomes... within a certain range of energies.
Adam and Jamie tackled this one on Mythbusters.
Using the same protocols as the 'official' testing, they found that thawed chickens busted windscreens as effectively as thawed chickens.
Wrong.
They revisited the myth and proved, beyond a doubt, that frozen chickens cause more damage.
To be fair, though, they went over that myth like three times before they finally came up with a test that proved it once and for all.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It's called "impulse". Impulse is how quickly the force is transferred between the objects, which is faster with a solid (ice) chicken than with a thawed one. And then you have the force per area, which is larger with a thawed chicken because it deforms on contact whereas a frozen chicken concentrates almost all the force on a small area.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.