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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."
Chicken McNuggets.
Hmmm...Carbonized chickens and hydrogen. There has to be a joke in there somewhere about chickens being classified as munitions...
My blog
We can finally power our homes with chicken.
*pulls up to full service Hydrogen fueling station*
"Just put three Leghorns in the tank."
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
How much more energy does it take to turn a chicken feather into a "hydrogen storage unit" than can be stored in the feather anyway?
Jenny-mae, I tole you not to let Billy-Bob alone with the chickens and the lighter fluid!
But Mary-Sue, Billy-Bob's up and solved the Hydrogen Nanostorage Problem! He saved the world! Solved global warming! Ther gonna give him a NOBEL!
So? I'm still makin myself scarce when Pa starts askin what happened to those Chickens!
This is clucking good news!
Hydrogen will burn just fine in a conventional internal combustion engine. The modifications to a modern gasoline-powered engine to make it run on hydrogen are essentially the same as those to make it run off compressed natural gas. I’m sure many of you have noticed fleet vehicles with a CNG sticker on them; though not widespread, the conversion isn’t exactly uncommon, either.
There are three main problems with converting to hydrogen. First, though hydrogen has much more energy density per unit of mass than gasoline, it has much less energy density per unit of volume in any of the ways it’s currently practically available. Second, for similar reasons, getting a sufficient density of fuel / air mixture to the pistons is a bit of a challenge and generally requires turbocharging, pressurized fuel lines, etc. (Or, you can live with an underpowered vehicle.) The last problem, of course, is producing hydrogen.
If the claims of TFA are accurate, then we may actually be on the verge of solving all three problems.
If we’ll soon see affordable high-capacity tanks, that solves the first problem. The second can be dealt with by making use of many of the high-performance tricks we’re already familiar with.
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water. If you’ve got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen. While we’ll never see cars powered in “real time” by the sun, it’s quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you’ll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
Put all these pieces together, and in a few years or so real solar-powered cars may be as common as home-converted home-brewed biodiesel cars are today.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
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
Since the chicken feathers have only to be carbonized once, and can repeatedly act as hydrogen storage... your question is pointless.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, they started out using horse feathers, once they figured out how to get down off of one.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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The idea those sound funny, and i've been laughing at a lot of the comments here, but chicken feathers are just waste and nearly free, so what could be cheaper to use for a hydrogen tank?
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Fuel Cell Feed | Electric Vehicle Feed @ Feed Distiller
I wouldn't say 'about a zillion to go.' I would say one big problem to go. That problem is platinum. We simply have not been able to eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells to extract the electricity from the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Platinum is a huge factor in the cost of the fuel cell and the larger problem is that we simply don't have the amount of it necessary to convert all of the vehicles of the world. I spent a few weeks at Los Alamos with a research group that had been given a hefty grant for finding a solution and all they were doing was shrugging their shoulders at it. It seems nearly hopeless.
The day we find a solution to this problem is, I believe, the day that fuel cells become viable for everyday transportation. I'll be the first in line to swap my motorcycle for a fuel cell powered version because the only problem with fuel cells is their cost per kilowatt. Currently it costs roughly $73 per kilowatt for a fuel cell (source). This is down from $1,000 in 2002. This means that we've come incredibly far, and we only have one problem to overcome.
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Is that a Troll, Offtopic, Informative, or Funny?
if 30% of the people who read it think the FP is a troll, then its a troll
so don't feed it plz.
O.o
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!"
already a thriving industry mining bat shit (guano) for fertilizer and explosives
He didn't mean to say thawed chickens twice. I think he meant to say that thawed chickens busted windscreens as well as thawed roosters.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water.
Basic electrolysis is pretty lossy up-front. It makes batteries look *good*. (41% efficient for systems running at 100 celsius. 64% for 850 celsuis. Not sure that's suitable for consumer equipment!)
If you've got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen.
It's electrolyze, not analyze. Also, widely manufactured photovoltaics are still expensive.
While we'll never see cars powered in "real time" by the sun, it's quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you'll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
I think the photovoltaics you'd need to recharge a car in a couple of days are going to be expensive. Let's say your family drives one half hour a day. This is pretty reasonable. A 15 minute commute during the weekdays and some chores on the weekend. To get yourself a reasonable stack of Thundersky Lithium Ion Phosphate batteries, you'd need to buy something like 30 of them, which is the size of the stack for Kearon's electric Ford Capri. This gets the stack up to 96 volts and can supposedly push the Capri 90 km or about 55 miles. It's also 8640 watt-hours. But remember, your elecrolysis is only 41% efficient, which means you have to produce 21073 watt-hours. There's going to be about 5 hours of peak sunlight per day, so let's just say the two days recharging is equivalent to 15 peak hours. This works out to about 1400 watts of solar panels. That's about $10,000 of new solar panels for one 55 mile charge completed in two days. We need about 210 miles range for the 30 minutes of driving a day. For that, you'd need something like $35,000 of solar panels.
So our back of the envelope calcs, with an optimistically small car and very modest driving distances with an unreasonable assumption of EV like efficiency, still gives us a pretty hurtful dollar figure. And this is just the solar panels. The electrolyzer is going to cost money as well. However, if you take the solar cells out of the equation, this starts to look good for us. Why? Because much of the cost of an electric vehicle is in the batteries. If we can electrolyze and burn our own hydrogen from a tank that actually fits in a car, we can still come out ahead, assuming the storage systems don't wear out.
http://www.evcapri.com/
That's your argument against hydrogen fuel cells as an energy source? That, since the hydrogen fuel cell was discovered in 1839 it is obviously past any chance of improvement? In that case, we should have given up on fuel oils a long time ago. I mean, oil wells were dug in about 347 by the Chinese and it took till 1847 before someone successfully distilled crude into lantern oil. And EROEI? Complete bullshit metric for the situation. Yes, it is a great guide to the feasibility of a system. But we know that the EROEI for oil is going to go up, and possibly soon.
The point of portable hydrogen fuel cells is not to convert every home in the world into it's own hydrogen production station. At the moment, that would have a really horrid energy return because of the current inefficiencies in solar panels. One of the goals is to replace the internal combustion engine because we know that, at some arguable point in the future, we will not be able to get oil cheaply any more. If we move the oil demand from the end users, where the engine is not all that damn efficient any ways, to the large power plants where the scale of the operations allows it to be used more efficiently than we have just bought time to continue finding a replacement source for oil
Since you didn't feel like bringing facts to the party, allow me to do that for you. The average car requires around 20 to 200 kW to operate according to this physics book. Let's start at the low end, since the same site also says that a typical automobile only requires about 15kW to maintain a speed of 50 miles per hour. So, a 20kW engine would get a car slowly up to speed. How much would that engine cost at the absurdly high price of 73$ per kilowatt? 1460 bucks. And, a quick google search puts the price of a rebuilt combustion engine right in the same price range. Now, it would result in a slower accelerating vehicle, but that is tolerable for a technology that is still in it's relative infancy. After all, the model T's engine only produced around 15 kW. And that was, what, 86 years after the first internal combustion engine was made in 1823. How dare we push technology forwards, using concepts that were discovered decades ago. How could we ever think those technologies would mature.
Now, before you think me all snark and no thought, I offer you this. I'll retract all of my statements if you can respond with facts, and without trite statements like "The so-called hydrogen economy is a lie." Of course the "so-called hydrogen economy" is a lie, that's why it's the "so-called" one. No more priming statements like "true believers", and then we'll talk.
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.
How about if they ban First Posts from AC users...
Until someone logged in has posted something - no AC's
And if logged in users post "First post" nonsense - ban them.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
Would probably only create a competition for "Second post".
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
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)
Adam and Jamie revisited that one after they found that the windshield they used wasn't rated for bird strikes. After the revisit, they did prove that thawed chickens did not penetrate as far as frozen ones. See episode 14 from the 2004 season.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Their surface areas per unit mass (smaller than 1,000 m^2/g) are not too impressive (since storage is done by physisorption on the surface). This will not produce sufficient adsorption. Activated carbon from corn-cobs appear to offer more promise (migger than 3,000 m^2/g) and are also quite cheap. See, for example from my home state: http://www.physorg.com/news162195986.html
"He experimented for years with various ways to use feathers and eventually wondered if they might store hydrogen."
Now did the professor just wake one one day and say "Aha! I know how to solve the energy crisis! Chicken feathers!"? It seems to be very original thinking.
PETA has only ever said one thing that I agree with: When they wanted Ben & Jerry's to switch to human breast milk they said 'The breast is the best'. However, unlike PETA, I prefer the packaging to the contents...
This is the same PETA that complained about President Obama killing a fly! What kind of message would it send to Kim Il Jong and Osama Bin Laden and the rest of the worlds baddies if the President had to get his fly trap to humanely catch and release the fly instead of swatting the little bugger...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
D'oh!
Should have been
thawed chickens busted the windscreens as effecively as frozen chickens.
Good catch, and thanks for pointing out the fowl up!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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.
I recall that they revisited the myth couple times and on the last time they did find a difference of penetrating power between thawed and frozen chickens.
- Raynet --> .
Married?
We get to piss off the vegans, environmentalists, and anti-environmentalists, all at the same time!
This is fucking BRILLIANT!
Noh, they repeated the experiment until they didn't make any mistakes, eg. in the first episode they used windscreen that wasn't rated to be bird strike resistant.
- Raynet --> .
I said 8 meters, Einstein.
I think that all your past head trauma may have affected you more than you realize.
If this is what they teach you in physics then I'm amazed your country has any engineers. It's not just a question of kinetic energy, it's a question of impulse and of elasticity. A frozen chicken is an (almost) inelastic object. A defrosted chicken is not. When a defrosted chicken hits an object, the chicken deforms on impact. The impulse is transferred over the time it takes for the chicken to deform. A frozen chicken will also deform very slightly, but it's almost instantaneous and so the energy will be transferred in a much shorter time. If the frozen chicken deforms for one millisecond and the non-frozen one deforms for two milliseconds then the amount of energy that the windscreen needs to be able to dissipate per unit time is half as much.
There's a simple way you can demonstrate this. First, punch a foam bag as hard as you can. Then punch a concrete wall equally hard. The foam bag deforms as you hit it, while the concrete wall does not. In both cases, you are transferring the same amount of kinetic energy, dissipating it as heat and sound through your arm and the surface, but one of these will hurt a lot more than the other.
Oh, and when you are so obviously wrong that a trivial experiment can demonstrate it, I suggest you be a little less patronising.
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