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New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel
overThruster (58843) writes A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'"
The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.
Actually, the furthest along are gasoline engines. 100% of all research funds should go to increasing fuel efficiency.
OK, I'm officially confused.
According to wiki:
So, we're going to generate hydrogen, so we can make ammonia, and then we're going to ... use the ammonia to make hydrogen?
Either I'm completely not understanding my own link, or there's a magic step in there which eludes me.
If you're already efficiently making hydrogen to make ammonia,and you wanted hydrogen for fuel, why not skip the step of making ammonia?
I guess the obvious conclusion is that it's easier and safer to deal with ammonia, but my dad used to manage refrigeration plants, and ammonia isn't something you fool around with either.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If I can't drive from Atlanta to Chicago without multiple hour stopovers, it's no-go. What I think we NEED are electric/gas hybrids; something I can head back and forth to work in solely on plug-in power, yet I can kick a small electric generator on for essentially unlimited range.
Yes, because centrally planning technology development worked so well for Russia.
Ammonia reacts to form hydrogen. Hydrogen reacts in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Electricity drives the electric car. This is electrical storage, just one implemented as an irreversible flow battery rather than a solid rechargeable one.
Catalyst: "a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change."
Yes, metals like palladium and rhodium cost a good chunk of change, but you don't need a lot of them, and you only need them once (per car). You add them in trace amounts to a porous honeycomb-like structure to maximize surface area, and bam, that whole gram of palladium adds $30 to the total cost of your car. Make no mistake, the more ways we have to accomplish a particular reaction, the better, and I consider TFA very cool news... But the cost of the catalyst wouldn't break the bank vs the cost of a new car.
Call me paranoid, but I can tell you a much more realistic reason we don't already have cars running on ammonia - The DEA. I can't buy a goddamned bulk pack of (real, not reformulated) Sudafed without showing two forms of ID, and $Deity help me if I actually need to get more in the same month! On the other side of the meth equation, a convenient source of anhydrous ammonia would make it much easier and safer to manufacture, so no ammonia for you!
Long term, I should think it would be to our advantage to pursue as many different kinds of fuels as we can find.
Because some might be better suited for some applications, and until you have a universal replacement for gasoline, you have no idea of what will be viable.
You're suggesting we decide a winning technology now, and ignore all others. Problem is, we don't yet know what the winning technology is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Whoosh!
Combustion engines have very low efficiency. Electric motors have very efficiency, and also make for a much simpler and lighter car.
There is no money to be made by selling the world something it needs for just pennies.
Um, yeah. Just ask this guy.
no moving parts and you can use an electric motor to power it. an electric motor is 95% effeceient, while even gas turbines are only around 45%
math favors the fuel cell. depending on how light you can build the fuel cell and how small you can build an electric turbine motor, this could work well for aircraft, boats, and cars.
battery vehicles don't work very well for ships and aircraft.
Actually, we should spend a bit more money on increasing traffic control and road design efficiency. Every car gets 0 miles to the gallon unnecessarily stopped at a light.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The reason why the gas companies have power is not because they are magic, but because they sell it so cheaply, yet make a huge profit.
So when you say "damned sure no will will ever allow this to be a legit fuel for cars", you are basically wrong. The proof is that diesel and ethanol additives are also sold as fuel.
If this was cheaper per gallon than gasoline, without any additional problems (i.e. cars still went as fast, no deadly poisons released), then you would be trampled by the rush to convert cars to ammonia.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yeah, because that's a limitless fuel.
Translation: Basement-dwelling pasty Slashdot poster takes time between Mommy bringing down meals to throw rocks at things he doesn't like, thinks he knows what's best, and everyone else is an idiot.
The only match for your limitless ego is your lack of awareness regarding your limitless stupidity.
why not just burn the ammonia?
Actually this is possible. From wikipedia:
Ammonia cannot be easily or efficiently used in existing Otto cycle engines because of its very low octane rating, although with only minor modifications to carburetors/injectors and a drastic reduction in compression ratio, which would require new pistons, a gasoline engine could be made to work exclusively with ammonia, at a low fraction of its power output before conversion and much higher fuel consumption
Taken to extreme and you've got a whole nation committed to Lysenko genetics/socialism or some other bad idea.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It makes perfectly good business sense. If you were an entrepreneur, wouldn't you be very happy to move to such a technology, drastically undercutting the oil companies? Contrary to popular belief, businesses don't generally make killings because they charge a lot, but rather because they don't charge a lot, relative to other alternatives. If you were one of the first firms to enter such a market (assuming the consuming public moves on this new tech) and make a very handsome profit, charging far more than your input costs. New players will eventually enter the market and big down prices, but since you were [one of the] first players, you got to make a killing. That is how economics works. The market rewards the first entrants to a market via profits above and beyond the going rate of return.
Actually, I think the crux of the problem is that you don't understand price theory. Price is not determined by the cost of the inputs. Rather, society determines the price via their actions in purchasing or not purchasing a good (and of course to nearly infinite extents of purchasing vs not purchasing). The more society wants a good, the higher prices will be driven up (all things the same), inducing more competitors to the market who compete for the lion's share, in turn bidding down the price until equilibrium is reached. (Nevermind that equilibrium almost certainly will change before it is ever reached.)
Because charging your electric car that fast would require more than 10x the entire power supplied to your whole house. (Not to mention the cabling...)
Uhm, we're pretty close to that already. About 700 miles give or take. Tesla can do 250 easy, some are pushing 300. So a 1 hr full charge stop (you do have to eat, right?) plus another 30 minute stop (pee break) to 50% charge would get you there. Next year, in the lighter Model X a single 1hr stop might do it.
You'll need a new excuse soon. I suggest Miami to Seattle. People are *constantly* driving that route, so if an electric can't do it, it will never be a success.
Every car gets 0 miles to the gallon unnecessarily stopped at a light.
I'm wondering, instead of using red/green switches at intersections, maybe we can have the cars drive through diffraction plates set up around the intersection. Then the wavefunction of you and car can spread out into the intersection via diffraction and arrive randomly into one of several quantum states (outbound lanes) which head toward your destination. If we made cars and their drivers out of bosons instead of fermions, it might work. Only one fermion can occupy any given quantum state. So with fermionic cars, there's always a small probability of quantum entanglement within the intersection between you and some other guy trying to make a left.
Well, bureaucratic idiocy ignored, there is another small wart on this process.
Catalysts are very sensitive to "poisons" - chemicals that stop their catalytic activity. Sodium amide used as a catalyst has a vulnerability to a potent catalytic poison - that being water. A little moisture in the fuel tank, a little moisture in the fuel lines, and presto. No catalyst.
I'm not saying it's not possible, I just don't know how one would keep that pestilential dihydrogen monoxide carefully excluded from the process. It's cumulative, every tiny scrap of moisture kills off some of the catalyst.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
As long as all drivers keep their eyes closed.
4. Find out "fresh" battery has gone through so many cycles it only has half its capacity left and find yourself stranded just short of the next "filling" station.
Look, all of these technologies have issues... maybe those batteries made from carbon that supposedly don't loose their capacity will end up being practical in a large scale, that would be great, but also, maybe this design will turn out to be a huge boon for the hydrogen car industry, basically solving one of the biggest problem in hydrogen fuel cells.... how to store enough hydrogen safely to have a reasonable rage.
Now I would be curious how the energy density of Ammonia, converted using this process, compares to that of gasoline which is currently pretty much top of the heap for portable energy density. It would also be nice to know how it compares to the current generation of batteries.
Everyone has their own particular chosen winner/looser but that is stupid. Innovation could come from anywhere and right now we need all the irons in the fire that we can get. We can't afford to put all of our sustainability money behind one thing that may or may not turn out to be the best choice in the long run.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Ammonia is very much renewable. The Haber process is well understood and has been running on an industrial scale for over half a century.
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The car CAN be fuel cell based, but TFA was talking about reforming a small amount into hydrogen to form a mixture of hydrogen and ammonia that can fuel an internal combustion engine.
Meanwhile, ammonia is much easier to store in liquid form
How about reducing weight that we all have to drag around with us
So you're suggesting a large portion of the American population get off their fat asses and lose weight so they can increase their vehicles fuel economy?
You might as well ask a starving lion to put down that leg of zebra it's gnawing on.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Most people are familiar with the Ammonia that you buy in a store... but it is not Anhydrous Ammonia... it is diluted in water, and even so, you don't want to take a big whiff of the stuff, it will knock you on your butt. Anhydrous Ammonia is pure Ammonia... It requires hazmat suits to transfer that substance from container to container (fuel pump to fuel tank in a car?). It's possible that you could distribute a more dilute formula to "gas" stations, but the effect would be dropping lots of water on the roads as you used the fuel. Do we have enough fresh water for this? Perhaps. Not to mention that the more dilute you make it, the more of it you will have to cart around per mile. Anyway, it is much more likely to cause accidents than gasoline. Don't believe me? Ask a farmer how much he likes using the stuff...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Well, gasoline engines are the furthest along and they still suck. Trying to make them more efficient is a dead end, that is why hybrids appeared in first place.
Most modern gasoline engines (in cars) no longer have carburetors so technically, they can't suck but instead inject.
Do I really need to haul around a backup camera?
Well, if you remove that plus the equipment it takes to integrate it into the existing display, you've just saved enough weight to bring a burrito with you on your trip. As long as it's not a big burrito. You could save more weight by driving barefoot. Or naked even. And run some laps first to shed water weight.
I really think that if we're to the point where we're worrying about single grams, we've gone too far.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
For the conversion from Ammonia to Hydrogen: Nitrogen.
Ammonia is NH3, so you'd get mostly Hydrogen and a byproduct of 1 nitrogen atom.
Nitrogen is already 78% of the earths atmosphere, and not a greenhouse gas. So it's not bad... at all.
Once you have the hydrogen, you mix it with oxygen and light it. (assuming you don't use it in a fuel cell)
You can literally put hydrogen into a normal combustion engine and it will run on it.
Hydrogen is 3x as energy dense as gasoline. So it works fantastically well. Newer cars with computers would need some modification. But if you're using an old carborated engine it works great.
What comes out the exhaust is water.
I've actually experimented with this. I have a "Rock crawler" (imagine a mini-monster truck) and one thing we're always dealing with is when trying to go up or down extreme angles gasoline engines tend not to work so hot. They like to be level. Hydrogen doesn't care if its upside down. I eventually went with natural gas. Hydrogen is hard to get in remote areas. But you can get a natural gas tank filled just about anywhere. But yea, if I could create it from stored ammonia I'd probably go back to it. The engine ran a lot better on it than natural gas.
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The ammonia in your cleaning bottle is hydrous ammonia, which is a fancy way of saying it is mostly water. Hydrous ammonia is pretty tame stuff. Anhydrous (no water) ammonia, like the kind required for chemical reactions, is nasty nasty stuff. If you breathe the vapors it can cause permanent damage to your lungs. If you get it on your skin, you can easilly get a nasty chemical burn. The vapor is flamable and forms explosive mixtures with air. It reacts violently with a variety of compounds.
Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
And if you removed all the state and federal fuel taxes, gas wouldn't be so expensive (at the pump) either.
Roundabouts are a good solution as you said in rural areas and also in residential neighborhoods. In low traffic situations, they work great to prevent having to stop in most situations. But yes, go to Carmel, IN (north side of Indianapolis). Try to go east or west through the town during rush hour (most traffic going north or south). You can't. Block a roundabout with traffic going one way, and all ways come to a dead stop, probably backing that street up to clog up another roundabout and you get a chain reaction from intersection to intersection.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Your geo metro also accelerates slowly, can't carry much (all 3 square feet of storage space) and get squished in an accident because it's the size of a postage stamp.
Meanwhile, for a little less efficiency, my Honda Civic has pulled trailers across the country (added a hitch), tons of storage room and is relatively safe.
The chances of surviving a real crash in a Metro is slim to none... You go ahead and tell me how that head on crash goes for you WHEN it happens. I know I'm still walking...
I think you miss the original poster's point. Obviously safety standards have improved since the Metro came out. But really, are you thinking that having air bags and crumple zones makes a car less fuel efficient? The reason the Metro gets good mileage is that it is relatively light weight and doesn't have a high horse power engine that allows one to far exceed the design specification of the vehicle.
There is no doubt that a Honda Civic is a good car, but as for efficiency, it is more than a "little less" unless your civic gets around 50 or 60 miles per gallon. When the civic was first introduced to the US in the 70s, it was a very fuel efficient sub compact economy car. Today's Civic, while a wonderful car is not any of those things.
What causes a vehicle to be fuel efficient is aerodynamics and low weight. The engines are more fuel efficient than even a decade ago, but manufactures have used that increased efficiency to build bigger cars instead of burning less oil.
Think of a race car. It's one of the most fuel efficient vehicles made. It squeezes every bit of energy out of the fuel that there is. And yet, it gets lousy mileage (but great HP). What is more efficient in solving real world problems, creating a car that can accelerate quicker without using more fuel than it's predecessor or one that can get from point A to point B on less fuel than it's predecessor. Engineers seem to think it is the former where as scientists say we need the latter.
Myth Busters took this on for a very congested test (also very controlled)
They got somewhere around 180 cars through a traditional 4 way stop, and over 300 through the same space as a roundabout. I was floored it was that great of a difference, they said because at any given time there were multiple cars in the roundabout doing their own thing. (may be off on the numbers, but the roundabout was unbelievably better in their test)
Granted the layout of the roundabout matters a TON, and most I have seen around here are cram a roundabout in a tiny space so you don't REALLY know if the car to your left is leaving the roundabout or continuing...
Anhydrous ammonia is used by meth cooks. The DEA will simply not allow it to become a readily available vehicle fuel.
It is also used in the manufacture of explosives, thus the BATF will never allow it either.
Just the very notion of selling anhydrous ammonia outside of tightly controlled industrial and agricultural marketplaces is a no-starter.
Your software disagrees with reality.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
If your car divides by zero, it's probably a Fiat.
Cars don't have to be as fast as they are today, but thats what people, driven by the automotive press, have decided they want. Today's toyota camry and honda accord both can be bought with engines that approach 300HP and have sub 6 second 0 to 60 times.
40 years ago, that was the realm of sports cars. Now we have that with dime-a-dozen, bake-potato-on-wheels flagship sedans
build a sedan with a 10 second 0 to 60, which used to be quite common, and your car will be universally lambasted as "sluggish".
even the new kia sedona minivan has a 0 to 60 of 7.4 seconds and a quarter mile just over 15 seconds..
I don't know the figures, so I don't know if it's just Americans that aren't used to them, but accidents on roundabouts are much less dangerous. That's a decent trade-off, even if there are more accidents.
Roundabouts are all over major UK highways, they work rather well if you know how to drive.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nonsense. You are dividing, and the result is undefined - there are no remainders in division except in gradeschool arithmetic where decimals are considered too difficult (in real math the concept is known as modulus, and is a conceptually independent operation from division). Basic first-week calculus can usually even tell you what the result would have been if your calculation didn't have a discontinuity in it - just perform the calculation at shorter and shorter intervals from the discontinuity to determine where the value converges from either side.
0/x as x -> 0? 0/1 = 0, 0/0.1=0, 0/0.000001 = 0. Therefore the value at the limit is 0
1/x as x->+0? 1/1 = 1, 1/0.1 = 10, 1/0.0001=10000, and the value at the limit converges to +infinity (or -infinity if you approach -0).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, technically X/0 equals +/-infinity only if X is non-zero. If X is zero then you need to do further analysis of the calculation to determine the relative sizes of the two zeros at the discontinuous point (limit calculus). Depending on the nature of the calculation from which the zeros emerge the limit at the discontinuity zero could converge to an infinity, 0, 42, 7/9, or any other value. And there's no guarantee that there is a well-defined answer at all - for example sin (1/x) oscillates between +/-1 infinitely fast as x approaches zero.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That implies that the the reality is flawed. ;-)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hell, you can even pump several megawatts over standard extension cord wiring with minimal losses, provided you keep the current under 15 amps or so and instead pump the voltage up to hundreds of kilovolts. Of course with that kind of voltage you're going to want some serious insulation, and probably an active system to detect when a firm connection has been made to the load before applying full voltage to prevent massive arcing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
1) becomes irrelevant, the fueling station recharges the battery at it's leisure, and puts it in the queue for the next person once charged.
2) One word: robots. They could pick up your entire car and hurl it across several city blocks to hit a bug on the sidewalk a fraction of a second later if there was a reason to build such a thing.
3) You wouldn't. Virtually all of these sort of systems rest on the assumption that you don't even own the battery, you just borrow/lease it from the people you buy the power from.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Very efficiency. No gas. Much MPG.
I'm a transportation engineer numbnuts I know the difference, I've designed them. Regardless of how the roundabout is supposed to be used, the fact is a vast majority of drivers treat them as stops. I've yet to see a roundabout that operates correctly and consistently in the US. Most of the states have begun to realize it's futile to try to educate US drivers about them because no matter how much information they've spread they still operate at less than 50% capacity because US drivers just don't understand how to use them.
Hell we still have drivers freaking out and driving the wrong way down the street on CFI's and DDI's and those aren't much different than standard intersections. There's a roundabout not more than a couple miles from me that is nothing more than a 4 way stop with sight obstructions that make it perform even worse, not because it's signed that way or even because it's designed or built wrong but because every driver stops at the yield sign for 3 seconds.
I live right next to one of our town's eleven recent-vintage roundabouts, and the only people I see stopping are occasional clueless tourists. My intersection used to be a pretty busy signal serving traffic coming off the Interstate six miles away, with a residential cross street. The roundabout gets traffic through in all directions much more efficiently than the signal did. Bonus: late at night, the constant gunning of engines when the light changed used to disturb us late at night. Now, late-night traffic just glides through and we don't hear a thing.
One word: robots. They could pick up your entire car and hurl it across several city blocks to hit a bug on the sidewalk a fraction of a second later if there was a reason to build such a thing.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Some numbers for the green power electric transportation dreamers:
14 million barrels of petroleum per day of transportation petroleum. Each barrel has 5.8 million BTUs of energy. Multiplying, that is 81.2 million million BTUs. Internal combustion engines are about 25% efficient, so the USA requires energy of "only" 20.3 million million BTUs per day. Since electric motors as used in electric cars are about 90% efficient, that means we require 22.5 million million BTUs per day. But battery charging is also about 90% efficient, so we then need 25 million million BTUs per day. Then, unless we're charging the batteries right at the power plant, we have to figure in the 93% efficiency of the power grid, so we really need 26.9 million million BTUs per day. There are 3413 BTUs per KwH as a conversion factor, so we need 7.88 billion KwH per day. Since there are 24 hours in a day, we need a generating capacity of 328,000 megawatts. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona can generate at a rate of 3810 megawatts. Dividing, we find that we need about 86 new nuclear power generating plants the size of our largest one to power US transportation completely and completely green.
Wind? Biggest wind machine so far is 8 megawatts, so we'd need 41,000 of them, but probably, for a fudge factor for the times that the wind doesn't blow sufficiently for 8 megawatts, we'd probably want maybe 4 times that many, or 164,000 really big wind turbines. There are 3,794,083 square miles in all of the USA so there would be a density of 0.043 wind turbines per square mile, but of course not all areas have wind or can be built (mountains), so maybe we'd get to needing 1 square mile per turbine. Doable, but how much would it cost? Read on internet 1.6 - 2.2 million per megawatt, so the large 8 megawatt turbine would be $17.6 million on the high end, and 164,000 of them would be $2.88 trillion. Build 'em out over 50 years or so and yeah, that's "only" 57.7 billion dollars per year. Chicken feed for a gov't that is already broke, eh? In contrast, the Palo Verde Nuke plant cost $5.9 billion, so 86 of 'em would cost $507.4 billion - lots less than $2.88 trillion for wind.
Solar only produces during the daytime. Not going to try to calc that.
It was a retort against the parents typo. "Electric motors have very efficiency". That's all. Get over yourself.