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Enzymes Make Electricity From Jet Fuel Without Ignition

Posted by samzenpus on from the spreading-the-power dept.

An anonymous reader writes University of Utah engineers say they've developed the first room-temperature fuel cell that uses enzymes to help jet fuel produce electricity without needing to ignite the fuel. These new fuel cells can be used to power portable electronics, off-grid power and sensors. A study of the new cells appears online today in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Catalysis. "The major advance in this research is the ability to use Jet Propellant-8 directly in a fuel cell without having to remove sulfur impurities or operate at very high temperature," says the study's senior author. "This work shows that JP-8 and probably others can be used as fuels for low-temperature fuel cells with the right catalysts."

4 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Efficiency by Argos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Important question: efficiency?

    1. Re:Efficiency by tulcod · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is not how fundamental engineering works.

      What do you think the first solid-state transistor looked like? A neat P-N junction on a silicon wafer, produced by one of those fancy ASML fab machines in Korea? Do you think the first solid-state transistor was capable of speeds anything like what we expect today? Do you think it was "efficient" for any meaning of that word?

      The first solid-state transistor was a piece of plastic jammed into a block of germanium. It was dirty, crooked, difficult to make, and generally a pain in the ass.

      But it was a proof of concept. It took a lot of additional engineering to make it usable in actual electronics. And then a lot more to make it smaller. And then a lot more to make it scalable. And then years and years and years and years of research brought us to what we know today as a transistor.

      But the first transistor was just an impractical oversized proof of concept.

      The research in this article is important. It shows that what was always theoretically an option is actually possible in practice. Scalability, efficiency, effort to produce - none of that matters at this stage. Obviously that would all be interesting next steps, but this shows that the principle works. And that is damn interesting.

    2. Re:Efficiency by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

      When RV-ing, fuel cells (EFOY, VeGA [1]) are already on the market. They may not be powerful enough to run an A/C, but good enough to a few months from a liter or two of fuuel.. This keeps the batteries topped off and allows one to use 12 volt items and 120/240 volt items (with an inverter) without the noise of a generator when dry camping.

      A fuel cell running on diesel would be very useful. It would have more energy per volume than methanol or propane, and would go far in supplementing solar.

      For non-RV uses, having a diesel fuel cell to supplement a battery bank if the solar charging system isn't cutting it would be useful. A good set of batteries, and one can have a circuit in their house just for small electrical items that are always on, such as battery chargers. It also makes for a decent UPS.

      [1]: Ironic that Truma, named after a US president, doesn't sell anything other than a propane gauge on this side of the pond, when they have the absolute best RV furnaces, water heaters (water heaters that will auto-dump their tanks rather than allow the water to burst if the tank is about to freeze), fuel cells, and many other niceties.

  2. Not subject to Carnot efficiency limit by stoploss · · Score: 4, Informative

    This isn't a heat engine; therefore, it isn't subject to the Carnot efficiency limit that is a key reason that internal combustion engines have such a low maximum theoretical efficiency in terms of extracting energy from the fuel.

    Hydrocarbons are actually a great energy store for a vehicle: they are thermally stable/don't discharge over time, it's fast & trivial to "recharge" the energy store, and hydrocarbons have orders of magnitude more energy per mass than any form of battery, which improves vehicle efficiency by reducing the mass that has to be lugged around. However, the internal combustion engine is a wastefully inefficient, complicated machine. Ideally, we could get the best of both worlds with a hydrocarbon fuel cell that efficiently produces electricity to drive electric motors for a vehicle. There are other technologies that could potentially accomplish this, such as the solid oxide fuel cell.

    Don't conflate the energy store (hydrocarbons) with the stored energy (e.g. fossil fuels). There is no reason we cannot create hydrocarbons at will using various approaches. Biodiesel from algae is one example as well as "reverse combustion" via more industrial processes (e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process). Some catalytic processes have been created that use solar power to create hydrocarbons.

    Personally, I prefer the idea of large nuclear plants creating hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2. As a bonus, we would get to keep our existing petroleum distribution infrastructure while our vehicle fleet becomes carbon neutral. Backwards-compatible carbon neutrality FTW?