My chemistry professor let me come in and do experiments with lye, lead, zinc, copper, and some other stuff for fun. The end result was a battery pack that powered a toy train for a few minutes.
Zero energy use while standing still from the engine. Sure energy is lost by the boiler and from the pipes, but not in needlessly moving the piston(s).
Zero pollution? Coal burning electricity plants have filter stacks on their chimneys that cost many millions, because burning coal is bloody dirty. Biomass can be even worse (if it's wet).
That's why steam cars burned oils, like kerosene. My steam system would work like this:
1. Grow algae using waste water
2. Crush it
3. Put algae oil in car
4. Gasify the non-oil parts of the algae to heat and power house (with steam)
5. Put ashes back into algae tanks
However, steam is 40% despite the lower temperatures. You can basically burn stuff at 100 C to get efficiencies that diesel engines get. So you don't need tons of NOx to get high efficiency. Catalytic converters are expensive, subject to obnoxious regulations, and full of rare materials.
Yes, that's a mild hybrid. I should have said that the its not just idling but also lower speed power, which is why the prius is so efficient. I think the prius drive train is better than the insight's, but since the insight is so small and light it gets better MPG. In fact, some modders put a VTEC civic engine in the insight and got 48 mpg. The modern insight and the CR-Z all have the same IMA mild hybrid system.
Actually a steam engine has two additional advantages. One is that it is essentially a hybrid for free. If a computer system (either carbon or silicon based) controlled the rate of fuel flow, then the engine could end up not using any energy while idling, which is the main benefit of a hybrid. No expensive batteries to wear out, just some code. The second is that the car is clean in terms of particulate, NOx, and hydrocarbon emissions. AFAIK steam car from 1915 meets 2025 California emissions standards.
Nah, it won't be useful outside of the lab. Those muons just decay too fast. This is very obnoxious, because muons catalyze fusion - they tighten up the nucleous, so it's easier for another atom to get in and fuse. If they lasted a bit longer (say 2x or 3x), then muon catalyzed fusion would be a practical energy source.
Add a hydrogen tank to your car and just introduce H2 into the air intake. Simple, low tech. It's a suplement to traditional fossil fuels, not a replacement. Run out of H2? The car just continues on gasoline.
That's an illegal engine mod if it was made after 1975. $100,000 in EPA certification costs are coming your way if it was made after 1975.
Adding H2 to a conventional car would be really cheap, but the problem is always the tanks. Hydrogen is PITA and the tanks are huge and expensive. Plus, you'll need a lot of power - likely 4-5 times as much as for an electric car, so it offsets the costs. Looking at the near term "no breakthrough" options, it looks like a car powered by batteries and biodiesel generators is a winner.
Happening here as well. May have figured it out - my nickname is quite long compared to the other menu items on the left nav bar - "black gold alchemist" is a lot longer than the than the second longest - "book reviews". I wonder if only those with long nicks are seeing this bug?
The typical chemical battery used in hybrids have very poor efficiency. It stores only 50% of the energy given and releases only half of the stored energy
Nope. Lithium-ion is around 90+ percent efficient round trip. See the note in the wiki article. Lead acid is around 70% round trip. Molten sodium is a very old technology that is actually quite safe, but has durability and power density problems.
Flywheels are great, but they're really scary. Flywheel hybrid research was mostly stopped when a wheel blew up and killed a technician at Chrysler. The problem with compressed air is that their is heating of the air during compression and cooling during expansion. If that heat does not stay in the air, there is efficiency loss.
What we need is really electricity priced the way cell phone minutes are sold. Peak hour, off peak and night rates. Then there will be an incentive for people to buy these things to store cheap electricity at night and use it in the day and reduce the grid load on hot summer days.
There already is for large industrial customers. The smart grid would bring that to homes. One of the consequences is negative electricity prices due to excess wind power. Even so, I did some bath that showed you could expect to make around 0.1 and 0.2 dollars per kWh of capacity per day. That's around 30-70 dollars a year per kWh. The cheapest batteries I know of are around 50-60 dollars per kWh and will be toast before they pay for themselves.
If your doctor tells you that you have lung cancer and need surgery, only an idiot would focus on the fact that your doctor smokes and is a hypocrite, and use that as an excuse to keep smoking and not get the scary and painful surgery.
Wrong analogy. The analogy is that the doctor tells you not to smoke (in a condescending and moralizing way) so you don't get lung cancer, and then goes outside and smokes.
Your post is at best intellectual fraud and at worst will actually harm people.
It's not fraud because I don't stand to make any money. I should have stated that I am not a doctor or medical professional, and will do so in any further post about the matter.
1) Your assertion that this is a problem for bio engineers and scientists implies that until then we do nothing. We simply sit on our hands and cheer on the people in this situation who have control. The scientists. In one fell swoop you turn an entire demographic into powerless victims
Better than turning them into an evil, piggish group to be hated. Some are definitely powerless victims. Some may be able to escape. It won't be easy, and technology will solve the problem long before to social change people get off their asses.
3)At one point you compare fidgeting to actual organized sport.
That's the point of number 1. Think about a football game for a minute. Most of the time the players are standing still (while the clock is stopped, etc.) or on the bench. Now watch children run around. Which one do you think is more active?
4) Because you don't really exercise but aren't really obese doesn't mean you are healthy, not at all... so you have managed to achieve skinny and unfit. How novel for you. The benefits of exercise have been proven thousands of times in thousands of studies. As have the benefits of eating well, there is a more balanced brain chemistry, nicer skin tone, better memory, ad infinitum
It depends on how you define healthy. I define healthy as feeling good. If skinny and unfit = feeling good, then it is healthy. Eating well (whatever that means) could mean that you have more of those "ad infinitium" items. I don't care about my skin tone, or my brain chemistry (whatever that means), and my memory is fine. So I don't need to change.
5)To insinuate that parents forcing their children to eat a plate of food has caused the absolutely staggering rise in childhood obesity is akin to claiming that that leaving your freezer open will cure global warming.
Here's the article. I was wrong about it. But I think it should be studied.
6) Diet and exercise is not akin to bleeding with leeches, it is the start of a healthy lifestyle and just might save someones child's life. To counsel against it is the very heart of arrogance and indifference. It may not "save" a child's life but it sure might give them a life worth living.
First, it may or may not be akin. My unhealthy lifestyle is fine for me, and most healthy lifestyles to me are not a life worth living.
7)At another point in this bomb you compare obesity and stomach ulcers, bravely showing a lack of understanding between both cause and effect and physiology.
I never, ever, attempted to compared stomach ulcers and obesity. What I attempted to compare was people's thinking about stomach ulcers and obesity.
Simple result. Obesity = Input Food - Output Exercise. It does not matter if you eat only Cheetos and Coke, or you eat organic food, if you exercise 400 minutes a day or 0. What matters is that you have equal amounts. You naturally have circuits that cause you to eat the right amount and to exercise the right amount. The problem is that parents force their children to eat whole plates of food at specified times, so they get more energy than they need. Next, parents and schools don't let them run around and fidget enough, so they don't get enough exercise. My parents, being wonderful that they are, did not do either. The result is that I eat maybe half as much as the average American, don't really exercise, but am not obese. I exercise not on a schedule, but when my body says so. I eat when I hungry - so I go to dinner at some random time, eat lunch randomly, snack, etc. A lot of energy is used to make food, and because I eat less, I'm green as a result;).
Diet and exercise is like bleeding with leeches. Just today, I heard that a program was in place for diet and exercise to mitigate neuropathy, and virtually everything under the sun. Diet and exercise won't cure obesity, like it won't cure stomach ulcers, which are now known bacterial. The problem with diet and exercise is that if it fails, well obviously the answer is just more diet and exercise. Plus, it allows one to blame the patient if it fails, and to create a whole subculture of people who hate and discriminate against sick people. The fix for obesity will be to find a pill or other mod that lowers peoples' overfeeding tolerance. Then obesity will be gone for good. Or maybe we can just implant a fuel cell to eat up all the excess blood sugar. Either way, it's in the hands of bioengineers and scientists, not P.E teachers and the First Lady.
Sundrop, AFAIK, is doing a solar-assisted biomass to liquids program. What they appear to be doing is gasification with:
CxHyOz + H2O -> CO2 + CO + H2O + H2
Instead of:
CxHyOz + O2 -> CO2 + CO + H2O + H2
So it's not thermochemical - it's biomass to liquids. But it's a heck of a lot more efficient than say, corn ethanol.
Disclaimer: I work on this professionally, so I have a vested interest.
Cool. I'm a highschool student with a chemistry interest. Thermochemical engines were a subject I dug into a while back. I wrote a program using Gibbs free energy data from NIST to automatically balance and find the equilibrium constant of the reactions. I used this program to try to predict the outcomes of various reactions for cycle construction. I looked through the data and I found the following cycles to be interesting:
Fe2O3/Fe3O4
Sodium-manganese
Gaz de France (will explain)
Heat rechargeable batteries (will explain)
The Gaz de France (see slide show slide 26) runs as follows:
1. K2O2(l) + H2O(g) -> 2KOH(l) + O2(g) at 100 C
2. 2KOH(l) + 2K(g) -> 2K2O(l) + H2(g) at 725 C
3. 2K2O(l) -> 2K(g) + K2O2(l) at 850 C
Yes. That's potassium. All liquids and gases. No gas-gas separation. If this could really work, I'm sure there's a modification to it to produce elemental potassium. In that case, you can reduce mostly anything.
The idea with heat rechargeable batteries was as follows - using tin and iron as an example:
1. Fe + H2O + SnO -> Fe(OH)2 + Sn (aqueous battery - produces electrical current)
2. Sn + H2O -> SnO + H2 (corrosion of the tin - likely with heat)
3. Fe(OH)2 + H2 -> Fe + 2H2O
So it is an electrochemical heat engine. I know tin would likely make life more difficult by forming SnO2 but I left this out to illustrate the way the cycle works. You need two metals, call them A and B. A has to have as negative an electrode potential as possible but still be reducible by hydrogen. Iron fits the bill. Metal B has got to have as positive an electrode potential as possible but still be able to hydrolyze. Tin fits the bill. Copper would be better, but as far as I know, the reaction of copper with water to form hydrogen just does not proceed.
That said, I'm excited that if it's getting in the news, new or not, because it improves my odds of getting funding to use that tech.
Good. This tech needs a heck of a lot more funding. It's basically ignored - you read the news, you hear about EV's, fuel cells, solar panels, etc. But you almost never hear about thermochemical engines. The way I think about it, a solar panel is like a Ferrari. It's expensive and fun, but not a great way to cross Africa. A thermochemical engine is like a Toyota Landcruiser. It's durable, it's cheap, and it gets the job done. Have you heard of anyone getting VC funding for this thermochemical stuff?
What on earth are you talking about? The process of thermochemical reduction is going to be:...
I understand you're reactions, but I'm giving the basic chemical equations, so I don't have O* on the surface, I have Ce2O3 + 1/2O <->2CeO2. I have the H2 and CO listed so that I don't repeat the reactions.
You have this thing going through methanol? Huh? These are all going to decrease your overall yield.
I have it going through methanol, because methanol synthesis and methanol to gasoline are (at least relatively) proven processes AFAIK. The claimed 50-60 percent is the maximum theoretical efficiency. I believe I've read a paper with 20% practical solar->hydrogen efficiency with zinczinc oxide. Maybe 20% is more reasonable.
Here's just a description of the reactions and why you want CO and gasoline. You want gasoline as the end product because gas is our infrastructure. You don't want methane, alcohol, or some other fuel, because conversion of vehicles to such fuels is virtually impossible with EPA regulations. Instead you want normal (though high octane) gasoline fuel.
What you get with this system is overall:
CO2 + H2O + heat -> gasoline + O2
The first step is to reduce CO2 and H2O:
Ce2O3 + CO2 -> 2CeO2 + CO (at low temperature)
Ce2O3 + H2O -> 2CeO2 + H2 (at low temperature)
4CeO2 + heat -> 2Ce2O3 + O2 (high temperature)
Next, it you don't have the right mixture of CO2 to H2O, you can do the following:
CO2 + H2 + heat <-> CO + H2O
Next, you create methanol:
CO + 2H2 -> H3COH
Finally, you create gasoline via the methanol to gasoline process:
H3COH -> gasoline + H2O
Now, where do you get the CO2? From CO2 traps, like soda lime:
CO2 + Mg(OH)2 -> MgCO3 + H2O (in alkaline solution)
MgCO3 + heat -> MgO + CO2 (heat)
You could power this CO2 trapper off of waste heat from the engine. This system could be up to 50-60 percent efficient at converting solar energy into gasoline. This is a vast improvement of biofuels, which are often less than 1% efficient. Gasoline engines are only 10% efficient, so the scheme is less efficient than electric cars + solar panels. However, the hydrogen and CO (especially) could be used as reducing agents to reduce metals such as iron and zinc. These metals would then be burned in metal-air fuel cells to provide power on demand. You also need hydrogen to produce ammonia and other industrial chemicals.
All those cycles you've mentioned involve nasty chemicals, non-trivial separation or both. For example, one step in the sulfur iodine cycle is the conversion of sulfuric acid into its components:
H2SO4 -> H2O + SO2 + 1/2O2
The problem is that all these components are gasses, and they have to be separated as perfectly as possible (we don't want SOx in the air). So, as a result, a lot of expensive components are needed. With the sodium manganese, iron, and cerium cycles, you simply have to pump gasses away from the solids. The problem that occurs in these cycles is that the solids are powdered, and as they cycle through the system, the grains of the powder fuse together, reducing surface area, and thus reaction rate. Interestingly, this same process occurs in rechargeable batteries, and leads to their failure. Maybe robots can grind up the solids and increase their surface area?
In addition, in the sulfur iodine cycle, you've got SOx and I2 gases on the lose at high temperature. This can corrode the containers of the system.
My hope is that these thermochemical engines can crack aluminum and zinc oxides down to the metals. Then we can have engines reduce the metals, and use them in metal-air fuel cells. Metallic fuels are much cheaper and less of a hassle than hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
My chemistry professor let me come in and do experiments with lye, lead, zinc, copper, and some other stuff for fun. The end result was a battery pack that powered a toy train for a few minutes.
Zero energy use while standing still?
Zero energy use while standing still from the engine. Sure energy is lost by the boiler and from the pipes, but not in needlessly moving the piston(s).
Zero pollution? Coal burning electricity plants have filter stacks on their chimneys that cost many millions, because burning coal is bloody dirty. Biomass can be even worse (if it's wet).
That's why steam cars burned oils, like kerosene. My steam system would work like this:
1. Grow algae using waste water
2. Crush it
3. Put algae oil in car
4. Gasify the non-oil parts of the algae to heat and power house (with steam)
5. Put ashes back into algae tanks
However, steam is 40% despite the lower temperatures. You can basically burn stuff at 100 C to get efficiencies that diesel engines get. So you don't need tons of NOx to get high efficiency. Catalytic converters are expensive, subject to obnoxious regulations, and full of rare materials.
Yes, that's a mild hybrid. I should have said that the its not just idling but also lower speed power, which is why the prius is so efficient. I think the prius drive train is better than the insight's, but since the insight is so small and light it gets better MPG. In fact, some modders put a VTEC civic engine in the insight and got 48 mpg. The modern insight and the CR-Z all have the same IMA mild hybrid system.
Actually a steam engine has two additional advantages. One is that it is essentially a hybrid for free. If a computer system (either carbon or silicon based) controlled the rate of fuel flow, then the engine could end up not using any energy while idling, which is the main benefit of a hybrid. No expensive batteries to wear out, just some code. The second is that the car is clean in terms of particulate, NOx, and hydrocarbon emissions. AFAIK steam car from 1915 meets 2025 California emissions standards.
More people die in the USA from colds and flus than from traffic deaths, but I don't see MAPNUHS (Mothers against people not using handsanitizer).
Nah, it won't be useful outside of the lab. Those muons just decay too fast. This is very obnoxious, because muons catalyze fusion - they tighten up the nucleous, so it's easier for another atom to get in and fuse. If they lasted a bit longer (say 2x or 3x), then muon catalyzed fusion would be a practical energy source.
Add a hydrogen tank to your car and just introduce H2 into the air intake. Simple, low tech. It's a suplement to traditional fossil fuels, not a replacement. Run out of H2? The car just continues on gasoline.
That's an illegal engine mod if it was made after 1975. $100,000 in EPA certification costs are coming your way if it was made after 1975.
Adding H2 to a conventional car would be really cheap, but the problem is always the tanks. Hydrogen is PITA and the tanks are huge and expensive. Plus, you'll need a lot of power - likely 4-5 times as much as for an electric car, so it offsets the costs. Looking at the near term "no breakthrough" options, it looks like a car powered by batteries and biodiesel generators is a winner.
Happening here as well. May have figured it out - my nickname is quite long compared to the other menu items on the left nav bar - "black gold alchemist" is a lot longer than the than the second longest - "book reviews". I wonder if only those with long nicks are seeing this bug?
Seconded - white left bar too big, on Firefox 3.5.4 on Ubuntu 9.10
The typical chemical battery used in hybrids have very poor efficiency. It stores only 50% of the energy given and releases only half of the stored energy
Nope. Lithium-ion is around 90+ percent efficient round trip. See the note in the wiki article. Lead acid is around 70% round trip. Molten sodium is a very old technology that is actually quite safe, but has durability and power density problems.
Flywheels are great, but they're really scary. Flywheel hybrid research was mostly stopped when a wheel blew up and killed a technician at Chrysler. The problem with compressed air is that their is heating of the air during compression and cooling during expansion. If that heat does not stay in the air, there is efficiency loss.
What we need is really electricity priced the way cell phone minutes are sold. Peak hour, off peak and night rates. Then there will be an incentive for people to buy these things to store cheap electricity at night and use it in the day and reduce the grid load on hot summer days.
There already is for large industrial customers. The smart grid would bring that to homes. One of the consequences is negative electricity prices due to excess wind power. Even so, I did some bath that showed you could expect to make around 0.1 and 0.2 dollars per kWh of capacity per day. That's around 30-70 dollars a year per kWh. The cheapest batteries I know of are around 50-60 dollars per kWh and will be toast before they pay for themselves.
If the donor body was able to talk, we would have a much bigger problem to worry about...
All it kept saying was "Brains!" over and over again.
If your doctor tells you that you have lung cancer and need surgery, only an idiot would focus on the fact that your doctor smokes and is a hypocrite, and use that as an excuse to keep smoking and not get the scary and painful surgery.
Wrong analogy. The analogy is that the doctor tells you not to smoke (in a condescending and moralizing way) so you don't get lung cancer, and then goes outside and smokes.
high end Tesla
Plus, they're great for running away from the police - until they run out of battery power... No wait, wrong kind of Tesla.
Finally found it. Tl to read now. Will read...
BTW, we still don't have the references for the creation of that diagram, so it means nothing right now. Here's a great graph.
BS. A Tesla roadster. A 55 kWh battery pack. A 200 watt stereo. 275 Hours of non-stop stereo.
Your post is at best intellectual fraud and at worst will actually harm people.
It's not fraud because I don't stand to make any money. I should have stated that I am not a doctor or medical professional, and will do so in any further post about the matter.
1) Your assertion that this is a problem for bio engineers and scientists implies that until then we do nothing. We simply sit on our hands and cheer on the people in this situation who have control. The scientists. In one fell swoop you turn an entire demographic into powerless victims
Better than turning them into an evil, piggish group to be hated. Some are definitely powerless victims. Some may be able to escape. It won't be easy, and technology will solve the problem long before to social change people get off their asses.
3)At one point you compare fidgeting to actual organized sport.
That's the point of number 1. Think about a football game for a minute. Most of the time the players are standing still (while the clock is stopped, etc.) or on the bench. Now watch children run around. Which one do you think is more active?
4) Because you don't really exercise but aren't really obese doesn't mean you are healthy, not at all... so you have managed to achieve skinny and unfit. How novel for you. The benefits of exercise have been proven thousands of times in thousands of studies. As have the benefits of eating well, there is a more balanced brain chemistry, nicer skin tone, better memory, ad infinitum
It depends on how you define healthy. I define healthy as feeling good. If skinny and unfit = feeling good, then it is healthy. Eating well (whatever that means) could mean that you have more of those "ad infinitium" items. I don't care about my skin tone, or my brain chemistry (whatever that means), and my memory is fine. So I don't need to change.
5)To insinuate that parents forcing their children to eat a plate of food has caused the absolutely staggering rise in childhood obesity is akin to claiming that that leaving your freezer open will cure global warming.
Here's the article. I was wrong about it. But I think it should be studied.
6) Diet and exercise is not akin to bleeding with leeches, it is the start of a healthy lifestyle and just might save someones child's life. To counsel against it is the very heart of arrogance and indifference. It may not "save" a child's life but it sure might give them a life worth living.
First, it may or may not be akin. My unhealthy lifestyle is fine for me, and most healthy lifestyles to me are not a life worth living.
7)At another point in this bomb you compare obesity and stomach ulcers, bravely showing a lack of understanding between both cause and effect and physiology.
I never, ever, attempted to compared stomach ulcers and obesity. What I attempted to compare was people's thinking about stomach ulcers and obesity.
Was a Random connection.
4 Things About Obesity:
;).
There's no exercise in P.E.
The more your parents force you to "eat right" the more obese you get - I can't find the link again but will hunt on request.
You can eat almost nothing but Big Macs and soda and be healthy.
Viruses might be at least partly responsible for obesity. One thing interesting is how quickly the paediatrician dismisses the study and gets back on the no-TV, soda, active lifestyle message. If it was going the other way, she'd not likely be criticising the small sample size.
Simple result. Obesity = Input Food - Output Exercise. It does not matter if you eat only Cheetos and Coke, or you eat organic food, if you exercise 400 minutes a day or 0. What matters is that you have equal amounts. You naturally have circuits that cause you to eat the right amount and to exercise the right amount. The problem is that parents force their children to eat whole plates of food at specified times, so they get more energy than they need. Next, parents and schools don't let them run around and fidget enough, so they don't get enough exercise. My parents, being wonderful that they are, did not do either. The result is that I eat maybe half as much as the average American, don't really exercise, but am not obese. I exercise not on a schedule, but when my body says so. I eat when I hungry - so I go to dinner at some random time, eat lunch randomly, snack, etc. A lot of energy is used to make food, and because I eat less, I'm green as a result
Diet and exercise is like bleeding with leeches. Just today, I heard that a program was in place for diet and exercise to mitigate neuropathy, and virtually everything under the sun. Diet and exercise won't cure obesity, like it won't cure stomach ulcers, which are now known bacterial. The problem with diet and exercise is that if it fails, well obviously the answer is just more diet and exercise. Plus, it allows one to blame the patient if it fails, and to create a whole subculture of people who hate and discriminate against sick people. The fix for obesity will be to find a pill or other mod that lowers peoples' overfeeding tolerance. Then obesity will be gone for good. Or maybe we can just implant a fuel cell to eat up all the excess blood sugar. Either way, it's in the hands of bioengineers and scientists, not P.E teachers and the First Lady.
The latter is the ultimate goal of popular entertainment.
No it isn't. The ultimate goal of popular entertainment is to make money by selling people what they want for more than it costs to produce it.
Sundrop, AFAIK, is doing a solar-assisted biomass to liquids program. What they appear to be doing is gasification with:
CxHyOz + H2O -> CO2 + CO + H2O + H2
Instead of:
CxHyOz + O2 -> CO2 + CO + H2O + H2
So it's not thermochemical - it's biomass to liquids. But it's a heck of a lot more efficient than say, corn ethanol.
Disclaimer: I work on this professionally, so I have a vested interest.
Cool. I'm a highschool student with a chemistry interest. Thermochemical engines were a subject I dug into a while back. I wrote a program using Gibbs free energy data from NIST to automatically balance and find the equilibrium constant of the reactions. I used this program to try to predict the outcomes of various reactions for cycle construction. I looked through the data and I found the following cycles to be interesting:
Fe2O3/Fe3O4
Sodium-manganese
Gaz de France (will explain)
Heat rechargeable batteries (will explain)
The Gaz de France (see slide show slide 26) runs as follows:
1. K2O2(l) + H2O(g) -> 2KOH(l) + O2(g) at 100 C
2. 2KOH(l) + 2K(g) -> 2K2O(l) + H2(g) at 725 C
3. 2K2O(l) -> 2K(g) + K2O2(l) at 850 C
Yes. That's potassium. All liquids and gases. No gas-gas separation. If this could really work, I'm sure there's a modification to it to produce elemental potassium. In that case, you can reduce mostly anything.
The idea with heat rechargeable batteries was as follows - using tin and iron as an example:
1. Fe + H2O + SnO -> Fe(OH)2 + Sn (aqueous battery - produces electrical current)
2. Sn + H2O -> SnO + H2 (corrosion of the tin - likely with heat)
3. Fe(OH)2 + H2 -> Fe + 2H2O
So it is an electrochemical heat engine. I know tin would likely make life more difficult by forming SnO2 but I left this out to illustrate the way the cycle works. You need two metals, call them A and B. A has to have as negative an electrode potential as possible but still be reducible by hydrogen. Iron fits the bill. Metal B has got to have as positive an electrode potential as possible but still be able to hydrolyze. Tin fits the bill. Copper would be better, but as far as I know, the reaction of copper with water to form hydrogen just does not proceed.
That said, I'm excited that if it's getting in the news, new or not, because it improves my odds of getting funding to use that tech.
Good. This tech needs a heck of a lot more funding. It's basically ignored - you read the news, you hear about EV's, fuel cells, solar panels, etc. But you almost never hear about thermochemical engines. The way I think about it, a solar panel is like a Ferrari. It's expensive and fun, but not a great way to cross Africa. A thermochemical engine is like a Toyota Landcruiser. It's durable, it's cheap, and it gets the job done. Have you heard of anyone getting VC funding for this thermochemical stuff?
What on earth are you talking about? The process of thermochemical reduction is going to be:...
I understand you're reactions, but I'm giving the basic chemical equations, so I don't have O* on the surface, I have Ce2O3 + 1/2O <->2CeO2. I have the H2 and CO listed so that I don't repeat the reactions.
You have this thing going through methanol? Huh? These are all going to decrease your overall yield.
I have it going through methanol, because methanol synthesis and methanol to gasoline are (at least relatively) proven processes AFAIK. The claimed 50-60 percent is the maximum theoretical efficiency. I believe I've read a paper with 20% practical solar->hydrogen efficiency with zinczinc oxide. Maybe 20% is more reasonable.
Here's just a description of the reactions and why you want CO and gasoline. You want gasoline as the end product because gas is our infrastructure. You don't want methane, alcohol, or some other fuel, because conversion of vehicles to such fuels is virtually impossible with EPA regulations. Instead you want normal (though high octane) gasoline fuel.
What you get with this system is overall:
CO2 + H2O + heat -> gasoline + O2
The first step is to reduce CO2 and H2O:
Ce2O3 + CO2 -> 2CeO2 + CO (at low temperature)
Ce2O3 + H2O -> 2CeO2 + H2 (at low temperature)
4CeO2 + heat -> 2Ce2O3 + O2 (high temperature)
Next, it you don't have the right mixture of CO2 to H2O, you can do the following:
CO2 + H2 + heat <-> CO + H2O
Next, you create methanol:
CO + 2H2 -> H3COH
Finally, you create gasoline via the methanol to gasoline process:
H3COH -> gasoline + H2O
Now, where do you get the CO2? From CO2 traps, like soda lime:
CO2 + Mg(OH)2 -> MgCO3 + H2O (in alkaline solution)
MgCO3 + heat -> MgO + CO2 (heat)
You could power this CO2 trapper off of waste heat from the engine. This system could be up to 50-60 percent efficient at converting solar energy into gasoline. This is a vast improvement of biofuels, which are often less than 1% efficient. Gasoline engines are only 10% efficient, so the scheme is less efficient than electric cars + solar panels. However, the hydrogen and CO (especially) could be used as reducing agents to reduce metals such as iron and zinc. These metals would then be burned in metal-air fuel cells to provide power on demand. You also need hydrogen to produce ammonia and other industrial chemicals.
All those cycles you've mentioned involve nasty chemicals, non-trivial separation or both. For example, one step in the sulfur iodine cycle is the conversion of sulfuric acid into its components:
H2SO4 -> H2O + SO2 + 1/2O2
The problem is that all these components are gasses, and they have to be separated as perfectly as possible (we don't want SOx in the air). So, as a result, a lot of expensive components are needed. With the sodium manganese, iron, and cerium cycles, you simply have to pump gasses away from the solids. The problem that occurs in these cycles is that the solids are powdered, and as they cycle through the system, the grains of the powder fuse together, reducing surface area, and thus reaction rate. Interestingly, this same process occurs in rechargeable batteries, and leads to their failure. Maybe robots can grind up the solids and increase their surface area?
In addition, in the sulfur iodine cycle, you've got SOx and I2 gases on the lose at high temperature. This can corrode the containers of the system.
My hope is that these thermochemical engines can crack aluminum and zinc oxides down to the metals. Then we can have engines reduce the metals, and use them in metal-air fuel cells. Metallic fuels are much cheaper and less of a hassle than hydrogen.