Why would you use an ICE? The product of a fuel cell is electricity, plus the combustion products and heat. Depending on the type of fuel cell, it could be a lot of heat - enough so that recovering the heat energy by running the hot, gaseous output from a fuel cell through a steam turbine can increase its energy efficiency as much as 20%. So the water is not likely to be 'dripping out' the tail pipe after the first two minutes, except in very cold climates.
Well, technically it works fine in some cars. I believe that the US Army has been migrating all of their rolling stock gradually to jet fuel (JP4), which is also basically kerosene. Their goal is to only have to have one fuel in the logistics chain. A quick search gave me several citations that kerosene, which is a bit lighter weight than diesel fuel, can be run in most older diesel engines with a slight loss of power and lubricity). The difference between JP4 and RP1 is that RP1 is much purer and does not contain several impurities that tend to clog up the plumbing in a rocket engine. See the book "Ignition" by John D. Clark, which I cited earlier.
Haha. Reminds me of the good old days. In high school one of the guys on the football team, trying the old 'light your farts' trick, lay down on a table with his legs in the air and his undies off, and held a lighter in the target zone. The fart was much bigger than he expected, and it went off in a ball of fire reminiscent of a blowtorch, singeing the hair off his butt and thighs!:D
We should mix it with this stuff, just to make it more interesting.
The article itself is pretty interesting, but it also has this money quote: "It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water — with which it reacts explosively...." - quote is from Ignition by John D. Clark, eminent rocket scientist, a very interesting, amusing and factual book.
The political advantage of Hydrogen is that, once it is magically created out of fairy dust, the primary combustion product from burning it is just water - no CO2 to sully our atmosphere. I think if that were not the major factor, H2 would be out of the picture almost immediately. I know of no other singular advantage.
Lastly but most importantly, his wrestling with car sales rules in many states is undeniably good. These rules have been bent and twisted to hell and back by the incumbent auto makers and their dealers to make it nigh impossible to compete with any other business model. For a place like Slashdot, with so many promoters of the "FREE MARKET", this thing should cause almost unanimous uproar. Tesla wants to cut costs on incumbent, useless, overpriced dealerships and modernize how cars are delivered, supported and maintained. It may work, it may not work, who knows? Regardless, however, laws shouldn't be designed to stack everything against that model in such a fashion, and saying that it's just whining and not a serious concern is childish at best, utterly irresponsible at worst.
You're probably right. But this may be one of those "be careful what you wish for" things - imagine if all the dealers were gone, and the car makers only sold their cars through their own 'stores'. It's very hard to predict what the pricing and other aspects will be at that point - especially with regard to warranty repairs. There are worse (for the customer) business models than the one presently in operation.
Interesting. I did not know about that. I did know that Consumer Reports, which is much more in touch with the average US consumer than Top Gear, rated it the highest of any car in their history. Of course that may be in part because of the promise of viable, attractive, electric vehicles, but the order backlog seems to back up the notion that he has hit a sweet spot in the market. Above a certain minimum level of utility, people buy cars to satisfy themselves with style, performance, cushiness, and obviously not least, feeling good about their apparent environmental impact.
Every organization/organism, from the smallest flea to the Salvation Army (and GE) has to take in more than it puts out. It is the way of life, just as it is the way of all social systems. In Capitalism we call that profit, a non-profit calls it 'reserves', a household usually calls it 'savings'. if your local free food pantry agency doesn't bring in more (in the form of donations of goods and money, plus government assistance), the lights will get turned off and everyone will go home, or back under the freeway overpass. Even governments and countries (government + the people and institutions) have this. If a nation spends more than it takes in, eventually it will be destitute, subject to revolution or takeover.
TL;DR: Profit is not a dirty word. Many, many people (myself included) are the type who are willing to bet some part of their assets, time and energy to make something cool happen. In my case it is commercial space development. If my associates and I succeed, according to the best analyses the mean standard of living of people worldwide may increase by as much as a factor of 10. And in the process, my heirs or some foundation (I'll be too old to see most of the benefits) will get a piece of the action.
In sum, Musk has shown in several ways that he does care about this stuff. He's not blowing over $1 billion on SpaceX because he's in it for the money - . he was betting that what he believed was a viable project. There's no better way to focus one's mind than to put a big chunk of everything you own on the table. After PayPal he could just retire to an island somewhere and play tennis all day. He's doing it because he believes in it. Making money at it separates the doers from the dreamers, and proves your idea and your plan were good. If SpaceX succeeds, Musk will live in history not as a guy who made a bunch of money, but a guy who used that money helping to lift humanity off this rock.
Fuel cells are theoretically more energy efficient than carnot engines - theoretically up to about 80% vs. about 58%. In most cases gasoline engines run (IIRC) more like 30-35% efficiency. That 80% assumes a high temperature fuel cell and using the waste heat to generate some more power. According to Wikipedia, "The energy efficiency of a fuel cell is generally between 40–60%, or up to 85% efficient if waste heat is captured for use."
On side note, those great big power plants - coal, gas, oil, or nuke, all generate more heat than electricity. At present we are not using that heat, just evaporating a lot of water. IMHO it could be used in some places to heat and (with all that CO2) accelerate growth in big greenhouses, or perhaps other applications.
Many folks don't realize that hydrogen is not the only possibility for fuel cells; there are methanol fuel cells, ammonia fuel cells, and even some fuel cells that use diesel or kerosene (e.g. Cheap Diesel-Powered Fuel Cells). I think the last two use high temperatures (250C) to break the diesel or kerosene down to smaller molecules, then use those directly in the fuel cell.
I suspect that for these types of cells, the key factors would be whether the fuel cell requires exotic or expensive metals like platinum, whether they can handle impurities in the fuel, and whether they can be used immediately or require some period of warm-up. In this case 'impurities' would be more chemistry than physical - for instance (just guessing) paraffins might be a very bad thing.
High temp diesel cells might be good for long haul trucks or other vehicles that are likely to run all day, even including occasional stops. A battery big enough to run for the first 10 minutes might handle the quick startup issue.
Of course, hydrocarbon based fuel cells don't solve the carbon dioxide issue. Perhaps there would be a way to recycle the CO2 back into a holding tank. But they would solve the noise issue!
I worked on a near-shore oil (seismic) exploration crew a long time ago, which used high pressure air to blow calibrated bubbles in the ocean. The air was at 3500 PSI and was carried from compressor to 'guns' via 1/2 inch high pressure hose. One of the guys on the crew before I got there happened to be in the way when one of those hoses broke, and swung around spraying air at 3500 PSI. The air cut his arm right to the bone, as it passed by.
Back in the day, some of my associates in the prototype test group used to play a prank based on this. They would fill one of those plastic film canisters that you used to get 35mm film in, by spraying the freeze spray used for testing electronics into it. If you keep spraying in the same place it gets so cold that it freezes. So you fill up the canister about 1/2 way with that, snap the lid back on, and quietly as you walk down the aisle, toss into the back of a terminal that someone is using/testing, that happens to have the cover off. A minute or two later, POP!! sounds just like a very big capacitor blowing up. Excitement and jollity ensue.
I don't know how much has changed in the last 30 years or so, but back when I was flying you could buy an older plane for less than a new Porsche, and if you flew it enough the cost per mile was actually pretty reasonable, especially if you had a lot of long trips it could be cheaper than the Porsche, and faster.
they are saving in passenger_miles/gallon. Those six or nine or ten additional passengers are paying that much additional, for the same total fuel cost.
I wonder how much this has to do with what I would call the "catalog effect". I first noticed this on dating websites. When using a catalog we become obsessed with concerns that would not be significant factors when meeting someone in real life. When we meet someone interesting in real life, our interest is in how they interact with us in various ways - how much they make, their haircolor, their hobbies, etc. are not important then, and possibly not ever. But when we have this information on a web page, like comparing TVs we want to know every detail and put it all into our little internal spreadsheet of suitability.
I think the same thing happens with flight picking - since the prices are there in front of us, we naturally tend to evaluate based on that. I have found myself actually choosing a flight that costs $20 less but requires me to take a less comfortable flight, travel farther to a different airport, pay more for parking, and/or leave at a time that may cost me $150 in lost wages. This obviously makes no sense but it's hard not to do it.
Unfortunately, in the US we have AMTRAK, which (while the company is trying hard) suffers from being a bastardized federal 'solution', which was designed almost purposely to fail. Governments tend to be better at some thing than others. One of those things is building and maintaining highways and other infrastructure. Back in the late 1960s when the railroads in the US were all on the ropes and often going bankrupt, the US government bailed several of them out, sometimes by way of merging them with each other. The railroads have hated passengers for decades, and wanted to halt passenger service entirely.
At that time the Feds could have worked a deal to nationalize the infrastructure - the rails, right of ways, etc., buying them from the railroad companies using any of several methods. This would have recapitalized the companies and elminated a large portion of their costs. The rail companies could have kept their switching yards and other non-mainline assets. The purchase could have been in the form of, say, 20 years of free rides on the new Federal Rail System. Then the route maintenance and planning could have been done for the benefit of communities and the overall transportation demands of the nation, while the railroads could be more competitive and more dynamic. Any entrepreneur who wanted to start providing a rail trip from point A to point B could, having met certain safety and stability requirements, could have started offering that trip to paying customers. Cities that wanted to re-route trackage or provide new services could negotiate with the Federal Rail System rather than companies with their own agendas. This would have been an optimal arrangement of public and private concerns.
Instead we got a passenger train system that pays too much to the rail owners, gets last priority behind all freight (except for certain corridors), and has little or no power or influence over track maintenance or the ability to establish new routes or bring in new entrepreneurial initiatives. But the personnel do actually try - this is not a criticism of the folks who actually run the thing.
Hmm. Wikipedia says Boeing 777 holds 31,000 to 47,800 gals of fuel (depending on model). IIRC Jet-A is about 3.2 lbs. per gallon, so for the smallest version, that's 99,000 lbs. for the smallest, 777-200. Passenger capacity is 314 to 440. given mean weight of 180 lbs., that's 56,500 to 79,200 lbs., plus baggage & freight. Using some arithmetic (max takeoff weight - empty weight - fuel), total capacity is about 148,000 lbs. So I would say passenger + cargo weight is not negligible. For a typical trip, fuel burn is on the order of 7000 to 10000 kg per hour = about 15,000 to 22,000 lbs. per hour, so for a four hour flight that would be about 60,000 to 88,000 lbs. Again, passenger weight is on the same order of fuel weight actually used. I'm probably off significantly on some of these numbers, but it seems to me that negligible isn't quite the right term.
I have read that both the Hawaiians and the Hunzas actually used that approach at one time. The Hunzas are believed to have been descended from a piece of Alexander The Great's army, and live in a high valley in the Himalayas - a very tough place to live. And some North American Indians did not name their children until the survived to two years old. Not to mention that in Europe even as recently as 150 years ago, even the children of kings and queens suffered a very high birth mortality. We have an ethic of preserving all human life (at least as soon as they manage to get born and avoid abortion), but that is not the only way. Other cultures have gone other directions.
I think the same defense-related information has been in The Register. In any case, it's a pretty common and well-accepted analysis among those who actually pay attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you use an ICE? The product of a fuel cell is electricity, plus the combustion products and heat. Depending on the type of fuel cell, it could be a lot of heat - enough so that recovering the heat energy by running the hot, gaseous output from a fuel cell through a steam turbine can increase its energy efficiency as much as 20%. So the water is not likely to be 'dripping out' the tail pipe after the first two minutes, except in very cold climates.
Well, technically it works fine in some cars. I believe that the US Army has been migrating all of their rolling stock gradually to jet fuel (JP4), which is also basically kerosene. Their goal is to only have to have one fuel in the logistics chain. A quick search gave me several citations that kerosene, which is a bit lighter weight than diesel fuel, can be run in most older diesel engines with a slight loss of power and lubricity). The difference between JP4 and RP1 is that RP1 is much purer and does not contain several impurities that tend to clog up the plumbing in a rocket engine. See the book "Ignition" by John D. Clark, which I cited earlier.
Haha. Reminds me of the good old days. In high school one of the guys on the football team, trying the old 'light your farts' trick, lay down on a table with his legs in the air and his undies off, and held a lighter in the target zone. The fart was much bigger than he expected, and it went off in a ball of fire reminiscent of a blowtorch, singeing the hair off his butt and thighs! :D
We should mix it with this stuff, just to make it more interesting.
The article itself is pretty interesting, but it also has this money quote: "It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water — with which it reacts explosively...." - quote is from Ignition by John D. Clark, eminent rocket scientist, a very interesting, amusing and factual book.
The political advantage of Hydrogen is that, once it is magically created out of fairy dust, the primary combustion product from burning it is just water - no CO2 to sully our atmosphere. I think if that were not the major factor, H2 would be out of the picture almost immediately. I know of no other singular advantage.
Lastly but most importantly, his wrestling with car sales rules in many states is undeniably good. These rules have been bent and twisted to hell and back by the incumbent auto makers and their dealers to make it nigh impossible to compete with any other business model. For a place like Slashdot, with so many promoters of the "FREE MARKET", this thing should cause almost unanimous uproar. Tesla wants to cut costs on incumbent, useless, overpriced dealerships and modernize how cars are delivered, supported and maintained. It may work, it may not work, who knows? Regardless, however, laws shouldn't be designed to stack everything against that model in such a fashion, and saying that it's just whining and not a serious concern is childish at best, utterly irresponsible at worst.
You're probably right. But this may be one of those "be careful what you wish for" things - imagine if all the dealers were gone, and the car makers only sold their cars through their own 'stores'. It's very hard to predict what the pricing and other aspects will be at that point - especially with regard to warranty repairs. There are worse (for the customer) business models than the one presently in operation.
Interesting. I did not know about that. I did know that Consumer Reports, which is much more in touch with the average US consumer than Top Gear, rated it the highest of any car in their history. Of course that may be in part because of the promise of viable, attractive, electric vehicles, but the order backlog seems to back up the notion that he has hit a sweet spot in the market. Above a certain minimum level of utility, people buy cars to satisfy themselves with style, performance, cushiness, and obviously not least, feeling good about their apparent environmental impact.
Every organization/organism, from the smallest flea to the Salvation Army (and GE) has to take in more than it puts out. It is the way of life, just as it is the way of all social systems. In Capitalism we call that profit, a non-profit calls it 'reserves', a household usually calls it 'savings'. if your local free food pantry agency doesn't bring in more (in the form of donations of goods and money, plus government assistance), the lights will get turned off and everyone will go home, or back under the freeway overpass. Even governments and countries (government + the people and institutions) have this. If a nation spends more than it takes in, eventually it will be destitute, subject to revolution or takeover.
TL;DR: Profit is not a dirty word. Many, many people (myself included) are the type who are willing to bet some part of their assets, time and energy to make something cool happen. In my case it is commercial space development. If my associates and I succeed, according to the best analyses the mean standard of living of people worldwide may increase by as much as a factor of 10. And in the process, my heirs or some foundation (I'll be too old to see most of the benefits) will get a piece of the action.
In sum, Musk has shown in several ways that he does care about this stuff. He's not blowing over $1 billion on SpaceX because he's in it for the money - . he was betting that what he believed was a viable project. There's no better way to focus one's mind than to put a big chunk of everything you own on the table. After PayPal he could just retire to an island somewhere and play tennis all day. He's doing it because he believes in it. Making money at it separates the doers from the dreamers, and proves your idea and your plan were good. If SpaceX succeeds, Musk will live in history not as a guy who made a bunch of money, but a guy who used that money helping to lift humanity off this rock.
Fuel cells are theoretically more energy efficient than carnot engines - theoretically up to about 80% vs. about 58%. In most cases gasoline engines run (IIRC) more like 30-35% efficiency. That 80% assumes a high temperature fuel cell and using the waste heat to generate some more power. According to Wikipedia, "The energy efficiency of a fuel cell is generally between 40–60%, or up to 85% efficient if waste heat is captured for use."
On side note, those great big power plants - coal, gas, oil, or nuke, all generate more heat than electricity. At present we are not using that heat, just evaporating a lot of water. IMHO it could be used in some places to heat and (with all that CO2) accelerate growth in big greenhouses, or perhaps other applications.
Many folks don't realize that hydrogen is not the only possibility for fuel cells; there are methanol fuel cells, ammonia fuel cells, and even some fuel cells that use diesel or kerosene (e.g. Cheap Diesel-Powered Fuel Cells). I think the last two use high temperatures (250C) to break the diesel or kerosene down to smaller molecules, then use those directly in the fuel cell.
I suspect that for these types of cells, the key factors would be whether the fuel cell requires exotic or expensive metals like platinum, whether they can handle impurities in the fuel, and whether they can be used immediately or require some period of warm-up. In this case 'impurities' would be more chemistry than physical - for instance (just guessing) paraffins might be a very bad thing.
High temp diesel cells might be good for long haul trucks or other vehicles that are likely to run all day, even including occasional stops. A battery big enough to run for the first 10 minutes might handle the quick startup issue.
Of course, hydrocarbon based fuel cells don't solve the carbon dioxide issue. Perhaps there would be a way to recycle the CO2 back into a holding tank. But they would solve the noise issue!
I worked on a near-shore oil (seismic) exploration crew a long time ago, which used high pressure air to blow calibrated bubbles in the ocean. The air was at 3500 PSI and was carried from compressor to 'guns' via 1/2 inch high pressure hose. One of the guys on the crew before I got there happened to be in the way when one of those hoses broke, and swung around spraying air at 3500 PSI. The air cut his arm right to the bone, as it passed by.
Back in the day, some of my associates in the prototype test group used to play a prank based on this. They would fill one of those plastic film canisters that you used to get 35mm film in, by spraying the freeze spray used for testing electronics into it. If you keep spraying in the same place it gets so cold that it freezes. So you fill up the canister about 1/2 way with that, snap the lid back on, and quietly as you walk down the aisle, toss into the back of a terminal that someone is using/testing, that happens to have the cover off. A minute or two later, POP!! sounds just like a very big capacitor blowing up. Excitement and jollity ensue.
killed by gravity
It's not just a good idea, it's the LAW!
But rarely from steam inhalation, unless it's very hot.
That would be an interesting trip.
I don't know how much has changed in the last 30 years or so, but back when I was flying you could buy an older plane for less than a new Porsche, and if you flew it enough the cost per mile was actually pretty reasonable, especially if you had a lot of long trips it could be cheaper than the Porsche, and faster.
they are saving in passenger_miles/gallon. Those six or nine or ten additional passengers are paying that much additional, for the same total fuel cost.
I wonder how much this has to do with what I would call the "catalog effect". I first noticed this on dating websites. When using a catalog we become obsessed with concerns that would not be significant factors when meeting someone in real life. When we meet someone interesting in real life, our interest is in how they interact with us in various ways - how much they make, their haircolor, their hobbies, etc. are not important then, and possibly not ever. But when we have this information on a web page, like comparing TVs we want to know every detail and put it all into our little internal spreadsheet of suitability.
I think the same thing happens with flight picking - since the prices are there in front of us, we naturally tend to evaluate based on that. I have found myself actually choosing a flight that costs $20 less but requires me to take a less comfortable flight, travel farther to a different airport, pay more for parking, and/or leave at a time that may cost me $150 in lost wages. This obviously makes no sense but it's hard not to do it.
Unfortunately, in the US we have AMTRAK, which (while the company is trying hard) suffers from being a bastardized federal 'solution', which was designed almost purposely to fail. Governments tend to be better at some thing than others. One of those things is building and maintaining highways and other infrastructure. Back in the late 1960s when the railroads in the US were all on the ropes and often going bankrupt, the US government bailed several of them out, sometimes by way of merging them with each other. The railroads have hated passengers for decades, and wanted to halt passenger service entirely.
At that time the Feds could have worked a deal to nationalize the infrastructure - the rails, right of ways, etc., buying them from the railroad companies using any of several methods. This would have recapitalized the companies and elminated a large portion of their costs. The rail companies could have kept their switching yards and other non-mainline assets. The purchase could have been in the form of, say, 20 years of free rides on the new Federal Rail System. Then the route maintenance and planning could have been done for the benefit of communities and the overall transportation demands of the nation, while the railroads could be more competitive and more dynamic. Any entrepreneur who wanted to start providing a rail trip from point A to point B could, having met certain safety and stability requirements, could have started offering that trip to paying customers. Cities that wanted to re-route trackage or provide new services could negotiate with the Federal Rail System rather than companies with their own agendas. This would have been an optimal arrangement of public and private concerns.
Instead we got a passenger train system that pays too much to the rail owners, gets last priority behind all freight (except for certain corridors), and has little or no power or influence over track maintenance or the ability to establish new routes or bring in new entrepreneurial initiatives. But the personnel do actually try - this is not a criticism of the folks who actually run the thing.
Hmm. Wikipedia says Boeing 777 holds 31,000 to 47,800 gals of fuel (depending on model). IIRC Jet-A is about 3.2 lbs. per gallon, so for the smallest version, that's 99,000 lbs. for the smallest, 777-200. Passenger capacity is 314 to 440. given mean weight of 180 lbs., that's 56,500 to 79,200 lbs., plus baggage & freight. Using some arithmetic (max takeoff weight - empty weight - fuel), total capacity is about 148,000 lbs. So I would say passenger + cargo weight is not negligible. For a typical trip, fuel burn is on the order of 7000 to 10000 kg per hour = about 15,000 to 22,000 lbs. per hour, so for a four hour flight that would be about 60,000 to 88,000 lbs. Again, passenger weight is on the same order of fuel weight actually used. I'm probably off significantly on some of these numbers, but it seems to me that negligible isn't quite the right term.
Well done! :D
Rx advertising was banned in the US as well until (guess) 15 or 20 years ago. It's still pretty restricted.
I have read that both the Hawaiians and the Hunzas actually used that approach at one time. The Hunzas are believed to have been descended from a piece of Alexander The Great's army, and live in a high valley in the Himalayas - a very tough place to live. And some North American Indians did not name their children until the survived to two years old. Not to mention that in Europe even as recently as 150 years ago, even the children of kings and queens suffered a very high birth mortality. We have an ethic of preserving all human life (at least as soon as they manage to get born and avoid abortion), but that is not the only way. Other cultures have gone other directions.
I think the same defense-related information has been in The Register. In any case, it's a pretty common and well-accepted analysis among those who actually pay attention.
IIRC in the US if you took all the assets of the top 5%, it would not quite cover this year's deficit.