That it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen, than is recovered from it is not new. This fact is true of any fuel source. We've just gotten used to having most of the work done for us.
That's where you're wrong. Fossil fuels (oil, coal, and their derivatives) can deliver more useful energy than it takes to produce them. It's a cost-effective equation. If, as you claim, it took more energy to produce them then they deliver, we'd be in a sorry state indeed, and would have abandoned their use many years ago.
Hydrogen is not in the same category as these fuels, because it must be created, using energy. Think of usable hydrogen as a battery. It always takes more energy to fill up the battery than you'll be able to retrieve from it.
That's why I think we're better off with diesel for the moment. Yes it pollutes, but it pollutes less than gasoline, and the vehicles that use it are available today and are moderately priced, and have reasonable performance. Hydrogen and electric vehicles all have the same problems
They're not solving any pollution problem, they're just moving it.
They have a cost penalty (are more expensive than gas powered equivalents)
They have a performance penalty (reduced power/range over gas equivalent.)
Diesel engines don't have any of those problems. There is usually an initial cost penalty, but that's generally offset by the lower cost of fuel and additional longevity of the vehicle.
Diesel still pollutes, and also kicks out lots of soot, which is staring to be linked to developmental lung problems.
Yes, diesel engines still pollute. However, they put out less CO2, less CO and fewer Hydrocarbons than gasoline engines do. They do produce particulates (soot) that gasoline engines do not, but the industry is currently investigating particulate traps and/or catalytic converters that will remove most of those as well. In addition, another poster mentioned that most diesels today can burn Biodiesel, which is made from corn or soy crops, and is therefore renewable.
I still say that diesel engines are a much better means of pollution reduction today than hydrogen. Especially since all of the people who tout hydrogen are relying upon the magical appearance of cheap, effective solar power. If we had cheap, effective solar power today, we'd be running our electricity grid off of that instead of producing it by burning coal. Wouldn't that be a nice thing?
Solar power in sufficient quantities to run even a moderate amount of the automotive traffic in the US is probably decades away. Diesel vehicles could be available today.
No - the AC has a good point that is generally overlooked.
Overall, hydrogen costs energy to produce. You can't just go dig it up out of the ground. You have to produce it somewhere, and then store it, transport it, and eventually burn it. By the time you do all that, you've used considerably more energy than just using the electricity, or heat, or whatever energy source you used to create the hydrogen.
Remember last summer, when California had rolling blackouts because they couldn't source enough electricity? Now why would they, of all places, want to increase their energy demands?
Gasoline, for all its faults, still provides more energy than it costs to make it.
I don't think hydrogen is nearly as good an answer as we're being led to believe.
If you want to see more effecient, cleaner burning engines on the road, you should start pressuring the auto manufacturers to bring over more of the small diesel engines that are running in Europe.
I drove one of those four years ago -- it was a Vectra, made by GM, and was a midsize, four door. There was no discernable performance difference between that vehicle, and a similar gasoline powered vehicle. It had plenty of passing power at 85+ mph, and it regularly got 50-55 mpg.
We should be pushing to make these vehicles generally available in the states, instead of trying pie-in-the-sky methods that use more energy, instead of less.
Unfortunately, someone at Sharp had his head up his butt while desigining it.
If you connect the serial cable to the Zaurus, it covers the pull-out keyboard, so you can't type while it's connected. There is a way to modify it so it works, but Sharp still really missed the boat.
I also have some test devices which I use a serial port to communicate with, and I really loved my HP 200LX for that. I could keep the 200LX and it's serial cable in my pocket, and I didn't have to lug around a laptop.
I bought the Zaurus to replace the 200LX, and so far it's done a great job.
I only have two complaints so far:
I wish it had come with a working serial cable
I wish the address book was easier to port from the 200LX.
Fortunately, the good points - touchscreen, color, CF & SD ports, wireless support, faster processor, linux, etc. far outweigh the negatives. I definitely recommend trying one out.
Go ahead and bash me because I make more money than you.
I thought about becoming a lawyer, but then I looked at the starting salaries, and decided I didn't want to go back to school in order to take a pay cut.
Am I the only geek left who thinks that a PDA requires a keyboard? One of the greatest strengths of Linux vs. Windoze is that it allows for the use of text commands.
I'm an embedded systems programmer, and one of the things I'd really like my PDA to do is to be able to carry my code with me when going to meetings, etc. I can sort of do that now with my HP 200LX, but it's honestly too slow to be able to access the entire 500K of source code my current project entails.
What I really want is a PDA that's the same size, consumes the same power, has at least the features mine has, and is just plain faster. I'd like a better OS, but I do have access to tons of shareware progs with DOS as an OS. A color screen, touchscreen, and a backlight would all be nifty, but I do just fine without any of those today.
I really just want a PDA that I can use as if it were a smaller version of my actual computer, and to be able to use it that way, I think it needs a keyboard.
I'm probably just going to have to buy a used Libretto.
I have a pair of the original i-glasses!, and the only game I ever enjoyed playing with them was Descent. The resolution (320x200) pretty much bites, and the head tracking is useless for aiming.
It was always fun letting friends use the system though, because anyone who wears the glasses while playing a game inevitably ends up looking like Stevie Wonder, turning their heads around at wildly exaggerated angles, trying to control the game.
I used to have to stop and reorient myself every so often or I'd end up with my head between my legs staring at the ground, or straining to try and turn my head around backwards, just to go straight ahead.
Nah - I never had much complaint about the lag on my i-glasses!, my biggest complaint was the lack of support (actual 3D games to play), and the second was the resolution. Try playing your favorite game in 320x200 resolution for a while, and see how realistic it looks.
Better yet, try and read anything on the screen at that resolution.
They're still cool toys, but I haven't used them nearly as much as I thought I would.
No - My mistake. It somehow got posted into the past. I didn't actually submit this story until Tuesday morning, around noon. I'm not sure how it got posted on Monday night at 8:39 pm.
The memory metals do have some promising features, such as size and power, but they are pretty slow to cycle, take a rather large amount of power to operate, and are relatively expensive.
The "Air Muscles" are a bit more complex, since they need a supply of compressed air, and all the associated support mechanisms (relief valves, air lines, control valves, etc), but you can make them from dirt cheap materials (the one I built cost me about $1.00, though I had to buy more materials than I ended up using -- however, I can still use those extra materials to make more muscles).
The Air muscles are also a bit easier to scale. The Shadow Robot Co. people claim that four of their larger air muscles can provide enough pull to lift a car. They also have a Usenet post that makes a lot of interesting claims about possibilities for the air muscles. Of course, these claims were made six years ago, and I personally haven't seen the air muscles being used in any of these applications, so there may be some complications that the Shadow Robot people aren't telling us about.
GM is tinkering with the idea of only running 4 of the 8 cylinders in some of their SUV engines (during low load/stops) in order to increase economy. I don't really understand how they plan to pull it off, since a V8 is balanced much differently from an L4. The only engine this would be feasible with would be a V12, since an L6 is naturally balanced, and requires no counterweight.
Funny you should mention the PowerStroke in the same message as this. The PowerStroke does do something similar, but only in coast-down situations. When you're going downhill, or slowing towards a stoplight, we'll actually turn off all the fuel, and then turn it back on again when the engine approaches idle speeds. It's a bit disconcerting at first to be coasting downhill and have the constant diesel rottle-rottle-rottle noise suddenly stop, but then you get used to it, and start coasting downhill in higher gears, to see how long you can keep the engine running w/o fuel!
I like the powerglove over a conventional joystick, because it's pretty easy to interface, and it supplies a large amount of data - X,Y, and Z coordinates, roll data, finger positions, and the 16 keys on the keypad (which usefully send data as if they were a hex keypad, even though they aren't laid out that way).
I have most of the parts I need, including the wheels, and I just finished modifying some cheap servos for continuous motion. Unfortunately, the wheels I bought weren't really designed to be driven, so I'm going to have to find a way to attach the motors. The Palm Pilot Robot kit just uses glue, but since the servos weren't really designed to take the lateral stresses that will be imposed by gluing them to the wheels and making them act as as a suspension system, I'm hoping to work out something a bit more robust.
The only problem I forsee is having to be tethered to the robot in order to control it (it'll eventually be autonomous and won't require a tether, though I plan to still be able to control it with a tether.) I think I'm leaning towards a cheap RF solution, so I can sit at the computer, and control the robot wirelessly.
Just another geek hobby (and ALL of the technology I'm using so far, with the possible exception of the wheels, is from the '80s).
OH - and there's no sacrifice necessary - I haven't had to modify the glove at all, and am not really planning to.
I don't know that I'd call hydrogen a "particularly good" place to store potential energy just yet. There are far more likely places for us to be using any extra potential energy in our existing energy network. (Remember California's blackouts this summer?)
I will grant you that if someday, we were to have an abundance of electrical energy that we didn't know what to do with immediately, then hydrogen would appear to be a likely storage container for that energy.
I wouldn't power a plane with electricity. I'd use the electricity generated by the solar or wind generators to reduce our existing dependance on burning fossil fuels for electricity.
That was part of the point I was trying to make. Why would you hop through so many hoops to use a new energy source (wind/solar - not H2) for a plane, when there are so many other needs that it could be used for?
The problem here is that you're thinking of the element H, while the substance you actually need is the molecule H2. H2 isn't readily available, even though there's a whole lot of H around. The available H is already tied up in existing molecules.
Also, H by itself doesn't contain any usable energy that we can liberate (except through nuclear reactions). The energy that you can liberate by burning H2 is actually less than the energy it takes to separate existing H out of whatever molecular bond it's already in, to make it into H2. So, in essence, by electrolysis, or whatever method we choose to use, we are "creating" H2, in the same way that if we combined gaseous H2 and gaseous O2 to get H2O - we would be essentially "creating" water out of its constituent components.
Refining oil is not the same at all - we already have the really long carbon chain, which contains a fair amount of usable energy. To liberate that energy, we burn the oil as a fuel - in whatever form we need it - fuel oil, gasoline, kerosene, etc. All forms already contain energy, we're just releasing it through an exothermic reaction. The energy that we put into refining doesn't actually add any energy to the oil, we're just changing it's form somewhat to make it easier to use. All of the energy we get out of it is already there.
Think of it this way: burning oil is like dropping a brick from the top of a building. The potential energy already exists, we're just releasing it. "Creating" and then burning H2 to release energy is like picking up a brick, climbing the stairs to the top of the building, and then dropping it off. There's no useful potential energy in the brick until we climb the stairs to the top of the building to increase the energy. However, in "useful" terms, it's usually better to use the energy it would take us to climb the stairs and drop the brick by directly throwing the brick. Same results, less energy used.
Not so. We're not CREATING fossil fuels, we're just picking them up out of the ground. The 2nd law of Thermo doesn't apply to drilling for oil in the same manner it applies to creating hydrogen.
Your 3x volume doesn't take into account the fact that liquid hydrogen must be kept at pressure inside a containment vessel. Jet fuel can be stored at room temperature and pressure.
By the time you add in the 3x volume, plus additional size/mass for the containment vessel, plus additional safeguards (we mustn't let the passengers be accidentally doused with liquid h2, or we'll need some jigsaw puzzle champions at the other end of the flight!), you're talking a plane which has either an enormously increased size (plus, don't forget that additional volume costs a lot in energy at 500 mph), or a greatly reduced ability to carry passengers. Either way, I don't think it'll work.
Making clean hydrogen is much cheaper and cleaner than refining gasoline - retrofit offshore oil platforms with solar panels and wind turbines, and you'd probably have great hydrogen-producers - could even use wave power for some of your electricity
But even if we could use wind power and solar power to generate electricity cheaply and effectively, it would still make more sense to use them to produce electricity, and then use the electricity directly.
Converting electricity into hydrogen is more costly (in energy terms), and then you still have to deal with the hydrogen storage and shipping, which would require huge pipelines or ships, not to mention the containment vessels required to keep it pressurized.
The fuel handling problems would need to be addressed, but I think the bigger problem is where does the hydrogen come from? There's no naturally occurring H2 supply on Earth, so we'd have to manufacture it (probably from water). The energy it takes to manufacture hydrogen is much greater than the energy that would be released by burning it. It really makes a lot more sense to just directly use the energy that would have gone into hydrogen production.
I'm not sure why you think that you need to burn oil to get hydrogen, or why you think that hydrogen isn't naturally occuring. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And you can get all the hydrogen you need from the ocean.
True, you don't need to burn oil to get hydrogen, but you do need an energy source. While H2 may be the most abundant element in the universe, it isn't just sitting around waiting for us to pick it up (at least, not on Earth). To get H2 from the oceans, we'd have to use more energy to liberate the hydrogen than we'd be able to get out of the hydrogen thus libreated (2nd law of Thermodynamics).
Where does that energy come from? Well, today, the bulk of our energy comes from oil, so that's why I said we'd need to burn more oil to make hydrogen than we would if we simply used the oil directly.
Please explain how the use of hydrogen as a fuel would "decrease the dependancy on foriegn oil"?
Hydrogen isn't a naturally occurring fuel. We're dependant on oil today because it IS a naturally occurring fuel, and therefore cheaper to use than other, man-made fuels. If we were to use hydrogen as a fuel, we'd have to burn MORE oil to produce the hydrogen than if we just used the oil directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Homer Simpson knows this plan doesn't work:
"Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
That's where you're wrong. Fossil fuels (oil, coal, and their derivatives) can deliver more useful energy than it takes to produce them. It's a cost-effective equation. If, as you claim, it took more energy to produce them then they deliver, we'd be in a sorry state indeed, and would have abandoned their use many years ago.
Hydrogen is not in the same category as these fuels, because it must be created, using energy. Think of usable hydrogen as a battery. It always takes more energy to fill up the battery than you'll be able to retrieve from it.
That's why I think we're better off with diesel for the moment. Yes it pollutes, but it pollutes less than gasoline, and the vehicles that use it are available today and are moderately priced, and have reasonable performance. Hydrogen and electric vehicles all have the same problems
They're not solving any pollution problem, they're just moving it.
They have a cost penalty (are more expensive than gas powered equivalents)
They have a performance penalty (reduced power/range over gas equivalent.)
Diesel engines don't have any of those problems. There is usually an initial cost penalty, but that's generally offset by the lower cost of fuel and additional longevity of the vehicle.
Diesel still pollutes, and also kicks out lots of soot, which is staring to be linked to developmental lung problems.
Yes, diesel engines still pollute. However, they put out less CO2, less CO and fewer Hydrocarbons than gasoline engines do. They do produce particulates (soot) that gasoline engines do not, but the industry is currently investigating particulate traps and/or catalytic converters that will remove most of those as well. In addition, another poster mentioned that most diesels today can burn Biodiesel, which is made from corn or soy crops, and is therefore renewable.
I still say that diesel engines are a much better means of pollution reduction today than hydrogen. Especially since all of the people who tout hydrogen are relying upon the magical appearance of cheap, effective solar power. If we had cheap, effective solar power today, we'd be running our electricity grid off of that instead of producing it by burning coal. Wouldn't that be a nice thing?
Solar power in sufficient quantities to run even a moderate amount of the automotive traffic in the US is probably decades away. Diesel vehicles could be available today.
Overall, hydrogen costs energy to produce. You can't just go dig it up out of the ground. You have to produce it somewhere, and then store it, transport it, and eventually burn it. By the time you do all that, you've used considerably more energy than just using the electricity, or heat, or whatever energy source you used to create the hydrogen.
Remember last summer, when California had rolling blackouts because they couldn't source enough electricity? Now why would they, of all places, want to increase their energy demands?
Gasoline, for all its faults, still provides more energy than it costs to make it.
I don't think hydrogen is nearly as good an answer as we're being led to believe.
If you want to see more effecient, cleaner burning engines on the road, you should start pressuring the auto manufacturers to bring over more of the small diesel engines that are running in Europe.
I drove one of those four years ago -- it was a Vectra, made by GM, and was a midsize, four door. There was no discernable performance difference between that vehicle, and a similar gasoline powered vehicle. It had plenty of passing power at 85+ mph, and it regularly got 50-55 mpg.
We should be pushing to make these vehicles generally available in the states, instead of trying pie-in-the-sky methods that use more energy, instead of less.
If you connect the serial cable to the Zaurus, it covers the pull-out keyboard, so you can't type while it's connected.
There is a way to modify it so it works, but Sharp still really missed the boat.
I also have some test devices which I use a serial port to communicate with, and I really loved my HP 200LX for that.
I could keep the 200LX and it's serial cable in my pocket, and I didn't have to lug around a laptop.
I bought the Zaurus to replace the 200LX, and so far it's done a great job.
I only have two complaints so far:
I wish it had come with a working serial cable
I wish the address book was easier to port from the 200LX.
Fortunately, the good points - touchscreen, color, CF & SD ports, wireless support, faster processor, linux, etc. far outweigh the negatives.
I definitely recommend trying one out.
I thought about becoming a lawyer, but then I looked at the starting salaries, and decided I didn't want to go back to school in order to take a pay cut.
I'm an embedded systems programmer, and one of the things I'd really like my PDA to do is to be able to carry my code with me when going to meetings, etc. I can sort of do that now with my HP 200LX, but it's honestly too slow to be able to access the entire 500K of source code my current project entails.
What I really want is a PDA that's the same size, consumes the same power, has at least the features mine has, and is just plain faster. I'd like a better OS, but I do have access to tons of shareware progs with DOS as an OS. A color screen, touchscreen, and a backlight would all be nifty, but I do just fine without any of those today.
I really just want a PDA that I can use as if it were a smaller version of my actual computer, and to be able to use it that way, I think it needs a keyboard.
I'm probably just going to have to buy a used Libretto.
Yeah, that's what it looks like in Opera 5.0
Yeah, but does it show the time in binary, using little blinky LEDs, like mine does?
Incidentally, I also think that the LEDs would make a far cooler watch than the LCD display with 1's and 0's.
Hmmm.... maybe I should just make one.
Cool.
Can I use Cave Quake 3 with my i-glasses!? I haven't found anything new to play on them in years.
It was always fun letting friends use the system though, because anyone who wears the glasses while playing a game inevitably ends up looking like Stevie Wonder, turning their heads around at wildly exaggerated angles, trying to control the game.
I used to have to stop and reorient myself every so often or I'd end up with my head between my legs staring at the ground, or straining to try and turn my head around backwards, just to go straight ahead.
Better yet, try and read anything on the screen at that resolution.
They're still cool toys, but I haven't used them nearly as much as I thought I would.
No - My mistake. It somehow got posted into the past. I didn't actually submit this story until Tuesday morning, around noon. I'm not sure how it got posted on Monday night at 8:39 pm.
My guess is that this story was too similar to the original story about Humanoid Robots to make the main page.
The "Air Muscles" are a bit more complex, since they need a supply of compressed air, and all the associated support mechanisms (relief valves, air lines, control valves, etc), but you can make them from dirt cheap materials (the one I built cost me about $1.00, though I had to buy more materials than I ended up using -- however, I can still use those extra materials to make more muscles).
The Air muscles are also a bit easier to scale. The Shadow Robot Co. people claim that four of their larger air muscles can provide enough pull to lift a car. They also have a Usenet post that makes a lot of interesting claims about possibilities for the air muscles. Of course, these claims were made six years ago, and I personally haven't seen the air muscles being used in any of these applications, so there may be some complications that the Shadow Robot people aren't telling us about.
Funny you should mention the PowerStroke in the same message as this. The PowerStroke does do something similar, but only in coast-down situations. When you're going downhill, or slowing towards a stoplight, we'll actually turn off all the fuel, and then turn it back on again when the engine approaches idle speeds. It's a bit disconcerting at first to be coasting downhill and have the constant diesel rottle-rottle-rottle noise suddenly stop, but then you get used to it, and start coasting downhill in higher gears, to see how long you can keep the engine running w/o fuel!
I just finished interfacing my old Nintendo Powerglove to an HC11 based miniboard, so I can use it to control a Holonomic Killough Platform, loosely based on the Palm Pilot Robot Kit
I like the powerglove over a conventional joystick, because it's pretty easy to interface, and it supplies a large amount of data - X,Y, and Z coordinates, roll data, finger positions, and the 16 keys on the keypad (which usefully send data as if they were a hex keypad, even though they aren't laid out that way).
I have most of the parts I need, including the wheels, and I just finished modifying some cheap servos for continuous motion. Unfortunately, the wheels I bought weren't really designed to be driven, so I'm going to have to find a way to attach the motors. The Palm Pilot Robot kit just uses glue, but since the servos weren't really designed to take the lateral stresses that will be imposed by gluing them to the wheels and making them act as as a suspension system, I'm hoping to work out something a bit more robust.
The only problem I forsee is having to be tethered to the robot in order to control it (it'll eventually be autonomous and won't require a tether, though I plan to still be able to control it with a tether.) I think I'm leaning towards a cheap RF solution, so I can sit at the computer, and control the robot wirelessly.
Just another geek hobby (and ALL of the technology I'm using so far, with the possible exception of the wheels, is from the '80s).
OH - and there's no sacrifice necessary - I haven't had to modify the glove at all, and am not really planning to.
I will grant you that if someday, we were to have an abundance of electrical energy that we didn't know what to do with immediately, then hydrogen would appear to be a likely storage container for that energy.
That was part of the point I was trying to make. Why would you hop through so many hoops to use a new energy source (wind/solar - not H2) for a plane, when there are so many other needs that it could be used for?
Also, H by itself doesn't contain any usable energy that we can liberate (except through nuclear reactions). The energy that you can liberate by burning H2 is actually less than the energy it takes to separate existing H out of whatever molecular bond it's already in, to make it into H2. So, in essence, by electrolysis, or whatever method we choose to use, we are "creating" H2, in the same way that if we combined gaseous H2 and gaseous O2 to get H2O - we would be essentially "creating" water out of its constituent components.
Refining oil is not the same at all - we already have the really long carbon chain, which contains a fair amount of usable energy. To liberate that energy, we burn the oil as a fuel - in whatever form we need it - fuel oil, gasoline, kerosene, etc. All forms already contain energy, we're just releasing it through an exothermic reaction. The energy that we put into refining doesn't actually add any energy to the oil, we're just changing it's form somewhat to make it easier to use. All of the energy we get out of it is already there.
Think of it this way: burning oil is like dropping a brick from the top of a building. The potential energy already exists, we're just releasing it. "Creating" and then burning H2 to release energy is like picking up a brick, climbing the stairs to the top of the building, and then dropping it off. There's no useful potential energy in the brick until we climb the stairs to the top of the building to increase the energy. However, in "useful" terms, it's usually better to use the energy it would take us to climb the stairs and drop the brick by directly throwing the brick. Same results, less energy used.
See the difference?
Not so. We're not CREATING fossil fuels, we're just picking them up out of the ground. The 2nd law of Thermo doesn't apply to drilling for oil in the same manner it applies to creating hydrogen.
By the time you add in the 3x volume, plus additional size/mass for the containment vessel, plus additional safeguards (we mustn't let the passengers be accidentally doused with liquid h2, or we'll need some jigsaw puzzle champions at the other end of the flight!), you're talking a plane which has either an enormously increased size (plus, don't forget that additional volume costs a lot in energy at 500 mph), or a greatly reduced ability to carry passengers. Either way, I don't think it'll work.
But even if we could use wind power and solar power to generate electricity cheaply and effectively, it would still make more sense to use them to produce electricity, and then use the electricity directly.
Converting electricity into hydrogen is more costly (in energy terms), and then you still have to deal with the hydrogen storage and shipping, which would require huge pipelines or ships, not to mention the containment vessels required to keep it pressurized.
The fuel handling problems would need to be addressed, but I think the bigger problem is where does the hydrogen come from? There's no naturally occurring H2 supply on Earth, so we'd have to manufacture it (probably from water). The energy it takes to manufacture hydrogen is much greater than the energy that would be released by burning it. It really makes a lot more sense to just directly use the energy that would have gone into hydrogen production.
True, you don't need to burn oil to get hydrogen, but you do need an energy source. While H2 may be the most abundant element in the universe, it isn't just sitting around waiting for us to pick it up (at least, not on Earth). To get H2 from the oceans, we'd have to use more energy to liberate the hydrogen than we'd be able to get out of the hydrogen thus libreated (2nd law of Thermodynamics).
Where does that energy come from? Well, today, the bulk of our energy comes from oil, so that's why I said we'd need to burn more oil to make hydrogen than we would if we simply used the oil directly.
Hydrogen isn't a naturally occurring fuel. We're dependant on oil today because it IS a naturally occurring fuel, and therefore cheaper to use than other, man-made fuels. If we were to use hydrogen as a fuel, we'd have to burn MORE oil to produce the hydrogen than if we just used the oil directly.
How does that help matters?