New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel 380
A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'"
The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.
Why not just burn the ammonia (Score:2)
I'm not sure if I understand the point. Why crack the ammonia to get the hydrogen out-- anhydrous ammonia is flammable; why not just burn the ammonia?
--stinky and poisonous, of course, but I suppose no worse than gasoline.
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Re:Why not just burn the ammonia (Score:5, Funny)
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no moving parts and you can use an electric motor to power it. an electric motor is 95% effeceient, while even gas turbines are only around 45%
math favors the fuel cell. depending on how light you can build the fuel cell and how small you can build an electric turbine motor, this could work well for aircraft, boats, and cars.
battery vehicles don't work very well for ships and aircraft.
Re:Why not just burn the ammonia (Score:5, Informative)
why not just burn the ammonia?
Actually this is possible. From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Ammonia cannot be easily or efficiently used in existing Otto cycle engines because of its very low octane rating, although with only minor modifications to carburetors/injectors and a drastic reduction in compression ratio, which would require new pistons, a gasoline engine could be made to work exclusively with ammonia, at a low fraction of its power output before conversion and much higher fuel consumption
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Their proposal is to reform some of the ammonia to form an ammonia/hydrogen mixture which will work better in an engine.
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Well, make fuel cells which burn ammonia. Problem solved. :-P
I see a problem here... (Score:2)
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Ammonia isn't particularly cheap for it's energy content.
Re:I see a problem here... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no money to be made by selling the world something it needs for just pennies.
Um, yeah. Just ask this guy [wikipedia.org].
Re:I see a problem here... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why the gas companies have power is not because they are magic, but because they sell it so cheaply, yet make a huge profit.
So when you say "damned sure no will will ever allow this to be a legit fuel for cars", you are basically wrong. The proof is that diesel and ethanol additives are also sold as fuel.
If this was cheaper per gallon than gasoline, without any additional problems (i.e. cars still went as fast, no deadly poisons released), then you would be trampled by the rush to convert cars to ammonia.
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And if you removed all the state and federal fuel taxes, gas wouldn't be so expensive (at the pump) either.
Re:I see a problem here... (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes perfectly good business sense. If you were an entrepreneur, wouldn't you be very happy to move to such a technology, drastically undercutting the oil companies? Contrary to popular belief, businesses don't generally make killings because they charge a lot, but rather because they don't charge a lot, relative to other alternatives. If you were one of the first firms to enter such a market (assuming the consuming public moves on this new tech) and make a very handsome profit, charging far more than your input costs. New players will eventually enter the market and big down prices, but since you were [one of the] first players, you got to make a killing. That is how economics works. The market rewards the first entrants to a market via profits above and beyond the going rate of return.
Actually, I think the crux of the problem is that you don't understand price theory. Price is not determined by the cost of the inputs. Rather, society determines the price via their actions in purchasing or not purchasing a good (and of course to nearly infinite extents of purchasing vs not purchasing). The more society wants a good, the higher prices will be driven up (all things the same), inducing more competitors to the market who compete for the lion's share, in turn bidding down the price until equilibrium is reached. (Nevermind that equilibrium almost certainly will change before it is ever reached.)
they'll just make bigger profits (Score:2)
They'll sell ammonia for only slightly less than the equivalent amount of gasoline and increase their profits. The oil industry has been known in the past to fix prices through cabals.
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Right, there's no money in selling the ammonia.
But there's a profit to be made selling the thing that can run on free fuel as opposed to $5.00/gal oil.
And there's a fuckton of profit to be made inventing the technology that allows the car-makers to earn a profit over the heads of their competitors.
This would be a FANTASTIC business.
you can be damned sure no one will ever allow this to be a legit fuel for cars.
AAAAaaahhh, implied anti-competitive practices by the entrenched powers. That's a legitimate concern and if these guys wind up mysteriously murdered and/or promoted to the oil/ga
Now I'm confused ... (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I'm officially confused.
According to wiki [wikipedia.org]:
So, we're going to generate hydrogen, so we can make ammonia, and then we're going to ... use the ammonia to make hydrogen?
Either I'm completely not understanding my own link, or there's a magic step in there which eludes me.
If you're already efficiently making hydrogen to make ammonia,and you wanted hydrogen for fuel, why not skip the step of making ammonia?
I guess the obvious conclusion is that it's easier and safer to deal with ammonia, but my dad used to manage refrigeration plants, and ammonia isn't something you fool around with either.
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Liquefied anhydrous ammonia or water with a tiny bit of ammonia in solution?
Re:Now I'm confused ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it needs to be anhydrous ammonia.
Looking at the paper, what they're doing is
1. Convert sodium amide into metallic sodium, hydrogen, and nitrogen.
2. Convert ammonia and metallic sodium into sodium amide and hydrogen.
They can easily balance those two reactions.
However, if there's any water in the system, there will be a 3rd reaction going on as well.
3. Convert water and metallic sodium into sodium hydroxide and hydrogen.
That 3rd reaction would effectively consume the sodium prevent it from making more sodium amide.
Given how nasty anhydrous ammonia is, I definitely know I wouldn't want to be anywhere near an accident involving it.
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Not to mention that hydrogen makes metals brittle and will slowly diffuse out of a 'solid' metal tank.
Re:Now I'm confused ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ammonia can be stored liquid at room temperature and pressure, has high storage density (NH3), and is the second most commonly produced chemical in the world.
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Yeah, that was kind of my point ... what is the benefit of going through several transformations versus using the stuff you make ammonia from?
That sounds like it does nothing to get us away from petrochemicals, it just changes the form of it.
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natural gas is a serious greenhouse gas, if we start shipping it around and pumping it even more chances are more will leak into the atmosphere.
Also, it is explosive so that is a downside too. Of course we do actually use compressed natural gas for some vehicles (municipal busses for instance) so its not totally crazy, but maybe not the best thing to scale to everyone using it.
Re:Now I'm confused ... (Score:5, Informative)
The point here is that to store Hydrogen you need 10,000 psi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Compressed_hydrogen) and Ammonia only needs 250 psi in a plastic container (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Storage_information).
They are looking at the following problem
H2O+Energy->H2->H2-Storage->FuelCell->Electricity+H2O
and have worked out that they can do
H2O+Energy->H2,+N2+Energy->NH3->NH3-Storage->H2 +N2 without NOx->FuelCell->Electricity +H20
and what they are excited about is that NH3 storage and transport is a known and solved problem industrially and NH3 cracking is now cheap and clean. Now someone just needs how to work out H2O->H2->NH3 using solar and the problem is solved.
There is also the other issue that a H2 leak is benign or a quick fireball and that an NH3 leak will eat the noses and lungs of everyone nearby.... http://www.wral.com/ammonia-le... [wral.com]
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Two reasons:
* storage - ammonia is a liquid at fairly low pressure (150psi/1000kPa). [Unlike hydrogen, which requires very high pressure (10,000psi/70,000kPa), and generally cooling. And the damned stuff seeps though anything (dem H2 molecules are kinda small)]
* energy density - as a liquid, ammonia has about half the energy of petrol (gasoline). Not bad - certainly better than the average battery. Vastly better (7x) better than hydrogen
It's not delightful stuff to handle, but beats the heck out of a highly
Wait, *why* couldn't we do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, metals like palladium and rhodium cost a good chunk of change, but you don't need a lot of them, and you only need them once (per car). You add them in trace amounts to a porous honeycomb-like structure to maximize surface area, and bam, that whole gram of palladium adds $30 to the total cost of your car. Make no mistake, the more ways we have to accomplish a particular reaction, the better, and I consider TFA very cool news... But the cost of the catalyst wouldn't break the bank vs the cost of a new car.
Call me paranoid, but I can tell you a much more realistic reason we don't already have cars running on ammonia - The DEA. I can't buy a goddamned bulk pack of (real, not reformulated) Sudafed without showing two forms of ID, and $Deity help me if I actually need to get more in the same month! On the other side of the meth equation, a convenient source of anhydrous ammonia would make it much easier and safer to manufacture, so no ammonia for you!
Not to mention poisons... (Score:3)
Well, bureaucratic idiocy ignored, there is another small wart on this process.
Catalysts are very sensitive to "poisons" - chemicals that stop their catalytic activity. Sodium amide used as a catalyst has a vulnerability to a potent catalytic poison - that being water. A little moisture in the fuel tank, a little moisture in the fuel lines, and presto. No catalyst.
I'm not saying it's not possible, I just don't know how one would keep that pestilential dihydrogen monoxide carefully excluded from the proce
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You're talking theory and we're talking reality here.
"In theory" your catalytic converter should never ware out. They told us when they made them mandatory decades ago that they'd never ware out.
But in practice, I end up replacing one every 5yrs or so. During the intended reaction they don't undergo any permanent chemical change. But that requires what they're reacting with to be 100% pure. Which is impossible. All kinds of stuff gets into fuel, the catalyst corrodes and we end up having to replace it.
Re:Wait, *why* couldn't we do this? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, first hit on Google [archives-ouvertes.fr], gets over 10KW/g of catalyst.
Keep in mind that weight doesn't matter for (solid) catalysts, but surface area does. If you can spread one gram over a square mile's worth of substrate, you get the same catalytic activity as if you used a kilogram with the same area.
In the future... (Score:2)
Ammonia avenue (Score:2)
And those who came at first to scoff
remained behind to pray
What are the byproducts? (Score:2)
What are the byproducts?
Re:What are the byproducts? (Score:5, Interesting)
For the conversion from Ammonia to Hydrogen: Nitrogen.
Ammonia is NH3, so you'd get mostly Hydrogen and a byproduct of 1 nitrogen atom.
Nitrogen is already 78% of the earths atmosphere, and not a greenhouse gas. So it's not bad... at all.
Once you have the hydrogen, you mix it with oxygen and light it. (assuming you don't use it in a fuel cell)
You can literally put hydrogen into a normal combustion engine and it will run on it.
Hydrogen is 3x as energy dense as gasoline. So it works fantastically well. Newer cars with computers would need some modification. But if you're using an old carborated engine it works great.
What comes out the exhaust is water.
I've actually experimented with this. I have a "Rock crawler" (imagine a mini-monster truck) and one thing we're always dealing with is when trying to go up or down extreme angles gasoline engines tend not to work so hot. They like to be level. Hydrogen doesn't care if its upside down. I eventually went with natural gas. Hydrogen is hard to get in remote areas. But you can get a natural gas tank filled just about anywhere. But yea, if I could create it from stored ammonia I'd probably go back to it. The engine ran a lot better on it than natural gas.
The timing is interesting.... (Score:2)
Well, good thing then. (Score:2)
That ammonia's not insanely explosive.
Ammonia is not an energy source... (Score:2)
Producing ammonia [wikipedia.org] today consumes more than 1% of all man-made power, and natural gas is used as a source of hydrogen. Like hydrogen, it is an energy carrier and not a energy source. That considered, ammonia produced with nuclear heat [energyfromthorium.com] would be an excellent carbon neutral liquid fuel, and is expected to cost significantly less than gasoline.
Cut the crap. What energy density/price ratio? (Score:2)
Because in a world of capitalist systems, that's all that matters. At the moment, I buy 25 miles of transportation for about $3.45 cents.
I'm pretty sure that ammonia doesn't have anything like the energy density of gasoline, and that it costs more per unit of energy. Feel free to show me how wrong I am.
TL;DR: Another horseshit, "we're saved! There's never going to be an energy problem again!" article.
Ammonia is nasty stuff (Score:3)
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, the furthest along are gasoline engines. 100% of all research funds should go to increasing fuel efficiency.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we should spend a bit more money on increasing traffic control and road design efficiency. Every car gets 0 miles to the gallon unnecessarily stopped at a light.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Funny)
Every car gets 0 miles to the gallon unnecessarily stopped at a light.
I'm wondering, instead of using red/green switches at intersections, maybe we can have the cars drive through diffraction plates set up around the intersection. Then the wavefunction of you and car can spread out into the intersection via diffraction and arrive randomly into one of several quantum states (outbound lanes) which head toward your destination. If we made cars and their drivers out of bosons instead of fermions, it might work. Only one fermion can occupy any given quantum state. So with fermionic cars, there's always a small probability of quantum entanglement within the intersection between you and some other guy trying to make a left.
Re: waste of time (Score:5, Funny)
As long as all drivers keep their eyes closed.
Humans are not made of fermions (Score:2)
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I wrote a traffic metrics recording and forecasting program for a transportation research company a few years back.
Roundabouts are the WORST thing there is for an uncontrolled intersection. They're only useful around rural high schools so that kids don't get impatient and rush into an intersection to get t-boned at 55mph. The tradeoff is that you increase fender benders by 10x. For any kind of significant traffic, roundabouts simply seize up.
Re:waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
Roundabouts are a good solution as you said in rural areas and also in residential neighborhoods. In low traffic situations, they work great to prevent having to stop in most situations. But yes, go to Carmel, IN (north side of Indianapolis). Try to go east or west through the town during rush hour (most traffic going north or south). You can't. Block a roundabout with traffic going one way, and all ways come to a dead stop, probably backing that street up to clog up another roundabout and you get a chain reaction from intersection to intersection.
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Your software disagrees with reality [youtube.com].
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That implies that the the reality is flawed. ;-)
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Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know the figures, so I don't know if it's just Americans that aren't used to them, but accidents on roundabouts are much less dangerous. That's a decent trade-off, even if there are more accidents.
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They don't work once you get even a moderate amount of traffic. Traffic in one direction can monopolize the roundabout and traffic from other directions can be stopped for hours. There's basically no control whatsoever.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
Myth Busters took this on for a very congested test (also very controlled)
They got somewhere around 180 cars through a traditional 4 way stop, and over 300 through the same space as a roundabout. I was floored it was that great of a difference, they said because at any given time there were multiple cars in the roundabout doing their own thing. (may be off on the numbers, but the roundabout was unbelievably better in their test)
Granted the layout of the roundabout matters a TON, and most I have seen around here are cram a roundabout in a tiny space so you don't REALLY know if the car to your left is leaving the roundabout or continuing...
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I'm a transportation engineer numbnuts I know the difference, I've designed them. Regardless of how the roundabout is supposed to be used, the fact is a vast majority of drivers treat them as stops. I've yet to see a roundabout that operates correctly and consistently in the US. Most of the states have begun to realize it's futile to try to educate US drivers about them because no matter how much information they've spread they still operate at less than 50% capacity because US drivers just don't understand
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I live right next to one of our town's eleven recent-vintage roundabouts, and the only people I see stopping are occasional clueless tourists. My intersection used to be a pretty busy signal serving traffic coming off the Interstate six miles away, with a residential cross street. The roundabout gets traffic through in all directions much more efficiently than the signal did. Bonus: late at night, the constant gunning of engines when the light changed used to disturb us late at night. Now, late-night traffi
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They still get 0 miles to the gallon technically... Plus even if they aren't running the engine, it probably doesn't turn off the radio/AC/accessories, so they are running on some sort of energy that will need to be recharged. Regardless, better flowing traffic with minimal stops is much better for everyone. Longer battery range for electrics, better fuel economy for gas cars. Sadly, pretty much every city has lights that are poorly timed for rush hour that really screw everyone over for the other 22 hours
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Not zero over zero. A small amount of power will be used, even if it's just powering the radio or infinitesimal internal battery discharge or fuel evaporation/degradation. That energy will be made up using gas. If two identical cars are idling and one has just been jump-started with a dead battery while the other is fully charged, the jump-started car will burn very slightly more fuel.
So, it's zero over an infinitesimal amount = Zero.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Funny)
If your car divides by zero, it's probably a Fiat.
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Nonsense. You are dividing, and the result is undefined - there are no remainders in division except in gradeschool arithmetic where decimals are considered too difficult (in real math the concept is known as modulus, and is a conceptually independent operation from division). Basic first-week calculus can usually even tell you what the result would have been if your calculation didn't have a discontinuity in it - just perform the calculation at shorter and shorter intervals from the discontinuity to determ
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No, technically X/0 equals +/-infinity only if X is non-zero. If X is zero then you need to do further analysis of the calculation to determine the relative sizes of the two zeros at the discontinuous point (limit calculus). Depending on the nature of the calculation from which the zeros emerge the limit at the discontinuity zero could converge to an infinity, 0, 42, 7/9, or any other value. And there's no guarantee that there is a well-defined answer at all - for example sin (1/x) oscillates between +/-
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Whoosh!
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Yeah, because that's a limitless fuel.
Translation: Basement-dwelling pasty Slashdot poster takes time between Mommy bringing down meals to throw rocks at things he doesn't like, thinks he knows what's best, and everyone else is an idiot.
The only match for your limitless ego is your lack of awareness regarding your limitless stupidity.
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How about reducing weight that we all have to drag around with us just to get our bodies from point A to point B. Do I really need to haul around a backup camera? How about a computer to manage stability control? 15 airbags? A plastic engine cover?
Re:waste of time (Score:4, Funny)
So you're suggesting a large portion of the American population get off their fat asses and lose weight so they can increase their vehicles fuel economy?
You might as well ask a starving lion to put down that leg of zebra it's gnawing on.
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Do I really need to haul around a backup camera?
Well, if you remove that plus the equipment it takes to integrate it into the existing display, you've just saved enough weight to bring a burrito with you on your trip. As long as it's not a big burrito. You could save more weight by driving barefoot. Or naked even. And run some laps first to shed water weight.
I really think that if we're to the point where we're worrying about single grams, we've gone too far.
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Well, gasoline engines are the furthest along and they still suck. Trying to make them more efficient is a dead end, that is why hybrids appeared in first place.
Most modern gasoline engines (in cars) no longer have carburetors so technically, they can't suck but instead inject.
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It's also slow, pollutes more than cars made in the 21st century, and a veritable deathtrap, but hey...
So you are saying that you need a bigger, higher fuel burning vehicle to lower pollution? As for the deathtrap, that's not really related to the engine, but the design of the vehicle itself.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
40 years ago, that was the realm of sports cars. Now we have that with dime-a-dozen, bake-potato-on-wheels flagship sedans
build a sedan with a 10 second 0 to 60, which used to be quite common, and your car will be universally lambasted as "sluggish".
even the new kia sedona minivan has a 0 to 60 of 7.4 seconds and a quarter mile just over 15 seconds..
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Your geo metro also accelerates slowly, can't carry much (all 3 square feet of storage space) and get squished in an accident because it's the size of a postage stamp.
Meanwhile, for a little less efficiency, my Honda Civic has pulled trailers across the country (added a hitch), tons of storage room and is relatively safe.
The chances of surviving a real crash in a Metro is slim to none... You go ahead and tell me how that head on crash goes for you WHEN it happens. I know I'm still walking...
I think you miss the original poster's point. Obviously safety standards have improved since the Metro came out. But really, are you thinking that having air bags and crumple zones makes a car less fuel efficient? The reason the Metro gets good mileage is that it is relatively light weight and doesn't have a high horse power engine that allows one to far exceed the design specification of the vehicle.
There is no doubt that a Honda Civic is a good car, but as for efficiency, it is more than a "little less" unless your civic gets around 50 or 60 miles per gallon. When the civic was first introduced to the US in the 70s, it was a very fuel efficient sub compact economy car. Today's Civic, while a wonderful car is not any of those things.
What causes a vehicle to be fuel efficient is aerodynamics and low weight. The engines are more fuel efficient than even a decade ago, but manufactures have used that increased efficiency to build bigger cars instead of burning less oil.
Think of a race car. It's one of the most fuel efficient vehicles made. It squeezes every bit of energy out of the fuel that there is. And yet, it gets lousy mileage (but great HP). What is more efficient in solving real world problems, creating a car that can accelerate quicker without using more fuel than it's predecessor or one that can get from point A to point B on less fuel than it's predecessor. Engineers seem to think it is the former where as scientists say we need the latter.
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we're already close to that! (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm, we're pretty close to that already. About 700 miles give or take. Tesla can do 250 easy, some are pushing 300. So a 1 hr full charge stop (you do have to eat, right?) plus another 30 minute stop (pee break) to 50% charge would get you there. Next year, in the lighter Model X a single 1hr stop might do it.
You'll need a new excuse soon. I suggest Miami to Seattle. People are *constantly* driving that route, so if an electric can't do it, it will never be a success.
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Re:we're already close to that! (Score:5, Funny)
You have to stop? Gatorade bottles grant the full cycle of hydration (just don't mix up the fresh and used.)
Re:we're already close to that! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because centrally planning technology development worked so well for Russia.
Re: waste of time (Score:2)
The whole central planning Russia meme is overused. China is succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams with centralised planning. Every country on earth has centralised planning.
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And on the other side of things is the "no central planning at all, ever" which gave us the streets of the Metro Boston area.
1 hour to travel 25 miles. Realize the joy. Live it. Join my commute.
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China only started to succeed when it dropped the central planning of everything model.
Central planning got them famine.
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China is succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams with centralised planning.
China has a mostly market economy. It still has SEOs (state owned enterprises) but those tend to be the slowest growing sector of the Chinese economy, and they are slowly shutting them down or privatizing them.
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Taken to extreme and you've got a whole nation committed to Lysenko genetics/socialism or some other bad idea.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
Ammonia is very much renewable. The Haber process is well understood and has been running on an industrial scale for over half a century.
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The car CAN be fuel cell based, but TFA was talking about reforming a small amount into hydrogen to form a mixture of hydrogen and ammonia that can fuel an internal combustion engine.
Meanwhile, ammonia is much easier to store in liquid form
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
Ammonia is toxic, but it's not THAT toxic. It is certainly less likely to kill you or leave lasting harm than a hydrogen fire/explosion.
The ammonia in your cleaning bottle is hydrous ammonia, which is a fancy way of saying it is mostly water. Hydrous ammonia is pretty tame stuff. Anhydrous (no water) ammonia, like the kind required for chemical reactions, is nasty nasty stuff. If you breathe the vapors it can cause permanent damage to your lungs. If you get it on your skin, you can easilly get a nasty chemical burn. The vapor is flamable and forms explosive mixtures with air. It reacts violently with a variety of compounds.
Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.
Re:waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Long term, I should think it would be to our advantage to pursue as many different kinds of fuels as we can find.
Because some might be better suited for some applications, and until you have a universal replacement for gasoline, you have no idea of what will be viable.
You're suggesting we decide a winning technology now, and ignore all others. Problem is, we don't yet know what the winning technology is.
Electric cars are inevitable (Score:2)
Actually, we do. Electric will win in every category that it isn't winning now, with the simple, predictable, and already-in-the-lab advances. Mostly, it's already winning anyway:
Simpler mechanically; significantly better torque curves; ultimate performance, considerably more horsepower for less weight and complexity (four 250 hp motors per wheel gives you a 1000hp 4wd vehicle with more torque than you can put on the ground -- you're gonna need a padded headrest and a massive tire budget); higher efficienc
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I think you've played too much Civilization or similar games. Real life does not have a tech tree with resource allocation sliders.
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This fragmented "let's try everything" car fuel crap is getting really old. 100% of all research funds should go to electrical storage for electric cars...
The article here is about using ammonia as the energy storage medium for fuel cells, which are for electric cars
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Supercap technology is one of those that addresses it. Yes, it takes a lot of amperes, but instead of feeding a battery a constant voltage/amperage and nursing it along with its chemical reactions, while watching its SoC and temperature level, a supercap can be charged quite quickly, since the charge is a physical process (electrons stashed at one end of the dielectric.)
Of course, the problem is that batteries have such a relatively low energy density per volume. Get battery energy within an order of magn
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Hey, don't forget asphalt for paving roads and straight up gasoline for cleaning things!
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That's not true they were more common than gas at one point but since gas cars have greater range and were cheaper the electric car eventually lost popularity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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Battery powered cars are have always been and will always be failures. People just don't have hours to waste waiting for a piece of shit electric car to recharge.
I don't see why you say that-- I, personally, spend at least eight hours every day when I'm not driving my car. Often more.
As long as the car can charge up overnight, it won't "waste my time waiting", because I'll be asleep.
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A 5 minute charge would require a charger that could supply about a megawatt (for about 250 miles). Even if you could design a battery pack that could handle that kind of power input, supplying the energy isn't trivial.
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Because charging your electric car that fast would require more than 10x the entire power supplied to your whole house. (Not to mention the cabling...)
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Hell, you can even pump several megawatts over standard extension cord wiring with minimal losses, provided you keep the current under 15 amps or so and instead pump the voltage up to hundreds of kilovolts. Of course with that kind of voltage you're going to want some serious insulation, and probably an active system to detect when a firm connection has been made to the load before applying full voltage to prevent massive arcing.
Re:waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
4. Find out "fresh" battery has gone through so many cycles it only has half its capacity left and find yourself stranded just short of the next "filling" station.
Look, all of these technologies have issues... maybe those batteries made from carbon that supposedly don't loose their capacity will end up being practical in a large scale, that would be great, but also, maybe this design will turn out to be a huge boon for the hydrogen car industry, basically solving one of the biggest problem in hydrogen fuel cells.... how to store enough hydrogen safely to have a reasonable rage.
Now I would be curious how the energy density of Ammonia, converted using this process, compares to that of gasoline which is currently pretty much top of the heap for portable energy density. It would also be nice to know how it compares to the current generation of batteries.
Everyone has their own particular chosen winner/looser but that is stupid. Innovation could come from anywhere and right now we need all the irons in the fire that we can get. We can't afford to put all of our sustainability money behind one thing that may or may not turn out to be the best choice in the long run.
Re: (Score:3)
1) becomes irrelevant, the fueling station recharges the battery at it's leisure, and puts it in the queue for the next person once charged.
2) One word: robots. They could pick up your entire car and hurl it across several city blocks to hit a bug on the sidewalk a fraction of a second later if there was a reason to build such a thing.
3) You wouldn't. Virtually all of these sort of systems rest on the assumption that you don't even own the battery, you just borrow/lease it from the people you buy the powe
Re: (Score:2)
There will always be a need for rare elements.
Besides, even mining asteroids for water will be economical once we have more people in space.