'Hydrogen-On-Tap' Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles (ieee.org) 148
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The city of Carmel, Ind., has trucks for plowing snow, salting streets, and carrying landscaping equipment. But one cherry-red pickup can do something no other vehicle can: produce its own hydrogen. A 45-kilogram metal box sits in the bed of the work truck. When a driver starts the engine, the device automatically begins concocting the colorless, odorless gas, which feeds into the engine's intake manifold. This prevents the truck from guzzling gasoline until the hydrogen supply runs out. The pickup has no fuel cell module, a standard component in most hydrogen vehicles. No high-pressure storage tanks or refueling pumps are needed, either.
Instead, the "hydrogen-on-tap" device contains six stainless steel canisters. Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons. Back in the garage, the driver can replace spent canisters with news ones to replenish the hydrogen supply. AlGalCo -- short for Aluminum Gallium Company -- has spent 14 years refining the technology, which is based on a process developed by distinguished engineer Jerry Woodall. In 2013, AlGalCo partnered with the Carmel Street Department to build a prototype for one of the city's Ford F-250 trucks. In tests, the red pickup has seen a 15 percent improvement in gas mileage and a 20 percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions.
Instead, the "hydrogen-on-tap" device contains six stainless steel canisters. Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons. Back in the garage, the driver can replace spent canisters with news ones to replenish the hydrogen supply. AlGalCo -- short for Aluminum Gallium Company -- has spent 14 years refining the technology, which is based on a process developed by distinguished engineer Jerry Woodall. In 2013, AlGalCo partnered with the Carmel Street Department to build a prototype for one of the city's Ford F-250 trucks. In tests, the red pickup has seen a 15 percent improvement in gas mileage and a 20 percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions.
HHO device... except dumber (Score:2)
The only reason you would want to do this is to modify the combustion performance a bit..
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That adding any significant amount of H2/O2 increases temps is almost a given, the main difference would be if it potentially causes a more even burn... though this is very unlikely without some engineering going into a sophisticated injection/ compression and ignition system.
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Re:HHO device... except dumber (Score:5, Informative)
The claim of "no emissions" is probably untrue
Obviously. They are also ignoring the emissions generated in the production of the aluminum/gallium "buttons".
This is likey an example of AJCMTP: When an ICE starts up and is running cold, the combustion is incomplete and they produce a lot of particulates, carbon monoxide, and VOCs. So by running on hydrogen for a few minutes, the cylinders heat up, and can then switch over to gasoline and burn it cleanly.
Especially in urban areas, cold engines cause a big percentage of air pollution. Reducing that pollution is the likely objective of this research.
AJCMTP = A Journalist Completely Missing the Point
The Problem With Cold Starts [utexas.edu]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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The basic operation of this device is to convert water and refined aluminum into Aluminum oxide and hydrogen. The problem is that refined aluminum doesn't exist in nature, and it is *monumentally* energy expensive to refine aluminum. Basically you pour in huge amounts of electricity to strip the oxygen off. when you account for this part of the process, there is a huge net negative energy balance. This device has negative efficiency when the entire cycle is considered. It is only cost effective because the electricity to refine aluminum is bought at industrial scale and costs 10% to 20% of the normal retail price for electricity.
Not to sound like a broken record but this is the basic argument for putting the most direct tax you can find on negative externalities (e.g a carbon tax) instead of using indirect methods (e.g. CAFE standards).
If what you care about is carbon dioxide emissions, tax them. People and industries will figure out the best way to reduce those emissions. The optimal way to do that (balancing convenience, efficiency, performance, preferences, and so on) will definitely change over time. If refining aluminum using
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Emissions were mentioned:
AlGalCo -- short for Aluminum Gallium Company -- has spent 14 years refining the technology, which is based on a process developed by distinguished engineer Jerry Woodall. In 2013, AlGalCo partnered with the Carmel Street Department to build a prototype for one of the city's Ford F-250 trucks. In tests, the red pickup has seen a 15 percent improvement in gas mileage and a 20 percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions.
So they found a way to reduce emissions by 20% and improve mileage by 15% - probably could have accomplished the same thing by merely replacing the Ford F-250 with a Ford F-150!
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And where do you get the electricity from? You've got to put just as much energy into water to split it as you get back burning the hydrogen, and batteries have a terribly low energy density.
Aluminum on the other hand is extremely energy dense - a bit lower than gasoline in terms of kWh/kg, and about twice as dense in terms of kWh/L. There's a reason it's earned the nickname "solid electricity". The trick is to get it to oxidize efficiently, since aluminum oxide rapidly forms a thin, impermeable gemstone
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I dunno slap a solar panel on the roof and slowly build up H2 and 02... the most beneficial situation with that isn't to actually run the engine on it but to use it to modulate the fuel burn. Some of the highest MPG engine designs are multi fuel as different fuels burn more or less efficiently in different modes of operation. So you don't even need that much... certainly aluminum buttons + gallium is the dumbest automotive idea I've
Re:HHO device... except dumber (Score:4, Informative)
Of course. Aluminum smelters are extremely efficient at converting oxide into pure aluminum. Delivering aluminum pellets to refilling stations would be safer and cheaper than delivering gasoline, and the delivery truck can pick up the spent pellets to take them back to the smelter for "recharging" and reformation.
Smelters are also very often located near large hydro-power plants or other large sources of cheap, clean energy.
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To fuel your vehicle entirely with AL you would have to both fill up on water + a heavy chuck of AL or perhaps some sort of pellets.
Re: HHO device... except dumber (Score:2)
...but not diesel, diesel is higher energy than gasoline, and harder to catch fire (you can throw a match in a tank of diesel and nothing happens)
Diesel fumes are safer in that they rise (gas fumes settle, i.e collect in depressions and low spots) and diesel can't be ignited by static electricity... but I believe diesel actually has a lower flashpoint than gasoline.
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Gasoline has a flashpoint of -49F which means you get gasoline vapors in the air basically at any normal non antarctic temperatures.
Diesel has a flashpoint of 126 and 205F which means you do not get vapors at all... at normal outdoor temperatures. You might smell it but you aren't getting any vapors like you would with gasoline, ethanol, methanol or even kerosene which has a f
Re:HHO device... except dumber (Score:4, Informative)
Aluminum smelters are extremely efficient at converting oxide into pure aluminum.
Sure, but they do this by reacting that aluminum oxide with carbon to make carbon oxides and metallic aluminum. Even if they were to "slap solar panels on the roof" there is still the matter of the coal used as the source of carbon for this reaction.
Delivering aluminum pellets to refilling stations would be safer and cheaper than delivering gasoline, and the delivery truck can pick up the spent pellets to take them back to the smelter for "recharging" and reformation.
I doubt it. Moving gasoline is pretty much a one man job since the fuel is moved by gravity and pumps. Moving pallets/barrels/boxes/whatever of aluminum pellets would be far more laborious.
Smelters are also very often located near large hydro-power plants or other large sources of cheap, clean energy.
They are also built close to coal power plants. Aluminum smelting is a 24/7 process because once everything is hot they want to keep it that way so it's running efficiently.
There's only so many places suitable for hydroelectric dams. If we are going to make this aluminum smelting process "green" then we need to follow the advice in the article to power it, wind and nuclear power. Since wind is intermittent, and nuclear is not, then it's really more about nuclear than wind. There's a bonus of the possibility of using waste heat from the nuclear reactor to help keep everything hot in the aluminum smelting plant. Another thing we need is a process of aluminum smelting that does not require the use of consumable electrodes made of coal.
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> but they do this by reacting that aluminum oxide with carbon to make carbon oxides and metallic aluminum
Hmm... so they do, I hadn't realized that, and it certainly makes it far less attractive. There are other reactions that could be used to cut out the carbon, but not being mature technologies the efficiency would likely suffer badly for the forseeable future. On the plus side, carbon capture is far easier to perform at large-scale industrial facilities than in cars.
>Moving pallets/barrels/boxes/
Keep your powder dry. (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily - pellets flow much like a fluid, and can be readily moved via screw or conveyor rather than pump. But that equipment is probably more expensive and less convenient than pumping through flexible tubes.
I'm only speculating here based on my experience with "pelletized" bulk items, and my knowledge of chemistry, but I can only imagine the problems on handling this aluminum gallium alloy. What kind of pellets have I seen? Corn, soybeans, gravel, agricultural lime, and sawdust come to mind. When these pellets flow past each other they grind each other down, this produces dust. Corn dust and sawdust are known to react explosively at times. Does this apply to a mix of aluminum and gallium? I assume so, finely divided aluminum is used as a component of rocket fuel.
One means to control this dust to to get everything wet. Wet sawdust and similar material will get sticky and make a mess but it's not near the breathing hazard or explosive hazard of dry sawdust. What happens if we wet down this aluminum gallium alloy? It gets hot and releases hydrogen gas. Again, rocket fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We will regularly see coal, corn, soybeans, and such moved by open top hoppers on trains and trucks. Perhaps there is a tarp covering it to keep the dust from getting everywhere and to keep rain from getting it too wet to handle. We can't move this aluminum gallium alloy like this, it must be kept dry at all times. If there is a fire then dousing it with water could only make the fire worse. When moving liquid fuels like gasoline it's kept in a tank, and if there's some water that gets in then that is not a fire hazard and it's easily filtered out. A gasoline spill is very bad, and a fire even worse, but we know how to manage this fire hazard. We can use a water mist and/or something like Purple-K. What happens if there is a spill of gasoline into water? Again, this is very bad but we know how to clean this up. What happens if there is a spill of aluminum gallium alloy pellets into water? Maybe not much, maybe it reacts violently. Did I mention that we use aluminum dust and water ice as rocket fuel?
Perhaps I am horribly mistaken in how dangerous this material is to handle. What I'm quite certain about is that we must keep this dry while being handled if only because getting it wet before it is in the chemical reactor chamber in a vehicle then the energy content is wasted. I suspect by just being exposed to the air means it will react with the humidity, much like how ethanol fuels will suck water out of the air and the water gets dissolved in the fuel.
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How about "ball bearings"? Even imperfect ones would flow far better than most things. You make a good point about dust though.
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Hmm - better yet, how about large bricks? Or perhaps rolls of foil so that more and fresher surface area can be produced on demand.
Admittedly not as convenient as pumped fluid, but relatively inert due to lack of exposed surface area. Stop by the station, pull out the expended gallon-sized power-cells and replace them with fresh ones? Not exactly an ordeal.
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I'm not so sure. Storing and distributing H2 is definitely a problem, and I'm not a big fan of hydrogen vehicles for exactly that reason. This isn't doing that though.
>Hydrogen cannot be a source of energy on earth
Agreed. And it's not being used as one here. Instead it's being used as a short-term intermediate energy transfer medium to get energy out of aluminum batteries and into existing ICE engines.
The energy flow:
Centralized power plant. Could be renewables, or nuclear. Or even fossil fuel plan
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I'm waiting for it to go full Cheech & Chong or Around The World in Eighty Days.
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That's what the gallium is for. Solves the surface oxidisation issue.
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Yes, that part is. It's a car that runs on a combination of gasoline and aluminium-gallium, and produces aluminium oxide and gallium. Which then need to be collected, processed, and the oxide thrown back into the big aluminium refinary from whence it came, consuming a ton of electrical power to turn it back into aluminium. It's a great deal of effort for a small gain in engine efficiency.
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Yep, and doping a catalyst within the aluminum may prove to be a brilliant innovation for aluminum batteries as well.
>The problem is if you have to re-smelt it, you are doing the most energy intensive operation
True, but it's also an *efficient* operation. It's energy intensive precisely because pure aluminum is such a great energy storage medium - about 2.5x as much energy per gallon as gasoline. You've got to put that energy in before you can get it out again splitting water.
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This system allows use of hydrogen as a fuel, but does not store its energy in molecular hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored as water, the energy is stored as aluminum, the gallium acts to prevent aluminum oxide building up and stopping the reaction. The buttons in their canister may well be safer than compressed hydrogen.
The AlGalCo website is fairly terrible and neither it nor the IEEE Spectrum article appear to address any hard questions, such as energy density, economic efficiency or whether there are othe
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Purportedly the energy density is 2x that of Diesel and 3.5x Li
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You can refine aluminum without releasing CO2. The CO2 normally comes from carbon electrodes, which are used because they soak up the O2. It's awfully convenient (and energetically beneficial) not to have to deal with a lot of very hot O2, but it's not actually necessary.
https://www.elysis.com/en/rio-... [elysis.com]
I agree though, this sounds pretty iffy for actually powering a vehicle. They're only using it to produce a bit of hydrogen. An aluminum battery would be more efficient.
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So I guess slasdot is all about fringe science now?
How on earth is this fringe science? The reaction of aluminium with water is incredibly well established completely non fringe science. It's a system storing energy as metallic aluminium. That's all.
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Re:HHO device... except dumber (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean if you want to feed hydrogen into an ICE, just split it with electricity and cut out the "buttons"...store it in a small canister even and generate it during normal operation. I know people that personally claim HHO devices work, but frankly I think it's mostly down to displacement of fuel air and something in there that burns a bit hotter offsetting wear in engines with 300k miles and poor maintenance on them...
it most definitely is not (see below).
The only reason you would want to do this is to modify the combustion performance a bit...
So I guess slasdot is all about fringe science now?
no, it is not. an organisation such as ieee.org would not publish an article without having done their due diligence.
i met Bill Ross, in Canada, the inventor of a (safe) electrolysis system that also splits (pure) water into its constituent parts. it uses Potassium Hydroxide as the auto-catalyst, which is lighter than water and so sits on the top. new water is fed into the bottom to help ensure that the KOH doesn't end up mixing.
not one but *two* companies ripped him off, giving you an indication of how beneficial it is. one of those companies then supplied Pepsi with units that went into their fleet vehicles:
https://www.greenfleetmagazine... [greenfleetmagazine.com]
the mixture of hydrogen *and* extra oxygen results in a *significantly* faster - and more complete - burn of the diesel fuel. reductions in NOx are a result, as is a significant reduction in Carbon (C) soot and Carbon Monoxide (CO) because of the (a) increased temperatures and (b) extra availability of oxygen resulting in not C, not CO, but CO2 as output.
"roll-your-own" electrolysis solutions tend to be quite problematic, and deeply unsafe, hence the reason why you are hearing quotes reports quotes of quotes quack science quotes.
Bill's system got the electrolysis voltage down to 0.6V DC (and over 500 Amps) because when producing the kinds of volumes required, a higher voltage results in heating of the water and the KOH, which results in a thermally-accelerated run-away of the reaction that *cannot be stopped* even if you turn off the current.
he um did actually have one prototype unit go wrong, when using it to generate pure hydrogen from the back of his truck, to power a barbecue. having turned up the voltage just a tad, to get the unit to generate a teeny bit more hydrogen, he knew the signs of what to look for if it went wrong, and just told everyone, "RUN".
he recounts that the 30ft fireball was quite spectacular.
bottom line, here, is that hydrogen is... really quite powerful stuff. 8 times more energy than carbon-oxygen burning, and a flame speed of 3,000 ft per second compared to 25-75 ft per second for carbon-oxygen burning.
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HHO devices "work" but they can't increase system efficiency much if at all.
Since the temperatures are high enough and the alloys used are not treated to avoid embrittlement, any efficiency improvement is offset by reducing the lifetime of critical components like pistons and rings. Those have their own energy cost of production. As does whatever ultimately consumable electrodes are used in the generator.
The same is true of this system. Even if you get superior combustion efficiency you still have to accoun
CONSERVATION OF H2O ????? (Score:2)
Because any industrial scale production of a device which robs this Earth of its potable water is at least as stupid an idea [and arguably a vastly stupi
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The aluminum button is a catalyst to split water... 50% of that reaction is waste heat that would require an extremely complex system to recover the rest is H2 and O2, which you then have to put through some even less efficient process to convert to mechanical energy either a fuel cell (terrible idea) or an ICE (meh I idea). Resmelting the aluminum would release something lie 30% of a normal engine anyway so kind of stupid to begin with, and it doesn't really matter if
The process of "recycling" Al2O3 (Score:2)
Aluminum Oxide has to be split via electrolysis, which is a lossy process. It isn't necessarily cheap. Where are you getting the power to "recycle" it?
Re:The process of "recycling" Al2O3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Aluminum is essentially a battery with higher energy density than gasoline (per liter). And unlike gasoline it's "rechargeable" (through reprocessing) from whatever electricity sources are available. Aluminum electro-smelting is a fairly mature and efficient technology.
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Re:The process of "recycling" Al2O3 (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no such thing as a free lunch. "whatever electricity sources" are fed by fossil fuel mostly.
We can change that. The lowest CO2 producing energy sources are also quite inexpensive. These would be wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Right now nuclear produces about 20% of our electricity, wind about 7%, and hydro about 7%, with geothermal being mostly a rounding error. There's lots of room to grow wind and nuclear in the USA, and this is true for much of the rest of the world.
So are mining operations.
That's true for every energy source, such as the quartz and coal needed for making PV cells for solar power. The movie Planet of the Humans shows the environmental damage solar power does. Again is the quartz and coal mined for producing silicon. Then comes the clearing of land of anything growing for placing the solar collector panels.
Any energy source will require some mining. What we can do though is keep this mining to a minimum. That means wind, hydro, nuclear, and geothermal.
The question therefor is if it would be more efficient to use fossil fuel to produce gallium and alluminium (including mining, smelting etc), or just dump that fuel directly into the truck to run on.
Maybe we should ask if there is a better source for this fuel. We know how to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels. We know how to extract CO2 from the air to close this carbon loop, making the fuel a net zero carbon emitter.
One way to reduce our mining needs is to extract uranium from seawater. There's a lot of uranium in the sea, and we know how to get it out. We will need more nuclear power in the future. We will need dams for freshwater, the control of flooding and droughts, shipping, and other needs, so we may as well get electricity from this in the process. We know how to solve the problems of burning fossil fuels. What I see as a problem are people unwilling to do the math on the solutions. Which energy sources have the lowest CO2 output? Which have the least impact on the environment? Which are lowest in cost? Which are the safest? The answers are wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Natural gas would be better for the environment than solar. It's because of natural gas that we've seen CO2 emissions lower and air quality improve. Natural gas would be better than solar power, and if we had to choose between those two for transportation then natural gas would be the better choice for many reasons. One such reason is that natural gas requires far less mining.
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Aluminum electro-smelting is a fairly mature and efficient technology.
It is a mature and efficient technology. It is also a process that produces a lot of CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Are there processes to produce aluminum without the CO2 production? Yes. The problem is that these are not mature and efficient technologies.
The electrodes used in making aluminum are made of coal. In the process these electrodes are consumed, essentially burned with aluminum oxide as the oxygen donor. These hydrogen powered trucks in the article would be more accurately described a
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It's a hassle though. The used packs have to be taken away and reprocessed, which means time and transportation costs and associated emissions. Electricity can be delivered via a wire and is already available pretty much everywhere. No new infrastructure required.
In other words this will have the same disadvantages as hydrogen. Maybe suited for some niche markets but unlikely to ever go mainstream.
Re: The process of "recycling" Al2O3 (Score:2)
> No new infrastructure required.
Er... yes... and no. We have electrical infrastructure in place, but if every house on a random cul-de-sac suddenly began continuously soaking up 50 amperes more "overnight" than they do now, it would ABSOLUTELY require large-scale upgrades to existing power-transmission infrastructure to meet the demand.
It's kind of like arguments in favor of planes vs trains that say jets don't require "new" fixed infrastructure. An occasional seaplane might be able to land in a random
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Domestic chargers are either 32A or 16A. Modern dual head ones can split the power between two vehicles as required too.
In the UK newer homes are usually 80A or 100A. Older ones can be upgraded. The issue was more to do with the quality of wiring in older homes than limitations of the grid.
Another option is similar to the auto balancing split charger I mentioned, but for multiple chargers say in an apartment block. Again they are already tried and tested and have enough intelligence to make sure everyone ge
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In the US, 50A chargers are the norm for anyone who ends up having to pay someone to run wiring for a new outlet anyway. The only people who bother with 30A chargers are people trying to reuse existing wiring (like a water heater or clothes dryer), or otherwise avoid spending a lot of money on a no-compromise installation.
In Florida, 200A is the norm for a residential service drop... anything less is considered substandard. Not all houses HAVE 200A service drops (I think 150A was the norm for houses origina
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Aluminium production is stunning wasteful in many resources and damaging to the environment.
-you need vast amounts of electricity to stick those 3 electrons back on to a metal with an atomic weight of only 27, which is why aluminium smelters are invariably near hydro-electric schemes, except in Bahrain where 2.5 Gigawatts of electri
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-you need vast amounts of electricity
Yes you do - though my understanding is that almost all of that energy is stored as chemical potential within the Aluminum, so that really it's a testament to the energy-storage efficiency of Aluminum
-you lose all of that heat as wasted energy cooling the aluminium back down to normal.
Only if you're stupid. Unless I'm misremebering badly, heat recycling is a common feature in most industrial-scale smelting processes precisely because the energy loss is so wasteful other
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The sun still works.
Until it doesn't. This usually happens at night.
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Aluminum Oxide has to be split via electrolysis, which is a lossy process. It isn't necessarily cheap. Where are you getting the power to "recycle" it?
The answer to where they plan to get the power for this is in the article, they suggested using wind and nuclear.
Here's a question for the electric vehicle advocates, where do you plan to get the power to charge those vehicles? Whatever your answer this is how we will have to power any replacement for fossil fuels. Solar power will not be the answer, that was made quite clear in Planet of the Humans. The answer will be a mix of wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear.
This "hydrogen on tap" process sounds st
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There's a good bit of work being done on synthesizing alkanes from atmospheric components. It's a promising field.
Great, a few questions... (Score:2)
The combustion chamber will have hight temperature steam in it, is corrosion or knocking an issue?
What's the efficiency of burning hydrogen? I can't think it would be high, around 20%? Mind you fuel cells are only ~50% efficient.
What's the total efficiency throughout the whole process?
What percentage of the operation time is on hydrogen? Can the engine support constant hydrogen without cutting back to fossil fuels? Things I've seen require fossil fuels to run a goodly percentage of the time to "oil coat
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>The combustion chamber will have hight temperature steam in it,
So does gasoline - burning hydrocarbons produces a mix of CO2 and water vapor and the hydrogen and carbon both oxidize. Burning gasoline is very similar to burning a blend of pure coal (carbon) and hydrogen gas.
>What's the efficiency of burning hydrogen?
That's a meaningless question - the efficiency of burning anything to produce heat is 100%. Efficiency come into play when converting the heat into work, which is a function of the engin
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The worst thing for your engine that this thing will put into the combustion chamber is hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, small enough to diffuse into metals and turn them brittle. That's why it's not used on production engines. Experimental hydrogen engines actually predate the first practical gasoline engines. Purpose built hydrogen ICE's use hardened and overbuilt components for durability, and more robust seals.
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Researching & answering some questions:
> What's the total efficiency throughout the whole process?
At best 20%, most of the waste is heat, just like petrol & diesel.
Q: The combustion chamber will have hight temperature steam in it, is corrosion or knocking an issue?
A: As pointed out, normal ICE engines also release some water vapour already, just not 100% like hydrogen.
Petrol: 13%, Diesel: 11%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Q: What's the efficiency of burning hydrogen? I can't think it would be
This is too simple and easy-sounding (Score:2)
1. It's one of the 'breakthrough technologies' that oil companies and automobile manufacturers have allegedly been 'supressing' for decades
- or -
2. It's just so stupidly inefficient, really, that it's just not practical
The alternatives to the above all beg the question: "If this is so great then why haven't we been doing it for decades already?"
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Queue up a bunch of slashdot "we believe in science" stories about magnets on fuel lines and the Detroit suppressing the 100 mpg carburetor.
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Queue up a bunch of slashdot "we believe in science" stories about magnets on fuel lines and the Detroit suppressing the 100 mpg carburetor.
There is a lot of energy in the waste heat of the exhaust, perhaps there is a way to reuse some of it by routing the fuel line through the exhaust to make the fuel really hot just before injection? I wonder what a magnet would do to hot fuel if it was *in* the fuel line?
So many interesting experiments, so few welding skills!!!
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Some manufacturers have experimented with recovering heat from the exhaust with thermoelectrics, as a way to replace the alternator. None ever managed to get the technology compact and cheap enough to use in a production car.
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Some manufacturers have experimented with recovering heat from the exhaust with thermoelectrics, as a way to replace the alternator. None ever managed to get the technology compact and cheap enough to use in a production car.
Interesting. I think 3D metal printing may allow for some interesting experiments with the ICE exhaust manifolds. Like if you pump the fuel into the cooler side of the exhaust so that it picks up more heat the closer it gets to the engine exhaust until it was at combustion temperature and then injected hot into the intake.
It seems so obvious, someone must have tried.
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Wouldn't the downside of a fuel line running alongside a hot exhaust increasing the risk of fire in a collision outweigh the benefits?
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Wouldn't the downside of a fuel line running alongside a hot exhaust increasing the risk of fire in a collision outweigh the benefits?
Not alongside, inside. I'm more curious about what would happen, how the engine would perform if the fuel was used to recover the energy that was being wasted via the exhaust. There is a lot of heat there so I am curious as it seems so obvious.
Your probably right, I only have my own experience from a collision (someone pulled out in front of me while I was traveling on a main road) and the impact crushed the front of the car and pushed the entire engine back. The exhaust pushed all the way out of the ba
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lack of funding? There's a lot of infrastructure involved in this, and that 15% mpg improvement is on gas consumption, not actual dollars per mile, so why would anyone bother before we got into the era of seriously looking at alternative power sources for cars?
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Might be someone fishing for a VC with money burning a hole through their pocket.
Chemist Here! (Score:2)
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No cold fusion required.
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The hydrogen is injected into the regular gasoline
ah no, hydrogen is a gas, hydrocarbon-based fuels (named gasoline in the US, petrol in the UK) are a liquid. hydrogen has to go into the air intake (which needs no modification).
and the engine runs on a gasoline hydrogen mix.
it's much better to have the extra oxygen as well (as you get from electrolysis). merely adding hydrogen alone does not provide quite the same benefit.
You can't run engines on 100% hydrogen unless they're designed for it,
correct. the flame speed results in what's termed "detonation", the higher temperatures require ceramic or special alloy cylinder liners, and if you don't get a complete burn, ins
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No, instead this whole process stupidly ignores the incredible amount of energy it takes to refine aluminum from oxide, it's a waste of time and aluminum. This is just getting some energy back from aluminum production, idiocy.
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It might be worth it if processing can be done with low-CO2 methods, trading clean energy from a giant installation for pushing it into dirtier mobile diesel production.
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It might be worth it if processing can be done with low-CO2 methods, trading clean energy from a giant installation for pushing it into dirtier mobile diesel production.
No way! Turning post-carnot-cycle energy back into heat and running it through another carnot cycle penalty - at temperatures that throw away 2/3 to 3/4 of the energy again before it's available as shaft horsepower, burning 3 to 4 times as much fuel (minimum) would be nuts. Far less loss to charge BIG batteries and spend some power hauling
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Just synthesize hydrocarbons already (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet another idea in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. The solution is to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels.
They plan to use wind and nuclear power to produce these aluminum gallium alloy "buttons" to recharge these "hydrogen on tap" cells. This hydrogen is used to fuel an internal combustion engine. Why an internal combustion engine? Because for all their faults and failings they are relatively simple devices made of very common materials, this makes them inexpensive to produce and maintain.
Why do we burn hydrocarbons for fuel? Right now this is because we can get them out of the ground in near incredible quantities, with relatively low costs, and can be used in these internal combustion engines with minimal processing. Even if we could not get them out of the ground then we would still find hydrocarbon fuels as quite desirable because of a number of favorable properties. Gasoline, kerosene, and other mixtures of hydrocarbons that are liquid at atmospheric pressure and at temperatures common on Earth are useful precisely because they are liquid at these pressures and temperatures. This makes storage and transport as simple as a tank made of steel, plastic, or glass. The energy density of these hydrocarbons is difficult to beat, both by mass and volume.
While burning hydrocarbons can produce CO2 this doesn't mean that it will add to the CO2 in the atmosphere. That's because we know how to extract CO2 from the atmosphere to produce more hydrocarbons. Where will the energy for this process come from? The same place they planned on getting the energy for making these "hydrogen on tap buttons", this will come from wind, nuclear, or whatever else suits you.
Will burning hydrocarbons produce other undesirable gasses? Gasses like NOx? Sure, but so will burning hydrogen or whatever other fuel people think up to replace hydrocarbons. Synthesized hydrocarbons will not contain sulfur like petroleum fuels, unless someone adds it in for some reason. Issues of VOCs, carbon monoxide, and other gasses that might be produced in the burning of hydrocarbons is something we've learned to filter out of exhaust. The air out of the tailpipe of a modern and well maintained vehicle is cleaner than the air that went in. I know some wiseacre will suggest that if the air is so clean then perhaps I should suck on a tailpipe. I didn't claim it was safe to breathe directly. My claim is that it will not add to the air pollution outside of some NOx, and if synthesized from CO2 out of the air it adds nothing to the total CO2 in the air.
Why not just use electric batteries? That is mentioned in the article. Electric cars are fine for people on their daily commute but for things like road maintenance trucks that put on many miles of pushing snow and such the use of batteries to power them is not practical. Also not practical are battery powered aircraft and ships that cross oceans. These need hydrocarbon fuels to be practical and we can make hydrocarbon fuels that are far more gentle on the environment by synthesizing them.
Synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels means we can keep our infrastructure and vehicles unchanged. The change is where the fuels come from. It's certainly encouraging to see people experimenting with different ideas on solving this problem, such as this "hydrogen on tap" technology, but it's frustrating in not seeing people put more effort into synthesized hydrocarbons.
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There are solutions other than creating hydrocarbons. You make many valid points, such as net pollution, where is the energy coming from, etc.
Electrification is the end result that is most desirable IF the storage units are reasonably environmentally friendly, and by that I mean easy to recycle/produce and reasonably efficient/energy dense.
Edison batteries and similar fit that bill, except for the energy density. The question is, are we able to move to something that is not "optimal" for the sake of the fut
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Edison batteries and similar fit that bill, except for the energy density.
If it fails on energy density then it does not "fit that bill".
The question is, are we able to move to something that is not "optimal" for the sake of the future? Right now the answer is no. I believe this should change. We have the capacity to make energy storage that fits the bill, the next step is to produce energy that also meets the criteria and away we go.
The only way to make this change is to make something better than what people have now. We will see people willing to give up some convenience in their effort to virtue signal. To get beyond this requires adding some real and tangible value. Tesla is doing this right. Tesla is making high end sport and luxury vehicles, vehicles that can make other cars in the same price class just disappear in the rear view mirror. On top of this comes conv
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Silane? Are you out of your mind? (Score:2)
If you're synthesizing the fuel, why not silane? Silicon oxide doesn't diffuse into the atmosphere.
Silane? I'll admit I had to look that up. Here's how it's described on Wikipedia....
It is a colourless, pyrophoric, toxic gas
I know why we should not use silane as a fuel. It's toxic. It's colorless. Oh, and it's PYROPHORIC!
One point of synthesizing hydrocarbons is that we won't need to make new engines or vehicles to use it. Another is that if some of it leaks then it won't spontaneously burn. Perhaps this would be useful for a rocket engine but I don't see this as helpful for powering snow plows.
How does the fact that silicon dioxide not
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Its like a hybrid car - but worse (Score:3)
Not clear how this is better than a conventional plug-in hybrid in any way.
The electricity ->aluminum ->hydrogen -> burned in an IC engine is almost certainly less efficient than electricity -> battery ->motor
It seems difficult to control -once you drop a pellet in, you start getting hydrogen. I uses fairly expensive gallium, and requires a complicated reprocessing system.
To be fair though, hydrogen powered vehicles tend to have all of the above issues anyway.
It is probably about cleaner combustion. (Score:3)
Adding a little hydrogen into the fuel-air mix of a gasoline or diesel engine can yield a efficiency benefit. It pumps up the temperature, scavenges leftover oxygen before it can react with the nitrogen. It isn't done, normally, because giving a car a supply of hydrogen isn't easy. Some people retrofit small hydrogen generators, but they take a lot of power from the engine. This could be a workable way to do it.
Re:Its like a hybrid car - but worse (Score:4, Interesting)
You might want to take a look at those old calcium carbide lamps. They generate Acetylene by reacting water with calcium carbide. They DO NOT drop a chunk of CaC2 into a pool of water and let 'em react. Instead they let water drip onto a pile of CaC2 and let that react. When the pressure gets to a designed level, the water stops dripping. Which sounds remarkably like the system in the article.
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It seems difficult to control -once you drop a pellet in, you start getting hydrogen.
From the summary, they've reversed this. They don't drop a pellet into water, they drip water on the pellet. So it can be stopped by turning off the water.
Couldn't making aluminum oxide produce electrity? (Score:2)
If I understand this right, it's a kludge to wring more efficiency out of existing trucks. But maybe a future design could tap into that aluminum to make something like an aluminum air battery.
So, you create the aluminum from aluminum oxide elsewhere, and this is a cost, but hopefully you use a relatively efficient or renewable source of energy for this part. Then you've got something that can get hydrogen from water and also some electricity on the side from the aluminum oxygen reaction. You won't beat
Salting streets?? (Score:2)
Excuse me, but who still salts streets?
Just put some pointy gravel on there like everyone else has been for ages!
And don't call yourselves green, if you keep doing this nonsense.
Notice how they leave out pricing. (Score:2)
How much do these canisters cost?
And what's the general mileage?
Once we know THAT, we can make a value decision in relation to gasoline engines.
I mean, if 4 canisters last for 500 miles and cost about $70, that's not bad.
If the canisters last for 50 miles and cost $300 EACH? Yeah, the value proposition isn't there.
Where does the Gallium go? (Score:2)
Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons.
So what happens to the gallium? Is it released into the atmosphere as waste? Do the magic chemistry pixies just take it away?
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So what happens to the gallium? Is it released into the atmosphere as waste? Do the magic chemistry pixies just take it away?
It stays in the reactor vessel as a catalyst. The water falls on the aluminum gallium ingot and reacts with the aluminum to produce hydrogen and aluminum oxide. Gallium alloys are known to melt easily so I assume that the heat from the reaction melts this alloy and allows the water to react easily with the aluminum, with the aluminum sort of "dissolved" in the gallium. Once all the aluminum is oxidized then the reactions stop. Then the ingot cools to a block of aluminum gallium oxide. The process is re
113 Grams? (Score:2)
113 grams sounds like a suspiciously exact number. There must be some reason it wasn't 110 or 115 grams, for example.
Oh, wait. Would it have hurt the editors to say 4 ounces (113 grams)?
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What's an ounce? Doesn't sound very scientific.
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That 45kg box is suspiciously close to 100 pounds too.
That's a real problem. If you want to be international, you have to speak metric. But just like with languages, something is always lost in translation.
It is particularly bad with cooking recipes, in the US for example, a recipe may call for 5lbs of flour (2.268 kg), because that's how flour is sold in the US. In metric countries, it is sold by the kg. So what are you going to do? Call for the exact 2.268 kg? No one wants to buy 3 bags, make precise meas
But what about the water ? (Score:2)
People forget that pure water is a limited resource and that water vapour is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
If you have a water drought such as in the US, I doubt people will want to put their restricted water supply into such a vehicle.
I wonder whether gasoline is cheaper than water per gallon ? I suspect in the US there is not much difference in price between the two.
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What nonsense are you spewing? Burning hydrogen makes water, right back into the cycle. The natural water cycle's volume dwarfs anything man would ever do even powering our civilization 100% on hydrogen.
The only problem with this article is ignoring the fact that refining gallium takes even more energy than aluminum, and you wind up with aluminum bound to oxygen which of course takes the immense amount of energy to make aluminum (why recycling is such a win, saves the 90% of energy to pull aluminum from o
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no, co2 is the worse [vs water] greenhouse gas.
But even CO2 is a wimp compared to methane, by a factor of 84x over 20 years or 28x over a century. (Half-life in atmosphere is about 12.4 years.)
You're far ahead to burn methane to CO2 than to leave it as methane (which is what happens to it, very gradually, in the atmosphere anyhow.)
thermodynammically this is B.S. (Score:2)
The end result of the hydrogen making is converting aluminum to aluminum oxide..... it is a fiendishly energy intensive process to refine aluminum from oxide, and no unlike what some retards here are claiming it isn't efficient at all, it's the reason why aluminum is recycled because it only takes a tenth of the energy to do that than make aluminum from oxide. This thing is a waste of energy and time, better to take the electricity that would have made aluminum and charged an electric truck.
nah, a reduction of 15% doesn't make a f250 (Score:2)
just like a hybrid, only worse (Score:2)
They're sending electrical power to split water, only to get some of that energy back in chemical form. Just send the darn juice to an electric motor instead.
Perfect example of the principle pointed out in Pl (Score:2)
Count all the resources used to manufacture and transport the fuel pellets, tanks, and the extra complexity to make use of them and it would almost certainly produce less emissions to just burn gasoline or diesel.
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You can see gasoline when it catches on fire. Hydrogen? Not so much.
Pure hydrogen, pretty much not at all. "Hydrogen burns with a pale blue flame that is nearly invisible in daylight."
Story I heard about how NASA, in the early days, searched for hydrogen leaks: A guy would hold up a big sheet of cardboard and walk slowly forward around the rocket. When the cardboard burst into flame you'd found the leak.
Apparently hydrogen is so easy to ignite that any leaks were almost guaranteed to be already burning,
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Since it's a fairly rapid reaction, tiny (nano/micron-size) gallium particles will be torn from the pellet, and if the aluminum/gallium ratio is balanced perfectly, in the end all you'll have is aluminum oxide laced with gallium particles.
It's quite similar to how a block of aluminum with a drop of mercury smeared onto it reacts with air humidity.