Are Nitrogen Powered Cars The Future? 370
_Chainsaw writes: "The local paper ran this story about a retired engineer who has come up with the concept of nitrogen powered cars. The idea is that the pressure generated when liquid nitrogen is changed into a gas state via a heat exchanger could power a car. What are the pros and cons of this idea versus conventional gas-powered cars and the ideas of battery powered and fuel cell powered cars? Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid? What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?" I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too. It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans? Will Nitrogen-fueled trains zip from city to European city?
Bit if you pay attention to details... (Score:1)
RIGHT ON! (Score:2)
Nuclear Power (Score:1)
Re: the way it works (Score:1)
Ah well, that's why I'm in computers, not chemistry. I WAS going to look it up, but I didn't even bother keeping those texts. Anyway, does it really matter, if the curve was different, wouldn't the liquid be under really, really high pressure at those temperatures anyway? Or is it a difference of really really high vs. a couple orders of magnitude higher really really high? Or am I completely wrong? It wouldn't be very effective if you had to refrigerate it; you'd drive your car into the wilderness, go canoe camping for a week, come back and you're 200 km from anywhere and out of gas.
You seem to be under the impression that when LN2 is stored at room temperature, the LN2 itself is at room temperature. This is not the case, because the whole point of having LN2 is usually to make use of the low temperature. LN2 is stored in unsealed Dewar flasks, which are double-walled flasks insulated by a vacuum. As they are unsealed, the LN2 slowly evaporates. This is not a problem because it is dirt cheap. AFAIK, no one actually refrigerates the stuff because that would be much more expensive than the LN2 lost to evaporation. Therefore, if you let your car sit for a long time, you would run out of LN2, at a rate dependent on the quality of the storage in the car.
Re:Nitrogen... (Score:2)
These areas support distinctly different marine life than other parts.
I'll freely admit I'm talking without a lot of actual factual knowledge. What sort of increases of CO and CO2 are found in cities, compared to countryside? Perhaps 5 or 10%?
So we'd have air with 85-90% nitrogen content. Is that healthy? Certainly the 5-10% extra CO/CO2 isn't.
Maybe I'm just making silly-ass comments. It'd be nice if the responses to my poorly informed commentary weren't even less informed...
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Cars... (Score:1)
There are already problems with "jams" of traffic in cities already. I think cars that are 1/3 the price would make it even worse.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
For Americans? (Score:1)
Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?
What bothers me a little is that you Americans always talk about what things apply to Americans when yer referring to world citizens really. Like America *is* the world. Like we (the rest of the world) don't care about this subject.
Please try to be more global since this (I think) is an international news site, right?
No hard feelings though
Fats
Re:Cost of the car 1/3?Pollution free? Yeah right. (Score:1)
A neat thing about gasses is that they're fairly easy to transport. Hydrogen and Nitrogen will most likely become the fuel of the future, but large quantities will of course not be produced in countries that has to burn fuel to get electricity! They will be produced in countries like Iceland, which has a practically limitless supply of free energy from volcanic activity, and it will be produced and stored by countries that have a surplus in their hydroelectric plants. Transporting gas is a lot easier and more efficient than sending electricity through cables. It is also one of the best ways to store large ammounts of energy. I assume that the nitrogen will be drawn from the air, seems like the best place to get nitrogen, so it would be silly to worry about releasing it ito the atmosphere since that's where it came from in the first place. Liquid nitrogen is already produced in large quantities around the world. For all intents and purposes it is a commodity item. All university labs know how to get some when they need it. And the price? Just short of a buck per litre. For americans this probably sounds horrendous, but in Scandinavia, that's cheaper than gas.
A penny for your thoughts.
Re:Nitrogen... (Score:1)
Re:Nitrogen "Polluiton" (Score:1)
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
Re:Local power generation (Score:1)
I think I'd rather just cover the roof of my house with solar panels, that way it's totally free energy, and I think you could get a few kilowatts during the day with current technology, which would probably be enough to charge an electric car and run the appliances. You'd need more efficient appliances to optimize its use, and of course a big bank of batteries to store power for nighttime; or the ability to sell energy to the power companies during the day and buy it back at night. I'm planning to build a small-scale system like that, so that 2 or 3 computers can be "off the grid", to avoid power surges and outages. I've got 2 golf-cart batteries and 2 120-watt solar panels; I just need to get a charge controller, and some 12V PC power supplies, and time to put it all together.
Re:Not that dangerous (Score:1)
When I was an irresponsible teenager I used to put small chunks of dry ice (maybe a cup's worth) into an empty 2 liter plastic soda bottle, pour in some hot water, screw on the top, and get back. A couple minutes of nervous anticipation, and the thing would blow like a mother fornicator. Those soda bottles can really hold a lot of pressure.
One thing I never tried (but thought would be cool) would be to weigh the bottle down, and toss it in to a body of water after screwing the top on. Shallow water = big splash! Deep water = dunno...
Not unless mass/cheap nitrogen freezing is done (Score:2)
I doubt this will fly except in some grad student's imagination.
Those are the facts. You have a better chance for nuclear fusion.
Or even better what about harnassing nuclear waste generated from fission reactors and assembling it intoa power source which could then power all sorts of devices. And when it's gone you just have a harmless number of inert elements. Of course a number of these fission wastes usually can degrade into things like lead which open up a whole new can of worms.
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:1)
I feel cars should be eliminated as soon as possible.
Think about all the stupid places you go
Think about the worlds dependency on gasoline
Think about the air (Thats CO and CFC's folks, Radiation kills. Greenhouse effect is a cycle.)
Think about what is destroyed to make more room for cars<br>
Think harder.
Think about all the fast food you eat because it is convienient to your car lifestyle.
(If you don't understand the environmental effects of the fast food industry Think Rain Forest and Cheap Land for Beef.)
I've read the article. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2000/Aug-13-Sun-2000 /business/14141335.html
It's very vague. A link to some real data about the competition would be useful... (http://www.motortrend.com/ search engine sucks!)
It seems a little embarrasing to think that what is essentially a car that runs on compressed air that blows a fan to turn your wheels what walked away with the award for "Automobiles for the New Millennium" We might as well pedal. The guy even stated that this would not be pratical for 50 years.
What about anti-gravity? What about that 100% automated transit system? What about virtual reality?
(Hey, do you really think we wont have fully immersive VR within 50 years? At least that will save some driving time.)
I'm basically saying Cars are dumb and I hate being dependent on them.
BTW - All homes should be 100% Solar powered. Anything manmade should be 100% bio-degradable and recycled. Hunting for sport should be punishable by death and (amost done) Love your Cats.
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Most power comes from temperature difference, (Score:1)
While you can use very small temprature differences to run an engine, you hit the thermodynamic wall pretty soon. Its possible for a reasonably skilled metalworker to build an engine that will run off the temperature difference between your hand and the air around you, (the plans are available for under $20, Howel's "Miser" low temp Sterling engine [8m.com]) but the ability for convection to keep that temperature difference, drastically limits the power available. Basically, to get one to generate more than internal friction at that difference takes VERY good machining skills, and some special materials (like graphite pistons). If you build one, and it will start itself from just the heat of your hand, you are a very good machinist. Many have to settle for one that runs off the heat from a coffee cup.
Re:Compare this to other power sources... (Score:1)
Alcohol - plant the entire surface of North America with enough corn to synthesize it, and it won't be enough.
Biodiesel - pollutes just as badly diesel fuel (in terms of particulate matter), and replace the crop requirements in corn for alcohol with the crop soy beans of similar size.
Fuel production turn-around time is also a major factor, as well as the materials required to produce the fuel. It seems that the planet's under surface life is a much better fuel producer than anything we have above ground.
David
Re:Another alternative (Score:1)
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:1)
I agree the priority is to find cleaner ways to generate electricity, at any scale.
As for hydro being bad for the river, I sortof don't buy that... it seems to me that the advantage of clean air outweighs the changes in the river flow. Rivers change course now and then on their own, and nature adapts. It bothers me a lot when people propose to tear down dams that already exist and restore the river to its "natural state", because the natural state has now changed; trees grow further down the banks than they did before, and there are new habitats for animals which would be destroyed by "restoring" the river. It's prudent to take steps to ensure that no extinctions are caused, and also to ensure that the rate of flow out of the dam is somewhere near constant (the large, intermittent gushing when there is too much rain and they have to do something with it now are destructive) but I think hydro power can be managed well.
it's not a thermal difference engine (Score:4)
Pick up a handy can of keyboard dusting spray and imagine it's a can of liquid nitrogen. You don't have to keep it cold, you just have to maintain the pressure in the can to keep the nitrogen as a liquid (the difference between it being a gas or a liquid is a function of pressure and tempature). When the ambient pressure in the can drops (you pull the trigger on the can, opening the valve), the liquid inside the can expands into a gas (you may actually feel it "boiling" inside the can). Now imagine you're pointing this can of dusting spray at a small model windmill. The blades on the windmill turn from the air rushing by. This is what spins the turbines in the car, and makes the wheels go round. You may also notice that the can is by now getting pretty cold. The liquid nitrogen in the can (we're pretending, remember?) is absorbing the ambient heat as it expands (this is how your refrigerator works BTW). As the can gets colder and colder, the rate of the gas coming out will slow. If the can gets cold enough, the liquid nitrogen in the can will be able to remain a liquid at room pressure. So the trick with the car is to carry enough liquid nitrogen to make the trip worthwhile, and to heat it efficiently as it expands into a gas so that the expansion chamber doesn't turn into a giant frosty popsicle and stop working.
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
No. The smaller the scale, the less of an effect the 2nd law of thermodynamics has. When you are talking about individual molicules, there is no effect whatsoever. This isn't surprizing, since thermydynamics deals with the movements of large numbers of molicules....
Its like newtons laws, it may be very, very close to the truth, but its still false.
pollution (Score:1)
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:1)
plus, there are projects like the French Phoenix or another Japanese plant, who make energy out of nuclear waste
I think BMW is working on something similar (Score:2)
Re:Environmental impact? (Score:1)
The LN is just a way to store energy.
Clean power generation (Score:4)
The existence of technology like this, and its lack of political support make me frustrate me greatly. The public has an irrational fear of all things nuclear, and thus there is no political support for setting this up on a commercial basis. More people die every year from coal mining and lung diseases related to the burning of coal than died from the Chernobyl disaster, the largest nuclear power accident ever, yet no one ever talks about the "2000 coal disaster" or the "1999 coal disaster." Write your congressman and tell him that you want funding for the IFR project and that you want one built commercially.
Re:Nitrogen... (Score:2)
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:2)
While reading your comment I noticed you said ""free" energy". I wonder how long it will take Jon Katz to start a ten part series on the evils of closed, proprietary energy as opposed to the open, free as in speech energy that makes us all better people. I think that open energy is important, especially in this post-Columbine era of geek persecution.
Note to moderators: If you're looking at this post and asking yourself if you should moderate this as off topic or save your points for a penis bird, I reccomend moderating me down. After all, it wouldn't be fair to deprive one of those birdies of an audience. Thank you for your time. I'm sorry.
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
e.g. see Maxwell's demon. [uci.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not that dangerous (Score:2)
Dry ice in a sealed container is also dangerous, but kind of cool when it starts liquifying and bubbling just before hell breaks lose. The reason why I say dangerous, because it was violent enough to rip apart a metal filing cabinet it was placed upon. Luckly, I was not injured.
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
This sounds like a version of Maxwell's demon, who, like Dracula, gets killed by a brave scientist every time someone tries to resurrect him.
Evironmental and safty dangers of liquid N2? Ha! (Score:2)
You couldn't possibly be flash frozen by liquid nitrogen if a tank ruptured in an accident. Liquid N2 is kept under pressure to be kept liquidous. If a tank ruptures, the Luiquid N2 will spill out and vaporize immeadiately. it's very unlikely, but still possible, that a small portion of your skin might get frostbite if exposed to the liquid N2 just after the tank ruptures, though, but not a big deal, really.
>What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
Where do you think they get the Liquid N2 from? The air is composed of about 70%(I think, dont quote me on that) nitrogen, and liquid N2 is made by compressing air and seperating the liquid O2 from the liquid N2. The Nitrogen just returns to where it came from.
-=The Rimstalker=-
Re:Why Hydrogen will beat Nitrogen... (Score:2)
-=The Rimstalker=-
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:2)
We could reduce urban sprawl, we could build better communitites where people don't have to drive everywhere, we could spend more money on public transportation to make it run more often, and most importantly we could educate people to realize that everytime they get into their car they are causing harm to the planet. It's true most Americans don't care about harming the planet or destroying their chilrens future when it comes time to make a midnight run for Haagen Dazs but you never know maybe we could convince a few of them.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
LN2 Suffocation is Hazard (Score:2)
LN2 working with lots of LN2 all the time is a pretty good way to get a pure nitrogen atmosphere cropping up in a number of enclosed spaces where people are working.
Re:Clean power generation (Score:2)
We've got one, as I understand, at Douneray in Scotland. It doesn't run anywhere near as cheaply as it should, and produces more waste.
Then, as with all things Nuclear, the decommisioning cost when it finally has to go is phenomenal.
Forget nuclear power. It's just a bad idea. And radiation isn't the only reason.
Re:Environmental impact? (Score:2)
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Some math/physics (Score:2)
density liquid 0.97_kg/l = 34.6_mol/l
density gas 0.00125_kg/l = 22.4_mol/l
Sp Heat 1.04_J/(g*K)
Heat Vap 2790_J/mol
Heating one liter of liquid nitrogen (at 77_K) to 25_C (298_K) requires:
(34.6_mol * 2790_J/mol) + (0.97_kg * 221_K * 1.04_J/(g*K)) = 319000_J
So... A liquid nitrogen engine moves 319kJ of energy aroung for every liter of liquid nitrogen it consumes. A portion of that energy is converted into useful work. The exact fraction depends on your engine cycle. Or maybe you don't use a thermodynamic cycle at all. Energy density looks good though.
One thing to remember folks, this technology will not improve large scale enviromental problems like the greenhouse effect. I would be -shocked- to learn that these nitrogen engines were more than 5% efficient. That is, 5% efficient from the fossil fuel at your coal or gas fired electric plant to the output of you engine (not wheels). People on hydroelectric or nuke power excepted
Ryan
ummm.. (Score:2)
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Re:Environmental impact? (Score:2)
Only if you have a 100% efficient refrigeration process, which exists in that wonderful, magical, place where there's no wasted energy at all and people talk to dolphins.
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Re:Then humans adapt (Score:2)
Quite true. You can't just shove liquid N2 in a pipeline.
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Nitrogen... (Score:2)
On the other hand, since you'll likely be getting the nitrogen from the copious supply that is floating around in our atmosphere, the only problem would be the waste oxygen and CO2 at the separation facilities. I can imagine that that much pure O2 getting thrown around is a dangerous thing....
Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:2)
Given that we're stuck with cars for the time being, nitrogen power really makes sense as a power source. One of the glaring problems that people tend to overlook when gushing about electric cars is that the electricity is almost as environmentally-unfriendly to generate as the original gasoline. Nitrogen isn't a perfect solution, but it could well be a major part of the future of transportation.
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
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Why use one fuel? (Score:2)
My first reason would be gas stations. Could they feasibly carry a dozen different fuels? Do different fuels have different benefits? Why not have different fuels depending on the type of car, like how some things -still- use diesel?
Also, with a dozen different fuels, there would be competition between fuels. If gas costs 1.60/gallon and rising people will just stop buying gas-powered cars, or if it gets bad enough, have their cars converted to a cheaper source. No more being screwed by gas companies..
Environmental Impact. (Score:2)
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
It could be almost as bad as dumping millions of gallons of Dihydrogen Monoxide into our lakes and rivers.
Re:Compare this to other power sources... (Score:2)
<I>Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.</I>
The cost to transport and obtain gasoline is incredibly low. This is mostly because we are on the "down" side of the infrastructure curve. All of the expensive stuff (eg refineries, storage tanks, oil tankers, etc) are mostly in place and paid off. Now we are in the "repair & replace" side of the curve. The biggest expense for a gallon (or litre) is the taxes on it. Also, it may be possible to create a gasoline substitute using coal tar, natural gas, or even bio-engineering. I would change it to 'Renewable - maybe'.
<I>Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Liquid nitrogen is INCREDIBLY easy to make. All it requires is a rather mundane staged air compressor, cooling coil, and a drip collector. It is simple enough you could set up a windmill to make liquid nitrogen. We don't go out of our way to manufacture liquid nitrogen now, and you can buy it in quantities as much as you can carry at a cost litre for litre that is cheaper than beer (and WAY cheaper than soda). The big hairy expense with liquid nitrogen (or any cryogenic liquid for that matter) is the storage cost. However, if you are planning on using it fast (a few hours), you can store it in styrofoam buckets safely. Liquid nitrogen has the advantage of being the easiest and safest cryogenic to store.
Exactly what is the pollution produced when you make liquid nitrogen? Liquid Oxygen? Heck, that isn't pollution, that's product. You sell that to all the aging baby boomers. I know. Many moons ago, I delivered cryogenic O2 to older folks with respiratory ailments. It was a great college job. You REALLY get treated well when you are literally delivering people the air that they breath.
<I>Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Sorry to burst your bubble, but burning H2 produces lots of nasty nitrate compounds. The problem is that burning H2 is only 'clean' when you: a) burn it ONLY with O2 and b) make absolutely sure that the combustion products are allowed to cool sufficiently prior to release. Live steam will corrode metals, and if hot enough will react with the surrounding air to make those nasty nitrates and carbon compounds again. The Hydrogen Economy zealots would have you believe that Hydrogen burns 'totally clean'. I will grant that it burns much cleaner than gasoline, but about the same as methane or alcohol, and they are MUCH easier to handle.
Cost to transport/obtain is high. Hydrogen is a low density and VERY reactive cryogenic. It embrittles virtually every metal known. We had to learn how to handle it easily in order to put men on the moon. That does not make it cheap, though.
The cost to make as a renewable is high. This is because you have to split it off of its prefered terrestrial mate: water. It takes LOTS of electricity to do this and is very inefficient. The cost as a non-renewable is moderate. You can create hydrogen gas by reducing methane (natural gas). It makes lots of nice pollution in the process. Then you get to compress and cool it to store it as a liquid, more money spent. This is how ALL industrial liquid hydrogen is made.
<I>Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.</I>
The cost to transport electricity is moderate. Those power lines that everyone SO love to have hanging over their heads lose about 1% per mile. (It may be better now, I haven't checked lately). Electricity itself is expensive, so any transport losses drive the cost up rapidly. Add in lots of nice infrastructure (like substations) which requires regular maintenance and you drive the cost up even higher. The other big cost problem is load balancing. If the loads are not balanced well, then it is costing you mucho money as the 'excess' electricity radiates away as heat in the lines. Load balancing a big area is a black art.
The cost to make electricity is high. You are transforming a fundamentally cheap energy source (oil, natural gas, coal) and transforming it into another form. A big commercial plant is lucky if it can turn 60% of the total combustion heat into electricity. This applies even more to 'expensive' electricity generation techniques such as nuclear, tidal, solar, or wind.
Add to this the horror that is battery production and use, and you make electricity very difficult to use efficiently. Perhaps something like very high speed flywheels or polymer catalyst fuel cells will allow us to better use the "electic option" for transportation.
<I>Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable -yes. </I>
The cost to make is medium to high. Both require the transformation of low density sunlight into plant sugars. This requires LOTS of land. Land is expensive and plants are inefficient. Lets not even get into the issue of water availability. No neither of these renewables is cheap.
There is some production of pollutants in the production of both alcohol and bio-diesel. The primary gaseous product is methane, a known green-house gas. You can capture the methane as a secondary fuel source, but it just adds cost with little effective return. The other biproducts are solid wastes. These can be simple things like celluloses. There are usually some nasty stuff leftover that contains lots of ketones and other stuff fairly toxic stuff. Just ask a distiller what he does with his 'mash' when he's done.
One pollution benefit with corn based bio-diesel is that your car smells like fresh popcorn.
<I>Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.</I>
They are certainly a nice supplement. I would love to see them used more. However, they cannot fill more than a fraction of the current demand.
Forget fusion. Thermonuclear fusion has been "20 years from commercial use" for the last 50 years. We aren't really any closer to tokamak fusion than we were in the late 60's. The current research is underfunded and (IMHO) headed in the wrong direction. There are some glimmers: the modest revival of interest in inertial confinement fusion (e-beam, n-beam, p-beam, and laser), muon catalyzed fusion, and He3 fusion. There even seems to be some substantive data still coming out of the so-called "cold fusion" folks. Regardless, most fusion approaches are going to produce lots of hard radiation: neutrons, gamma & x-rays. Don't expect Doc Emmet E. Brown's "Mr. Fusion" any time soon.
Why the bias towards centralized energy sources? That is the exact opposite of what I want. I want off the grid. Pull down those ugly power lines. Clean up our air. I want a cheap, clean, personal power source that I can use for all my home and transportation needs.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy storage. Some possibilities are non-platinum catalyst fuel cells, high speed flywheels, liquid nitrogen, buckytube hydrogen gas storage pods, and 'perfect mirror' light/heat storage units.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy generation. Some possibilitities are 70%+ solar cells which use micron sized dipole antennas (rectennas) or quantum dots, methane cycle fuel cells, low grade thermal-isotopic heaters, magneto-hydrodynamic generators, and maybe even "cold-fusion" power generators.
Mostly I would like someone to develop a form of electrical power storage that would give us the equivalent energy storage capacity of 100 litres of gasoline in about a kilogram of "battery". Power generation we can do (if somewhat badly). Storage and distribution are the key.
Battery Acid is an unlikely future hazard (Score:2)
A Nevada company Power Technology Inc. [powerpwtc.com], is currently developing a new type of car battery to replace lead-acid battery. The battery is based on technology from inventor Alvin Snaper [powerpwtc.com] and uses a Nickel-Iron/Alkaline electrochemistry adapted from electric cars built by Thomas Edison. You can actually drink the fluid directly from the battery, yet because of improvements in the design, and the lack of lead, it only needs half the space, and a quarter of the weight of traditional car batteries.
this smacks of... (Score:2)
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Why Hydrogen will beat Nitrogen... (Score:5)
The fuel of the future, IMHO is hydrogen. Long maligned for the Hidenburg disaster, hydrogen is a fuel source with a lot of potential. (In fact, it was *not* hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg disaster. Static electricity discharged between sections of the outer skin covering, igniting the highly flammible weatherproofing compound that covered the skin of the Hindenburg. That's why the fire was described as a bright orange - a hydrogen fire would be virtually colorless. The myth of a hydrogen accident on the Hindenburg has attached a stigma to hydrogen that is based on poor evidence.)
The way a car hydrogen engine could be made safe is through the use of advanced carbon nanotube technology. These nanotubes can trap the hydrogen molecules, making them safe to transport. The holy grail of hydrogen/nanotube research is a nanotube that can hold 65% of its own weight in hydrogen. Above that figure, hydrogen fuel cells become economically feasible. Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel that provides a great deal of energy and can power a car with greater efficiency than electric motors or gasoline engines. If someone can create a nanotube storage system (and there have been rumors that breakthroughs are pending - they're at least up to 10% hydrogen/carbon) then hydrogen will become the fuel of choice for automobiles.
Not that dangerous (Score:5)
But back in the physics department, we used to shoot each other with liquid nitrogen from squirt guns. Yow! That gets your attention.
Then there was Frank, who would actually swallow a few drops, and belch long musical selections.
As for transporting it, a thermos dewar is your best bet. Make it out of stainless steel, so you don't have shattering glass in an accident. I'm not sure how much you'll need to have in your tank to fuel the car though, so it may get big, bulky, and heavy.
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bukra fil mish mish
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Re:Methane (Score:2)
Yes, there's a limit. Most modern landfills have a system to collect methane, and larger landfills use it to drive a power plant. But not much of a power plant. After the first few years, gas production declines. The power plants are usually removed, one engine at a time, over the first five years. A number of the dumps along the San Francisco Bay had such systems at one time; the Menlo Park dump still has at least one engine running.
Sewerage treatment plants usually generate enough methane to power their own operations. Sometimes they can sell a little power. But it isn't a big-time energy source.
Most serious biomass power plants run off some kind of agricultural waste. Even that's marginal. The ethanol industry, by the way, is a joke; it takes more energy to make the ethanol than comes out. It's a tax break Archer-Daniels-Midland exploits, not a real industry.
Not as efficient as other techniques (Score:2)
A liquid nitrogen car would need some kind of engine to convert the expansion of the gas into rotary motion, which is inelegant and mechanically complex... and not being able to directly drive the wheels, it would entail a need for transmission, clutch, driveline, differential, and all that other yucky stuff which internal-combustion cars have, but which could be eliminated using a proper electric design.
About the only plus I can think of is free air conditioning (a non-trivial consideration in Phoenix, where I live!), because the exhaust (non-toxic nitrogen gas) is actually quite cool. But in a conventional electric vehicle, air conditioning takes a small percentage of the power necessary to actually move the car, so it's not impossible to have the creature comforts we're used to.
In short I'd expect EVs to become mainstream long before the liquid nitrogen idea does, but maybe it will surprise us and find some niche where it fits better.
Re:Are Nitrogen Powered Cars The Future? (Score:2)
This isn't exactly anything new... The University of Washington has been researching this for a while and has a working (albeit inefficient) model of a LN-powered car...
Here's a link: LN 2000 [washington.edu]
Internal Combustion engine still has life (Score:3)
While things like hydrogen power, fuell cells, battery power and now nitrogen power is potentially great for automobiles, people are forgetting that gasoline and diesel engines are far cleaner today then they were 30 years ago when emission controls first became common.
On the engine side, the rapid development more precise fuel metering, better combustion chamber design, catalytic converters and sophisticated computer controls have cut emission levels on gasoline and diesel engines over 93% compared to 1970 levels.
And today's gasoline and diesel burn quite a bit cleaner than the old fuels, too. Eliminating tetraethyl lead has reduced a major pollutant source, for one thing.
Already, the technology is now in place to reduce engine emissions to almost 98% lower than 1970 levels. The combination of direct injection of fuel into combustion chambers, closely-coupled catalytic converters or particulate traps (for diesel engines) and the advent of low-sulfur content fuels (sulfur content under 80 parts per billion) in the next few years will result in gasoline and diesel engines where the exhaust may end up being -cleaner- than the air going into the engine!
Besides, there is still a surprisingly amount of petroleum reserves we've not even come close to tapping. Much of China's oil fields have yet to be tapped, there are many oil fields in Siberia that have been barely exploited, and the oil sands in western Canada have potentially more oil than all of Saudi Arabia!
Right now, scientists are studying the use of plant products to produce a synthetic diesel fuel equivalent called SynFuel. This could mean that agricultural waste could end up being converted to SynFuel, and we essentially have a renewable source of a diesel fuel equivalent.
In short, technology has advanced to the point that gasoline and diesel engines will still be viable 20 years from now, but they will burn extremely cleanly and a large fraction of the fuel source may come from the byproducts of agriculture.
Re:Another alternative (Score:4)
That's a fundamental concept of thermodynamics..one of the proposed "ends" of the universe is called "heat death." That is where all the matter and energy have been converted to heat, which can_not_ be converted to any other form of energy.
Re:Why Hydrogen will beat Nitrogen... (Score:2)
You didn't create pure hydrogen. 100% hydrogen burns with a colorless flame like methanol does. You may want to check for impurities, because hydrogen fires are impossible to see in many circumstances.
Re:OT: Flywheel (Score:2)
Internal forces acting externally
Re:Fossil fuel Cars will be gone in 10 Years (Score:2)
I think Dr. Hubbert forgot about coal, oil shale, tar sands, and even agricultural byproducts, all of which can be converted to biochemical products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, etc. Remember what coal is: mostly hardened hydrocarbons. We've barely begun to exploit the technology to turn coal into fuels usable by current internal combustion engines. And since the world's coal supply is far bigger than the world's oil supply, extracting fuel from them is still viable for the next 600 years.
I think Dr. Hubbert didn't count on the rapid advances in oil-extracting technology in the last 30 years that has made supposedly tapped-out oil fields viable again and the development of technology to extract oil products from coal, oil shale and tar sands. There is enough tar sands in western Canada to make the equivalent of more than ALL the known oil fields in the Persian Gulf COMBINED.
Re:well, not quite (Score:2)
Methanol on the other hand can be obtained biologically via fermentation, and the plants grown for this purpose will absorb the CO2 produced when the fuel is used in a fuel cell. Thus a methanol economy can be much more ecologically sound than a hydrogen one.
Already available (Score:2)
Re:Fast Food? Stretch.... (Score:2)
Anyway unless your a health nut with a close job or are in olypic trainning and you have a $100 to $500 backpack (Mine is $100 the $500 is a really nice hiking pack) I don't recomend giving up your car.
Agreed. I prefer to go easy on the environment, but must use a car. I DO take public transportation to work, but first, I must drive to the train station!
I would consider a scooter or bicycle to get to the train, but without bike lanes, that's suicide around here. If there were support for environmentally friendly ways to travel, perhaps more people might use them.
In development now? Try "very old hat". (Score:2)
The mistake you seem to be making is in the assumption that a thermovoltaic system could convert heat to electricity without using a heat sink. That assumption is false. Consider the photovoltaic cell. A typical PV cell is maybe 15% efficient, so 85% of the absorbed energy is converted to heat. If the sun radiates at 5700 K (the source temperature) and the PV cell is dumping heat to the environment at 323 K, the entropy change per joule of light is (0.85/323) - (1/5700) which is greater than zero. Even the PV cell is subject to the Second Law, and so will the postulated TV cell.
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Cost of the car 1/3?Pollution free? Yeah right... (Score:2)
(a) "Low Cost." Liquid nitrogen is >-200F. That's cold enough to crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?). What kind of container is needed to hold it and can stand a collision so that it does not shatter into bits? Plastic probably. Composite highly likely. That's not to mention the plumbing, the compressors. Doh!
(b) "Pollution Free." To freeze something takes energy. To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel. So you put in an extra efficiency factor in your fuel chain. You make the City Mayors happy, but you make the people around power plants Extremely Unhappy.
(c) "Safe". Things take can crystalize metal is more dangerous than things that burn. A 3rd degree burns may be survivable. A crystalized head is not.
The "small town engineer"'s nitrogen powered car is a paper design (with all due respects). I remembered doing something like that (N2 powered motor) in a thermo problemset back in school. It's nothing new.
Re:Cars aren't going away anytime soon (Score:4)
Power generation is dirty however you slice it (unless you use solar or hydro or some other "free" energy). Compressing gas so you can extract energy later by expanding it, is just another way of storing energy that you had to generate somewhere. Just like storing electricity in a battery directly.
The advantage over an internal combustion engine, is the huge gain in efficiency of using a big powerplant (where it's in the power company's best interest to spare no expense to make it more efficient, because it helps their bottom line in the long run) vs. millions of little engines designed for performance rather than efficiency. If everybody had a V8 in their backyard running their own generator rather than buying power from the power company, you could kiss clean air goodbye.
Local asphyxiation hazard (Score:2)
This problem goes away if you just include the oxygen in your liquid. Unfortunately, liquid air has a tendency to fractionate itself during evaporation, leaving behind LOX. LOX is fire and explosion hazard (add LOX to asphalt and set it on fire, it goes BOOM).
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Methane (Score:2)
But here's the cool part: They don't make or collect the methane specifically to power cars. It's already being generated by rotting biomatter in landfills. It's just a matter of collecting it and they were doing that anyway and burning it to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions because methane is estimated to contribute 20-24 times as much to the greenhouse effect as the CO2 produced by burning it. So basically, from an environmental standpoint, these 20 cars are free.
There's an upper limit on how much methane collected from landfills can do for us. Not enough methane is produced by our waste to power all our cars. The people involved in this methane experiment estimate that the methane being collected now could power 1200-1400 cars and it's not overly optimistic to assume there could be 1000 methane cars on the streets of Reykjavik in just a couple of years. The CO2 emissions saved by 1000 cars would be 100.000 tonnes per year, or 5% of Iceland's total CO2 emissions. In the slightly longer term, it's estimated that by 2012, we'll be collecting enough methane for 2500 cars, which means a savings of 12.5% of the current emission rate. That's not going to take us all the way, but that doesn't make those 12.5% any less important.
Economy is the big problem though. The methane infrastructure costs money to build and operate. Currently, you get 23% better mileage per dollar with methane, but only because methane isn't being taxed. In Iceland, as in much of Europe, a litre of gasoline costs about the same as a gallon costs in the US and 70% of that is tax. The same tax on methane would kill it.
There's also another way of using the methane. Just burn it instead of other fuels in power plants. It's being done on a small scale already. The Icelandic power grid is fed by hydroelectric powerplants so this doesn't do anything to lower Iceland's emissions, but it can help elsewhere. Many of the other "clean fuels" for cars aren't really much cleaner since they have to be produced with energy generated at a power plant which may itself be running on dirty fuel, but if the powerplant is running on methane, you get a real benefit.
PS. The numbers I user here are from this article [google.com] (it's in Icelandic). If any of them are wrong, I wouldn't know.
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One little detail... (Score:2)
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it is dangerous, suffocation sucks (Score:2)
In the event of a tank rupture (I'm assuming a car would be carrying a good quantity of liquid nitrogen, but perhaps I'm wrong) the hazards from liquid nitrogen are twofold: Freezing and suffocation.
If you are really close to the tank when it ruptures, you have a good chance of getting frozen. If the nitrogen has to fly through air as a thin stream for several feet, it won't likely hurt you. I've had liquid nitrogen poured (purposefully) onto my hand in a pencil thick stream from about 4 feet above it. By the time it had reached my hand it was very close to boiling and vaporized quite rapidly in my hand. It "danced" in my hand like water on a hot skillet (CMA disclaimer: I do not recommend repeating this without a trained cryogenic gas safety expert present, you could be seriously injured if you mess this up). However, having 20 gallons of liquid N dumped in your lap from 1' away would be quite lethal. It is all a matter of range and quantity.
However being in a nice enclosed space like a car presents another hazard from liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen expands a LOT, and strangely does not contain any oxygen. If your nitrogen tank bursts and vents into the cabin of your car, it will drive all the air out of it. If you are unconscious or too dazed to get out of the car quickly you could suffocate very quickly. (it does not take more than 2 or 3 breaths of pure nitrogen before your blood O2 drops enough to make you pass out anyway). The resulting gas is also cold, thus denser than air and will not "float away" on it's own.
Admittedly CO2 presents a much bigger suffocation hazard, but that too is generally not used in enclosed spaces. I guess I am also ignoring the forceful explosion hazzard caused by the rapid expansion of liquid nitrogen insided an enclosed space, but this post is getting too long :)
A fuller outlook may be had by consulting the international chemical safety card [cdc.gov] for nitrogen (courtesy of the CDC).
Re:Cost of the car 1/3?Pollution free? Yeah right. (Score:2)
later
Erik Z
Clarifying a nit on absolute temperature (Score:2)
Everybody uses Kelvin these days, but you get exactly the same results with Rankine or any other absolute scale. You can prove this to yourself by multiplying the numerator and denominator of your equation by any non-zero factor. The result does not change.
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Re:Clean power generation (Score:2)
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Re:Not that dangerous (Score:2)
in your lab. It can really hurt you.
Otherwise it is pretty safe. LN_2 evaporates
on contact with skin so it takes quite a bit
of it to cause a frostbite.
The biggest danger I see with it is if its
container were punctured AND compressed in
a collision. You could get a good blast from
this sort of thing.
Use of liquid nitrogen would be difficult also
because refuel would have to be done by
professionals. Otherwise, a layman would let
water in, which over time could lead to corrosion
and even puncture of dewars. Also, nitrogen
boils more when shaken (duh), so use of it in
a car would be wasteful.
With all that said, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxigen
and inert gases are the environmentally safe
components, so future cars will likely use one
or more of those.
carnot efficiency? (Score:2)
with something like fusion power and ultra capacitors, you get a carnot loss at the generation plant, line losses, but a relatively simple powerplant with a fantastic torque curve (electric motor).
how long til the naysayers finally admit that ZEV electric vehicles are the future?
Gas (Score:2)
This is nothing new, the basic idea: burning fuel to move a car. The fuel you choose is arbitrary, and safty concerns are more or less moot with modern technology. I personally perfer hydrogen to nitrogen, simply because when you "burn" hydrogen you get water, which can than be electrolyzed (via solar power) back into hydrogen and oxygen. The reasons that hydrogen is not currently used as a primary fuel source is becuase of the hindenburg, and the space shuttle challenger, BUT I am willing to wager that no more people will be killed/injured with hydrogen powered cars than with petroleum powered cars (read about it and you will agree). The other reason is because of "big Detroit money" (you know what I mean)
One last point: If you think this has never been tried, then you should do a web/library search for "hydrogen power."
Anyhoo I could go on for hours but I won't.
Hydrogen is a very efficient store of solar power (Score:2)
Yes, but you can use solar power to manufacture hydrogen (e.g. in the Sahara, in the southwestern US, etc.), which can then be shipped in fuel cells to wherever it is needed. The entire cycle, from creation to burn, is thus clean, environmentally safe, and sustainable.
Nitrogen Fuel? (Score:2)
Well, for one thing, the car isn't actually burning nitrogen. It's just using some of its physical properties to store energy.
Burning nitrogen is something that you want t avoid doing in an automobile engine. In fact, your car has an "EGR" system ("Exhaust Gas Recirculation") which pumps a controlled amount of exhaust back into the engine to be re-burned. This helps to dilute the air/fuel mix in the engine and therefore lower the temperature of the combustion. Lower temperature = less nitrogen burning = less NOx emissions = less yellow haze over the city. If your state or province does an emissions test, you're going to fail it if your EGR system doesn't work.
Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid?Well, the risks are the same as carrying around tanks of LPG (liquified propane gas) or compressed natural gas. If they rupture but don't ignite, it'll get pretty damned cold. Since the nitrogen won't burn under normal conditions, I think you're still better off than you would be in a LPG/Natural Gas car. And, I'd suggest, a mechanical explosion caused by a compressed tank blowing up is probably more surviveable than a thermal explosion like a Ford Pinto gas tank.
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?Air is what, 78% nitrogen anyway? It's not an issue. You'll be taking nitrogen out of the air, compressing it, and then releasing it as the vehicle drives. It's not an issue at all, it's as environmentally benign as a hydrogen powered car (but a lot safer).
My only question is what powers the compressors that fill the pressurized tanks of nitrogen? That's really where the energy that runs the car is coming from; it's just being stored in a format that is convenient to a mobile vehicle. (Similiarily, a hydrogen vehicle will not be *powered* by hydrogen, it'll be powered by whatever actually broke the hydrogen away from the oxygen in a water molecule. (Chemical reaction, electrolysis of water, etc.) Hydrogen is just a convenient means of storing and carrying the energy.)
I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too.Keep it compressed to the liquid state in the vehicle's fuel tanks. Release it as you need it. As you decrease its pressure, it will evaporate at a boil from a liquid state to a gaseous state. As it evaporates, it will maintain the usual temperature one associates with liquid nitrogen.
Similarily, when water boils, it maintains the contant temperature of 100c (212F) until all the liquid water is gone. (Or you seal up the vessel to increase the pressure - car cooling systems are usually good to about 120c because they keep the coolant (mostly water with some ethylene glycol to prevent freezing) under a pressure of 10-15PSI above atmospheric. Some later steam locomotives managed to get liquid water to 200-300 degrees celsius.)
It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?Yes. The car isn't going away. Public transit, no matter how good, is too slow, inefficient, and full of derelicts and other disgusting people who lean on you or let their kids puke on your Armani pants. This is why I drive. Now, if I worked right downtown, the economics of parking would probably make me take the TTC. But since I live and work in the 'burbs, and my workplace provides parking, there's no question that I'll keep driving.
Besides, driving is fun. It's in our blood. Imagine asking any typical North American to give up his or her TV sets? Same thing but worse.
Biological hydrogen (Score:2)
One more response for the day before the limit kicks in.... have to decide priorities. <sigh>
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Re:Why Hydrogen will beat Nitrogen... (Score:2)
Negative pollution (Score:2)
Since you're taking the nitrogen from the air to start with, there's no "negative consequences" from releasing that nitrogen. And besides, nitrogen is already 4/5 of the atmosphere and relatively inert.
(BTW I got my one negative "offtopic" karma point for mentioning this technology in an alternative energy discussion about 7 months ago. This ain't new.)
Before you all start harping how much it costs.. (Score:2)
First off; Ambient systems are not likely to work because this is low-quality heat. Getting one to work would be a nobel prize winner. Check out a intro thermo book for some depressing facts about the wonderful world of heat transfer: Simply put: (stolen from someplace I forget)
Yes, using alcohol or nitrogen to power a car moves the pollution up the line, DUH. The objective is to expend energy (see above rules) to make something that puts energy in a portable form (be it a battery, nitrogen, alcohol, whatever). Of course it's going to cost more to make that energy than you'll get out; That's why it costs money! The objective is mearly to put it in a portable form.
We don't know how lucky we are to have petroleum; The cost of powering cars with alcohol or nitrogen would be a LOT more if we didn't have vast reserves of petroleum. I'm just hoping we make the switch to alcohol because lots of people forget that petroleum has another much, much more important use as a primary source of hydrocarbons for making PLASTIC. We use plastic everywhere, and there are other sources, but they all cost a lot more.
At any rate, cars in the future are going to cost a lot more to run, and they'll cost more the longer we run on petrolum products, it just happens that right now, gas is the only way to go fast cheap.
Clarifying the parent... (pre-emptive answer) (Score:5)
So a theoretically generalized heat engine doesn't care whether you carry around a fire or a block of ice, or (for that matter) if you skim along with one ski in a trough of cold water and another ski in a trough of hot water, as long as it's got access to a temperature difference. In practice, of course, you've got to design different engines if you want reasonable efficiency.
Incidentally, being from the frosty Northern near-state of Canada, I'd really rather not have a car without a toasty hot engine. While you can use liquid nitrogen to heat your cab, it's not terribly efficient. However, people who live in hot places might appreciate the cheap, efficient, and simple air-conditioning.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Evironmental and safty dangers of liquid N2? Ha (Score:2)
Yup... anybody who's handled liquid Nitrogen in a confined space knows... displacing vast quantities of oxygen is a bad thing.
the way it works (Score:2)
In this case, you don't burn anything. The final exhaust stream is room temperature (ambient environment, actually, but close enough), so you don't need to heat anything up. As for storage, it doesn't require any energy to store; you just stick it in a container when it's cold, cap it really tight, and it stays liquid because it can't expand into a gas.
To get energy out of it, just let it out of the container slowly. When it warms up it will try to expand and create a high pressure (it will warm up in storage, so you need to seal it in tightly in a tank that can withstand high pressures), which you can use to push a piston, just like in a gasoline engine.
It's a pretty neat idea, the article says it has three times the energy density of batteries, which is not bad. Nitrogen gas (N2, not NOx like from gasoline cars) is completely non polluting, so it's environmentally friendly once it's in the car. Nitrogen is also a renewable resource, so no worries about resource depletion.
There are some obvious difficulties, too, though. Battery energy density will likely improve with new technologies, whereas this won't. Batteries can be recharged on the go with solar panels, also. Fuel cells and gas-electric hybrids will both have much higher energy densities. That means this comes out on the low side when it comes to range before refuelling. I'm not sure about performance. It depends on the pressure, but I would not be surprised if it comes in behind even electric cars. I strongly doubt it will come anywhere near matching gasoline cars. That's just conjecture, though. Safetywise, you need a high pressure tank, and refuelling could be a problem. You will probably have to cool it down until it liquefies at standard pressures, or pump it in at very high pressure so it stays liquid; both methods have big problems. Finally is the issue of compressing the gas to a liquid. That takes a lot of energy, so this isn't exactly free environmentally. If your electricity source is a coal generating station, these cars would probably pollute just as much as gasoline cars.
With all the problems, I doubt this is the way of the future, but still, a very interesting and unique idea.
Compare this to other power sources... (Score:3)
Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.
Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes.
Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable - yes.
Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.
Poor energy density - STUPID IDEA (Score:2)
Nitrogen's energy density sucks
Herewith:
Most of the available energy is from the phase change (using the cold N2 as the "bottom" of an energy gradient running from ambient) For N2, this is a measley 400 J/g (compared to carbon, at 60,000 J/g). So, in going the 200K to ambient, a gram of N can gives at most 600 J of energy. (Specific heat ~1 J/g/k). One horsepower is a 740 Joule/ second. Assuming an efficient car only needing 20 HP, and riduculously high Carnot efficiency of 50%, you need 20* 740 / 0.50 / 600 = 50 gram/s, or almost 180 kg/hr.
Nitrogen isn't even close to being a useful transportation fuel.
Uh, no... (Score:2)
It doesn't work that way. (Score:2)
The way it'll be done is to have a super-insulated tank of LN2 or liquid air at more or less atmospheric pressure; no pressure container, no explosion risk. A pump draws liquid from the tank and pressurizes it to several thousand PSI. This liquid goes through the evaporator where it becomes high-pressure gas, which in turn operates the expander to produce power. This limits the high-pressure sections of the system to a few tubes instead of the entire fuel supply, and cuts weight and expense. A system designed for efficiency will have several expansion stages with a re-heat in between.
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How to make LN2 (Score:2)
LN2 is often made by using an expansion piston process on air. I.e. the air is put into a cylinder and a pisto is drawn out which expands and cools the air. The air condenses and is drawn off. Then the LOx and other trace liquids are allowed to boil off, leaving the LN2 behind which is stored in a double walled/vaccuum insulated tank called a dewar (which others have noted already).
Nitrogen Power Cars Already Exist (Score:2)
http://www.mtsc.unt.edu/CooLN2Car.html
The University of North Texas has been working on this project for a while. Check the website for more details.
Why Methanol will beat Hydrogen... (Score:3)
Methanol can be generated from CO2 and water, to which it, of course, returns when burned. It can also be manufactured easily from vegetable matter.
Like hydrogen, it supports a simple closed cycle using the atmosphere as the return pipe without polluting it with toxins, and can be easily burned or used in a fuel cell to generate electricity. Unlike hydrogen, it's energy-dense and simple to handle under even the most primitive conditions by unskilled labour.
A little added complexity on the manufacturing side for a big payoff in simplicity everywhere else is why methanol is a much more likely "fuel of the future" than hydrogen (methane is intermediate between the two in almost every way, but it's another gas so I'm still betting on methanol).
If we could just stop the damned blind rednecks from drinking it all, we'd have no trouble with supply.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You sure did. (Score:2)
- This is not useful unless you have a large supply of water close to a much higher area you can use for an upper reservoir. If you don't have the necessary geography, you can't use pumped storage.
- This is not something that coexists well with other uses. Fish tend not to fare well when they go through the pumps.
- The net efficiency is only about 80% at best.
- The systems must be huge to be effective. To store 6 gigawatt-hours (to replace one major powerplant's output during the afternoon hours) with a 200 foot rise takes (6e9 * 3.6e3 / 9.8e3 / 61 ) = 36 million cubic meters of water. That's an area of 2900 acres covered to a depth of ten feet. It can't be used for wildlife habitat or fish or much of anything else because it's always being filled and drained. Here are links to sites for the Ludington MI [glft.org] pumped-storage plant, and one for the Mount Elbert [usbr.gov] plant. (Note that the Mt. Elbert plant claims a capacity factor of 15% of its rated 200 MW, and that is probably when running on a daily cycle. If it had to even out multi-day variations in supply from e.g. wind, it would be far lower.)
Storage is the killer for alternative energy applications. Chemical fuels have storage built in, all you need is a tank. When alternative energy technology comes to a point where it can be transformed into, or generated directly as, a form of energy which is easily stored and transmitted, that will address some of the biggest issues immediately. Long before the limits of possibility are reached, cost has forced everyone to do something else. Currently, PV with battery storage has a delivered cost of about $.90/KWH. That kind of cost makes the most gold-plated nuclear plant look cheap by comparison. Ummm, no. An alternative must satisfy the same need. There is potential for alternative systems which incorporate work-arounds to achieve the "where needed, when needed" parts, but this requires re-thinking the system from end to end. In general the alternative advocates have done a lousy job of this. So was I. Hybrids kill pure electrics, because they carry chemical fuel. However, the storage problem is not specific to vehicles. The price of crude oil has been falling in real terms for many years. So has the price of coal. The technology for extracting the raw materials has been improving as well, and in some cases faster than the difficulty of finding new reserves. After looking at that, nuclear may still be the preferred alternative. It's far easier to isolate a few tons of fission products for a thousand years than it is to store and cycle millions of tons of chemicals, especially when those chemicals include ions of toxic heavy metals. For alternative energy to get away from the problem of toxic releases, it will have to move to materials which are made entirely of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These include hydrocarbons and alcohols. Interestingly enough, hydrocarbons are a lot like fats, and sugars are alcohols...Reversing the greenhouse warming (we need the greenhouse effect or the earth freezes solid) needs further tricks. One that I like involves taking the methane clathrate deposits on the continental shelves (which are threatening to decompose to gas, and CH4 is about 200 times as good a greenhouse gas as CO2) and mining them for fuel. Crack the CH4 into H2 and carbon soot, then bury the soot (old coal mines seem appropriate). Burn the H2 in whatever is convenient.
With a few exceptions, those countries are generally producing their electricity from fossil fuel and exacerbating greenhouse warming something awful. China is a huge offender in this regard.In this DOE table [doe.gov] you'll see that the total nameplate capacity of non-hydropower renewable energy generators in the country for 1999 was a whole 2000 megawatts. That is out of a total generating capacity of nearly 700,000 megawatts. The entire nameplate generating capacity would barely replace 2 nuclear plants, and probably have about 1/3 the capacity factor. If it's going to really be an alternative, it has a hell of a long way to go.
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Re:Internal Combustion engine still has life (Score:2)
Certainly, you have to admit that smog alerts per year in the Los Angeles basin are now far less than it was even 15 years ago, mostly because automobiles have become so much cleaner.
But help is on the way: buses can be switched to clean-burning natural gas (like they have in Sacramento, CA), and the advent of improved diesel fuel formulations (especially the drastic reduction of sulfur compounds to under 80 parts per billion) and modern diesel engine design will dramatically reduce exhaust emissions, including the big issue of particulate emissions.
With modern computer engine controls, we can very tightly control the combustion process, which goes a very long way in reducing exhaust emissions.
Re:Not that dangerous (Score:2)
Re:Nitrogen... (Score:2)
There are already problems with "bubbles" of pollutants over cities already. I think nitrogen would make it even worse.
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well, not quite (Score:2)
If it's not worth the effort, why change? (Score:2)
My point is that people will do the same old thing unless they feel a need (economic, moral, or otherwise) to change. People have many needs, and energy is only one of the many competitors for their efforts. The least-effort method of generating electricity leaves more time and money available for other pursuits, and is ipso facto the preferred one. The need is to properly price electricity according to the impacts of its source (internalizing the externalities), and then the problem will take care of itself. The problem is that properly pricing the externalities is a political can of worms of titanic proportions.
I ran a calculation a while ago, and even at enormously increased rates of use we have literally centuries of uranium left and at least a millennium of thorium. In contrast, we have a problem with global warming right NOW. Technology for the positively-renewables isn't quite here yet, so nukes are a great way of cutting the damage in the meantime.--
Re:Are Nitrogen Powered Cars The Future? (Score:2)
From the LN 2000 [washington.edu] car page.
The process to manufacture liquid nitrogen in large quantities can be environmentally very friendly, even if fossil fuels are used to generate the electric power required. The exhaust gases produced by burning fossil fuels in a power plant contain not only carbon dioxide and gaseous pollutants, but also all the nitrogen from the air used in the combustion. By feeding these exhaust gases to the nitrogen liquefaction plant, the carbon dioxide and other undesirable products of combustion can be condensed and separated in the process of chilling the nitrogen, and thus no pollutants need be released to the atmosphere by the power plant. The sequestered carbon dioxide and pollutants could be injected into depleted gas and oil wells, deep mine shafts, deep ocean subduction zones, and other repositories from which they will not diffuse back into the atmosphere, or they could be chemically processed into useful or inert substances. Consequently, the implementation of a large fleet of liquid nitrogen vehicles could have much greater environmental benefits than just reducing urban air pollution as desired by current zero-emission vehicle mandates.
When can we start?
Re:Another alternative (Score:2)
"The essence of the refutation is that the Demon cannot see the molecules unless he uses a flashlight, and thus spends energy."
There's another article here that says that this analysis is incorrect though: http://www.consciousness.arizo na.edu/quantum/qc2.htm [arizona.edu] and http://www.realbooks.com/revie ws/0615/braindrain.htm [realbooks.com] as well.