dmyurych - Slashdot User

Comment Better than Hydrogen Perhaps (Score 1) 1

by dmyurych on Friday November 12, 2021 @12:09PM (#61981567) Attached to: Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia

Being a toxic substance, ammonia may not be the ideal energy carrier we are looking for. But perhaps it's still better than hydrogen with it's inherent problems--explosiveness, high cost of transport, and both embrittlement and leakage when trying to contain it.

Submission + - Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia (phys.org) 1

Submitted by fahrbot-bot on Friday November 12, 2021 @12:40AM

fahrbot-bot writes: A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases—rather than requires—energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The scientists were excited to find that the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required. Instead, this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly, all a much cleaner process than using carbon-based fuels.

"We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented," says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. "To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions—and get energy—is a pretty big deal."

Ammonia has been burned as a fuel source for many years. During World War II, it was used in automobiles, and scientists today are considering ways to burn it in engines as a replacement for gasoline, particularly in the maritime industry. However, burning ammonia releases toxic nitrogen oxide gases.

The new reaction avoids those toxic byproducts. If the reaction were housed in a fuel cell where ammonia and ruthenium react at an electrode surface, it could cleanly produce electricity without the need for a catalytic converter.

Comment New Battery Not All That Innovative (Score 1) 1079

by dmyurych on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @05:28PM (#26349113) Attached to: Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes

I worked in retail selling batteries for a spell so I took a look at the Apple website at what they had to say about the new battery for the MacBook Pro. I would say Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything new other than making it bigger (in part by eliminating the ability to easily remove it).

The entire notebook industry has been moving to Lithium Polymer for the last several years. Li-Poly is still classified as Lithium Ion technology but with advancements over the previous generation of Li-Ion. One of these advancements is the shape of the cells from the cylindrical form to pretty much any form desirable. So this is hardly innovative unless your comparing it to batteries from five year old notebooks.

Adaptive charging also doesn't seem to be new. Li-Ion batteries have always required special circuitry in the chargers to ensure a safe charge as well as prolong the life of the battery (you're asking for trouble if you try and charge a Li-Ion with a straight trickle charge with no feedback from the battery). Maybe Apple's new adaptive charging has made significant advances over it's competitors, but they certainly didn't invent it like they seem to imply.

There are only a handful of large manufacturers of Li-Ion cells in the world (all in the far east I believe). Apple may be assembling these cells into their own batteries but I'm sure there is nothing special about the cells that any of the other notebook manufacturers couldn't incorporate into their own Notebooks as well. Yet from the Apple's website you'd think they had their own chemists and engineers developing batteries from scratch.

So it seems that they crammed a bigger battery into the new MacBook Pro and therefore it has a longer life over a single charge. Which not being able to easily remove does not bother me as long as it is still serviceable (that is replace the cells like you would RAM or the hard-drive by opening up the case) five years from now when it might make a useful second-hand computer. It doesn't sound like they've come up with anything special that would prolong the overall life of the battery either. Or are they exaggerating this claim as well. Does anyone know the typical recharge cycle ratings on any recent and up-to-date Li-Poly notebook batteries?

Since this is something I know a little about, it seems to me to be another example of how companies get away with deceiving people about how something is supposedly so innovative and better than everyone else's.

By the way I have a two year old MacBook running OSX and Ubuntu so I'm not an Apple hater by a long shot.

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