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An electric ferry with a 50 nautical mile range at a speed of 30 knots?
That'd better be an incredibly short transit. Sort of like that electric aircraft operated in Canada that has 15 minutes of flight time.
If you run out of charge at sea, then how do you get the ferry moving again under its own power, or does it have to be towed by a boat with a real engine?
There's a reason I call this special brand of silliness "virtue-less" signaling. It's nothing more than a "me-too" display of utter impracticality, feeding into "the movement" to "demonstrate to the world" how efficient electricity can be if absolutely every other performance metric that actually matters is totally ignored in favor of demonstrating that some vehicle can be electrically powered. Even airplanes can be powered by Lithium-ion batteries, assuming you don't mind an airplane that has a maximum of 30 minutes of flight time at cruise speed, can't carry very much at all, and is every bit as expensive as one that can fly great distances with significant payloads using gasoline or kerosene.
It's not as if we "weren't aware" that you could power nearly any type of vehicle using electricity and batteries, it's that in the past we understood that there was a practical limit to what you could feasibly do with electricity and batteries, which hasn't fundamentally changed because battery gravimetric and volumetric energy density never went up by the order of magnitude that all the pundits predicted "was just around the corner", without evidence. Batteries were so limiting to practical vehicle operation that it didn't merit further development. Emissions controls on modern vehicles are so low that 75% of emissions come from other places besides transportation. Ye olde personal transport, better known as a horse, emits more CO2 per mile traveled than a Corvette's 650 horsepower V8 engine.
Now the "green religion" has supplanted common sense and objective reality, companies that come up with increasingly unrealistic battery transport get "brownie points" for sticking their noses up the rear ends of our climate changers while squandering inordinate sums of public money and resources to create machines that are more energy efficient than combustion engines, but in practice are nearly unusable for anything outside of niche use cases and, in point of fact, consume 3X or more energy to make and recycle, as compared to their combustion engine powered counterparts.
Now then, if someone had come along and said, we analyzed the driving patterns of hundreds of millions of drivers and couldn't help but notice that nearly all of y'all drive within about 100 miles. We can make a battery powered vehicle that weighs no more than a regular car and costs no more than a regular car to make, because the energy required is equivalent, and we came up with a practical way to recycle the major components in the car, especially the all-important batteries, then I can totally see the logic behind that and get behind producing practical electric vehicles that are, in point of fact, better for both the environment and your bottom line from Day 1. Not only that, but you get a full size car that doesn't look like some wonky sci-fi movie abortion in the name of some nearly meaningless efficiency improvement that ends up doubling or tripling the cost of the materials / labor / manufacturing machinery. Said practical vehicle also shouldn't require more computing power or total parts count than a Space Shuttle. It's a car, after all, not a sci-fi movie fantasy intended to make your daily commuter car feel "futuristic" because it's a bit more efficient than a combustion engine.
There is so much rock solid logic behind that approach that naturally, it was totally ignored in favor of all the oddball ideas that the oddballs market to their fellow oddballs. People want reliable and affordable cars that provide a modicum of comfort, and a touch of style. Most of them don't want, let alone need, a Space Shuttle on wheels.
The Aptera immediately comes to mind. If we make the car out of Carbon Fiber, shape it like the fuselage of an aircraft instead of a car, use 3 wheels instead of 4 while claiming it's more stable than 4 wheels, which is an outright absurdity, and cover it with solar panels, then we wind up with a futuristic looking gadget that only seats 2 people and still can't charge the battery fast enough for it to provide any meaningful amount of energy unless you live in a desert and don't drive much. If you absolutely must put some solar panels on the car to satisfy complexity and futurism cravings, then the most practical use is to provide power for AC, even when the vehicle is not running, possibly preventing some driver who accidentally leaves their child in the car from coming back to discover that humans don't live very long at 160F.
Ignoring the fact that all those fancy lightweight materials would get obliterated in a crash involving a Ford Fiesta, yes the Aptera looks very cool. Yes, I like the concept, but that's not the point. Aptera is not a practical car and everybody knows it. When it comes time to recycle that? Forget about it.
Aptera is essentially 1/2 the seating capacity of a Cirrus SR-20 or SR-22, the most mass-produced General Aviation airframe beyond the year 2000. A brand new Cirrus costs $750,000. The engine is about $125,000, the avionics are typically another $100,000, and the airframe itself accounts for everything else. Unlike the Aptera, 7,645 Cirrus SR-20 and SR-22 airframes have been manufactured, most being the newer SR-22 model. SR-22's empty weight is 2,224lbs and operating empty weight is 2,450lbs. Aptera weighs 1,800lbs with a 60kWh battery. If we presume 2/3rds of the SR-22's airframe weight is wings, aft fuselage, empennage, and landing gear, then both vehicles have nearly identical amounts of high-modulus CFRP incorporated into their fuselages. The Cirrus' 310hp twin-turbocharged Continental IO-550 weighs about 600lbs, IIRC, which means 1,624lbs is everything else (fuselage, wings, empennage). The landing gear probably weight about 150lbs, so figure 1,474lbs is the airframe proper. The wing and empennage account for the bulk of the weight in most well-designed aircraft, since these are load-bearing structures. I'd be shocked if the fuselage weighed more than 600lbs or so. Nissan's new 60kWh battery weighs 900lbs, meaning 900lbs for absolutely everything else in the Aptera. Figure on 300lbs for the wheels, steering gear, suspension, and electric motors. Long story short, the ultra-expensive molded / vacuum-bagged CFRP structures for both vehicles are about the same weight and therefore exactly the same cost. Aptera is claiming $26,000 USD to $54,000 USD for the entire vehicle. About $15,000 USD of that cost will be the battery alone.
A SR-22's fuselage is nowhere near that cheap. Sure, FAA red tape and low production volumes add to the cost, but the cost drivers in serial production large composite parts are materials and labor for hand-layup of parts. If Aptera passes NHTSA testing for highway vehicles, then their production cost will surely match all other vehicles using similar quantities of CFRP, which is essentially limited to high-end sports cars and "super cars". Companies like Boeing and Airbus can afford automatic tape-winding machines that make very large CFRP structures less labor-intensive and therefore more cost-effective to produce per kilo of materials consumed, but who here thinks costs will be remarkably different for a low-volume road vehicle using the same materials and fabrication methods as aircraft?
Vehicles like the Aptera are bright shining examples of everything wrong with the EV industry. The idea is spectacular, but the execution is where it all falls apart. If you can really make an all-CFRP car body that costs 1/5th to 1/10th of what it costs other automotive and aerospace OEMs, then great, because they need some pointers on how to do it cheaper / better / faster. The probability of that happening is near-zero, because nonsense like this is vaporware. So long as someone keeps throwing money at Aptera, they'll keep tinkering with their super-cool but wildly impractical design, from a mass-production standpoint. For serial mass-production this design is a non-starter, because it's no different than any other high-end sports car or GA aircraft fuselage. BMW's i3 EV design probably came the closest to a practical integration of CFRP and plastic into a mass-producible chassis design, but even that was built on top of a metal frame to handle the beating that it receives during daily driving.
We can sum up so many of these completely misguided development efforts like so:
We spent a bat guano crazy amount of money on engineering effort to come up with something we can't mass-produce for any reasonable cost, so that the most wealthy amongst you have another luxury toy / virtue-less signaling "status symbol" to demonstrate to the rest of you mere mortals how disinterested we are in your plight while we screw you over at every opportunity presented.
The other concept demonstrated here is that so long as you pay your engineers, then no matter what level of overall absurdity there is to your "futurism" idea, they'll try to come up with something to please the people cutting their paychecks, rather than telling them, "No, those concepts don't work together the way you want them to, and what you want can't be had for any reasonable amount of money or effort."
At a grand scale, this is how we wound up with absurdities like the F-35B. The engineering staff at Lockheed-Martin refused to tell the US government, "Hey, look fellas, the words stealth, supersonic, and vertical take-off don't belong together in the same sentence. You can have one of the three per airframe, but not all three in the same airframe. This is going to cost you way more than it's actually worth, even if it can be made to work at some level." In point of fact, some of the engineers told the government this right before they quit.
Is the F-35 still a great aircraft?
Every pilot who has ever flown one, regardless of service or national origin, has stated that they don't want anything else after flying one.
If money is no object, then you can make nearly any idea, no matter how utterly impractical, at least give the appearance of working at some level. However, there must be some reason why Tesla sells so many more Model 3s than any other model. They hit on something that works for them, and it's more economical than all their other models, which is why it's so successful.
If Tesla had started with a much lighter Model 3 with a 100 mile range that only cost, say $20,000 USD, they would have all but cornered the market on new car sales in America, provided that they could keep up with demand. For every Corvette that GM sells, they probably sell 100 or more Cruze or Malibu or Impala models. Yes, the Corvette is super-cool. It's also super-expensive and has a real hard time going over the speed bumps in grocery store parking lots.
ARS Technica - The Internet needs to stop getting excited by vaporware EVs
What's the point to this rant?
If you want to increase the rate of EV adoption, then stop blowing mad money on futurism nonsense and start making practical and affordable vehicles that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could walk into a dealer showroom, plunk down the money, and then drive away in a new EV that he can affordably own and use under every day driving conditions. The battery technology to go 400+ miles without spending inordinate amounts of energy and money simply doesn't exist yet. Trying to force it into existence through inordinate cost and resource consumption isn't working. You're fighting against basic physics, and physics always wins. That doesn't make the basic EV passenger car or concept of using less energy for mundane activties like going to work / school / to the store, via practical forms of electrification, any less useful for 90% of everyday use cases. You're only going to sell so many Corvettes, and your target market is pretty small. The rest of us have no use for or interest in owning a Corvette or vehicle that performs the way a Corvette does, which is a weekend play toy for the rich, for all intents and purposes.
Until some automotive manufacturer out there finally "gets it", I won't be buying an EV. The juice isn't worth the squeeze on my wallet and the claims that I'm "saving the planet" by doing so are dubious at best. Every modern car made is beautiful but ultimately disposable trash. They're clearly made to function as disposable appliances, rather than durable goods capable of lasting long enough for that "energy payback" period to kick in. If you have to artificially inflate the price of gasoline to make it appear otherwise, then it's because the premise of your argument is false and you're simply trying to manipulate people into doing what you want them to do. Nobody had to be manipulated into using cars instead of horses. It was self-evident which one was more practical, given the amount of horse manure left on the streets of the average city. If the horse ever ran out of food or over-heated or froze, then it died and you had to buy a new horse. The car just sat there until you refilled the gas tank, let it cool off, or warmed it up by running the engine. If they're going to insist on building cars like kitchen appliances, and they all do, then they sure as hell better actually be cheaper for the consumer to own and operate, because most of us can tell when we're getting charged more money for the same product, or a lot more money for a less capable product. Most of us could tolerate the reduced range, but we can't tolerate triple the price for a car that's half the size of what we previously had and maybe 2/3rds of the range under ideal operating conditions.
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Agreed Kbd512. In the specific context of a short range passenger transport ferry, a battery electric solution is certainly technically achievable. But is it really the optimum solution from a lifetime cost, reliability and resource consumption perspective? It is possible to build a lot of things that basically work from a technical viewpoint. Electric cars are a good case in point. Because they work at a prototype level, many people assume they can provide a solution.
But this solution looks extremely problematic as soon as we attempt to scale it from prototype to mass market solution. Suddenly it becomes clear that its material resource requirements are very high. Its embodied energy requirements are high and much of that energy must be provided by fossil fuels. Scaling it as a replacement for the ICE places severe demands on the worlds copper, cobalt and lithium resources. This is very problematic in a world where global supply chains are breaking down. It isn't recyclable. It places demand spikes on the electric grid that will be very difficult and expensive to meet if it ever replaces a large fraction of the ICE road fleet.
Now consider that cars only account for 20% of total oil based energy consumption worldwide. Most of it gasoline. If we stop burning gasoline in cars, we have a gasoline disposal problem, given that asphalt, diesel, kerosene and naptha are still needed for things that cannot run on batteries. Irony of ironies: we could eventually end up burning gasoline in GTs to meet the peak power demands imposed by EV charging on the grid! Wouldn't that be a comedy twist?
So what looks like a promissing solution from an end use perspective, is actually a disasterous idea when expanded at scale. Most people don't see it because they look at it from an end-use rather a systems perspective. And most people are happy to ignore underlying problems if they find the solution aesthetically pleasing.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-28 08:26:35)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For kbd512 and Calliban re posts on electric ferry ...
Each of you made interesting and thought provoking points....
To the point raised by kbd512 about range ... I asked Google, and got this:
2016 Highlights of Ferry Operations in the United States
www.bts.gov › 2016-highlights-ferry-operations-united-states-0
Nov 2, 2017 · Ferries are used for a variety of reasons: to cross water in rural ... miles,7 with an average distance of 11.9 nautical miles per route ...
A builder wanting to serve 80% of that market would appear (to me at least) to be secure with a fifty mile range.
Buyers who live in regions where air pollution is under strong pressure will like the benefits of clean operation, and all the old belching craft can be sold to nations where pollution is not (yet) recognized as a problem.
The feature that ** really ** caught my eye is the speed of operation .... Asking Google again:
How fast do ferry boats move?
Fast RoPax ferries are conventional ferries with a large garage intake and a relatively large passenger capacity, with conventional diesel propulsion and propellers that sail over 25 knots (46 km/h; 29 mph).
It would ** appear ** that a 30 mile per hour running speed would match the "Fast RoPax" design.
Without more detail I can't be sure, but I'm expecting to find that most ferries do not approach that operating speed.
***
For Calliban ... your words reminded me of James Watt, so I asked Google for a refresher on his distinguished career....
If there were ever a time to nip a bad idea in the bud, that was the time!
The development of coal fired steam engines marked the beginning of the global disaster we see today.
Humans were getting along just fine with sail, and they were killing each other at a marvelous rate with simple instruments of destruction.
We (humans) are now faced with the full magnitude of that terrible idea's full expression.
And yes, I know that Watt only improved an earlier design. He should have bought the patents and burned them.
(th)
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Another news article on the same idea
World's fastest electric “flying”ferry to cut commute time in half
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/06/2 … cars-and-m
'“There’s no other ship that has this kind of active electronic stabilisation. Flying aboard the P-12 Shuttle in rough seas will feel more like being on a modern express train than on a boat: it’s quiet, smooth and stable,” Erik Eklund, Vice President of Commercial Vessels at Candela, said.'
I guess it could be an effective emergency route and Rush hour comes and Think of the hours people waste of their lives in a car, stuck in traffic jams. Why would people drive their car into a ferry in Boston, the worst amount of congestion and traffic jams is none other than Boston, Massachusetts, that place in South America Rio de Janeiro, Brazil gets more and more busy each year, Mexico City, Mexico - 95% Traffic jammed, the Chinese they have way too many people China's solution is to put 'bus on stilts' it looks like a man doing a cowboy walk try to Straddle over get over some small bar stools. This strange idea and route is making sense to some person in their Swedish transport mindset.
For someone this made sense in their minds. I always liked some to try an idea, try these type of new innovate ship and hovercraft and boat designs, flying ferry boat, the swamp boat fanboat tourists and locals go out and hunter for gators and have a big meal that evening, the pontoon,the ship that flies through the water on giant stilts. Maybe one day we will see some innovative ship or sub or hovercraft move on Titan or some other world. Back to reality on Earth while Japan's birth rate is in steep decline the US population will continue growing and perhaps face some of the worst traffic problems in no particular order, think of the time you could spend reading a book or writing or on a date or being with friend or family, time and times of your life lost to traffic congestion,.
For now I see it as not fully effective but a possible future solution and a way to go from point A to point B quicker as crow flies for the most direct path between two points. Anywhere you have inflation, economic hardship and gasoline taxes and ridiculous price rises due to Wars and bad energy policy you will have an opening for the new service, the Swedish might drive their car onto some boat or hovercraft thing because of the crazy rise in vehicle fuel prices. Why do people use the Miller Ferry to Put-in-Bay and Middle Bass Island to transport because it will make economic sense? Even though there are massive issues to be solved with some EV, it is a short transit for the Swedish person and it is not very efficient I suspect there might be some level of intelligence and economic reason behind this new vehicle push. I think maybe we had a somewhat related alternative transport topic 'Ice Roadway on Mars' topic. If you read on the Swede they are a people with a history and blood and geography that almost forced them to that destiny of sea-faring Viking peoples, Sweden the fifth largest nation in Europe. If you think of how they move around its all valley and mountain and snow and rock and lake and sea and river and more valley and mountain, your neighbors might be not too far away on the other side of some mountains but after you dig a hole in hillsides and tunnel through one mountain you are faced with more valleys and mountain. Forget images of the plain of Russia or the "Great Plains" of the USA, instead think of constant obstacles think of fjords, the Rockies, Appalachians, Highlands, White Mountain Range, Alaska Range, you climb up a Mountain in Sweden, climb down a Mountain and its more Falls and Hills, the Rivers, a Farmer growing crop on hillside that need to get to the next town, Avalanches that close roads and delay train journeys, Norrland terrain can also be wild, untamed, 'uncivilized' for a lack of a better term and deeply forested, maybe the reason Vikings became Vikings and used the natural canals and transport rivers is because it was always the easiest way to get around, in ancient times when your enemy attack you Viking tribe you would use the quickest route to hit back with a counter attack the other Viking tribe. One day it might also make economic sense to have some new speed boat hover craft thingy to transport between Appleton above Milwaukee to Ludington and cutting across harbor and lake instead of trucking peoples all the way around the outside of the Great Lakes, in our quick on demand interconnected world for a lot of business driving the long way is not an option as time is money.
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-06-29 07:23:51)
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For Mars_B4_Moon re #454
Your post reminded me that some ferries carry cars.
The ones I think of first are the ones that transport only people.
So, thanks for the reminder that some ferries carry vehicles as well.
For SpaceNut ... if you run across an analysis of the kinds of loads ferries carry world wide, I'd be interested.
Hopefully other members of the forum would be interested as well.
The issue at hand here is a simple one...
An investor (or investment team) must try to bet with success on a multiple year basis.
it would appear that fossil fuel from the ground is NOT a good place to put long term investment funds.
The folks who make money over the long term are going to be those who back long term winners.
The folks who bet big on long term losers will NOT end up with full coffers.
Members of the NewMars forum have the luxury of being able to comment without any risk at all.
(th)
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tahanson43206,
When I was mulling this over, I was thinking about operators such as the New York Water Taxi services. A 50nm range would be a stretch for practical operations there. In all probability, you'd need more of the electric powered vessels- not a lot more, to be clear, but probably around 1.5 (electric) to 1 (diesel). I looked at a different page on the BTS site that provided figures for ranges of most routes (26% under 1nm, but it varies between 0.1nm and 595nm- a very significant variance). I was also curious about how initially feasible this is to do. Is it worth looking into? Sure, but an entire series of assumptions are being made about how the ferry will be operated.
I came to the conclusion that if the distances are that short, then you're not likely to get up to 29 knots and the CO2 intensity from a low speed transit is then more dependent upon the number of butts in seats than anything else. For example, most of the ferry rides I've taken are only about half-full. According to Candela's own infographic, that means their electric ferry is no better than a diesel powered bus as far as CO2 emission are concerned. Is that really what we wish to achieve by electrifying transport? That means you have to pack the thing for every transit and that's the only way you achieve their lower-than-diesel CO2 emissions.
The development of coal fired steam engines marked the beginning of the global disaster we see today.
The development of coal-fired steam engines marked the beginning of the age where most people on the planet were becoming wealthy and educated enough to ever give a crap about the environment, because they weren't constantly fighting to stay alive.
Do you ever stop to think about what enabling technologies gave you Lithium-ion batteries and laptop computers and the internet?
All that stuff was a technological spin-off created after cheap and readily available coal / oil / gas energy. I know you don't like the fact that history played out that way, but you didn't get the techno-gadgetry we have today without coal. Slavery was mostly done away with after coal. Most of us have no desire to go back to the way we lived back then, and for good reason. Scientists didn't get to spend their entire lives working in labs until the literal Vikings were held at bay and division of labor became practical. The people who invented microchips wouldn't last 5 minutes fighting Vikings, working an ox-drawn plow in 100 degree temperatures, or worrying about whether or not their house was going to fall apart after the next major storm. Thank goodness for coal.
Humans were getting along just fine with sail, and they were killing each other at a marvelous rate with simple instruments of destruction.
Yeah, because that was such a great way to live...
Who taught you this nihilistic zero-sum way of thinking?
I want to know so I can keep my children far away from their poisonous brain excrement. I don't want their beautiful minds destroyed by this idiocy masquerading as "enlightenment".
We (humans) are now faced with the full magnitude of that terrible idea's full expression.
That would only seem to be the case within the hellscape created by your three-pound universe. You clearly didn't come up with this on your own, so who taught this to you? Somehow, with all of your education and knowledge and life experience, you're operating on some of the most reductive logic imaginable. There never was and never will be anything "terrible" about people using energy to improve their lives, as best they know how at the time they do it. It doesn't matter if you believe that or not, because it's still true.
Oh, the horror of light at night, indoor plumbing, indoor cooking without suffocation, modern medicine, being able to talk to almost anyone on the planet at any time, being able to go anywhere at any time, having plentiful food and water any place not lorded over by a brutal dictator, and the computational technology to do anything our minds or a self-learning computer program can conceive of doing. That's such a terrible way to live! Oh woe is me! Whatever shall we do with all that bounty and technology and promise for a better future? Oh right, if we follow the ideology that you were taught, we should destroy it all and go back to living like serfs.
I am eternally thankful that clever men such as James Watt lived and tirelessly devoted so much time and effort to improving our lives, even though they would never live to see it.
And yes, I know that Watt only improved an earlier design. He should have bought the patents and burned them.
James Watt should've doomed another generation of humanity to short and bleak lives because some cult members who hate humanity dripped poison into your mind, which makes you believe that the world is ending because it's a little bit warmer than it previously was?
If there were ever a time to nip a bad idea in the bud, that was the time!
Your nihilist viewpoints on history and technology are bad. The people who taught you to believe that sort of garbage are a cancer on civilized society and humanity writ large. They profit off of poisoning the minds of people such as yourself, convincing them to both despise themselves and to do self-destructive things in the name of their crusade against humanity. They don't love humanity, nor care at all about the environment, they simply hate others and themselves. That is reprehensible. The fact that they taught you to believe that, even more so. Dr. Robert Zubrin calls these stains on humanity, "merchants of despair", for that is what they are. Stop lapping up their poisonous brain vomit. Let them wallow in their misery and self-loathing if they must, but never join them. That is complete waste of your time on this planet. Life is too fleeting to think or live that way.
Nip that in the bud. Only you have the power to do so.
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Mars_B4_Moon,
I see nothing wrong with trying new ideas. I take issue with ideas being sold to others based upon false premises. I take issue with cult-like ideology that asserts that everything electric is good and everything related to combustion is bad. They can't approach any problem without the words "green", "battery", "electricity", "solar", "wind", and "CO2". It's identical in belief structure to, and has all the problems associated with, an organized religion. The planet is not dying. Humanity is not dying.
Their ideology is faulty, even if, like all other religions, there's some kernel of truth to the religion's teachings. They live in a never-ending now, with no perspective on where we've been nor where we're headed, apart from their version of "hell". They cannot be happy that their lives are so full of bounty and possibility for the future. Instead of trying to perpetuate the system that gave them everything, they seem "hellbent" on actively destroying it.
When you triple the cost of every mode of transport and energy generation or storage, all without equivalent reliability and capability to what it purports to replace, what do you actually get?
Is it futurism magic that keeps the climate change "boogeyman" at bay, or just and absurdly poor use of available resources?
In another 100 years, the Derpistanis alive during that time will no doubt say the same things about their Lithium mining companies that the Derpistanis alive today say about the oil companies.
There's a conspiracy by "Big Lithium" to manipulate the Lithium prices. Why do we even need any Lithium when we have Sodium? The world would be so much "greener" if we all switched to using Sodium. We should just stop making Lithium. We're saving the planet. All those Lithium miners hate the planet.
They'll spend billions on studies to show that Lithium is bad and Sodium is good, and that every aspect of humanity is wrecking the planet because we're using Lithium. They'll call Lithium "dirty" and every other name in the book. If bird crap doesn't have the right color, well, that's because of Lithium. Everyone using Lithium batteries will be villified and ignored- "because those evil dirty Lithium users don't care about the planet".
100 years after that, 12th generation Derpistanis will do the same thing while trying to foment their "fusion revolution".
Yeah... It's that kind of "derp". What's so great about "derp"? Beat's me. Ask a Derpistani. They'll tell ya.
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Nissan's new e-POWER series hybrid achieves 60mpg by using a gasoline combustion engine, run at constant speed at all times, to power an electric motor and small battery pack. It's not a plug-in hybrid.
Nissan's e-POWER system has a fuel economy rating of 3.9L/100km.
Tesla Model 3 consumes 25kWh/100km.
33.7kWh per gallon of gasoline * 1.03027 = 34.720099kWh/100km
25kWh / 34.720099kWh = 0.720044 or 72% as efficient as a Tesla Model 3.
In other words, the Tesla Model 3 is only 28% more efficient than the Nissan.
According to US EIA, the US electric grid looses 5% of all power generated during transmission.
US EIA also rates EVs such as the Tesla as around 73% efficient, overall. Somewhere between the power station and the battery, 27% of the input power is lost as heat.
25kWh / 0.73 or 73% = 34.246575kWh
34.720099kWh / 34.246575kWh = 1.013826900938269 or 1.0138% more efficient.
Did I mention that Mercdes-Benz has a 65% thermally efficient internal combustion engine in a similar series hybrid configuration?
A Mercedes-Benz gasoline-powered series hybrid engine uses 29.52kWh per 100km, which means your Tesla EV is now consuming more total energy than a gasoline powered combustion engine and mostly using fossil fuels to do it.
Energy efficiency doesn't really care about anyone's ideology, does it?
Before long, the one and only benefit to a vehicle with a giant battery will be no measurable tailpipe emissions, albeit with drastically increased emissions everywhere else and no net energy efficiency payback, at all or ever.
It will take 3 times more energy and also emissions to create a battery powered vehicle with equivalent range. Ever after, you're actually consuming more energy than a gasoline-powered combustion engine, most of it is still coming from fossil fuels, and now you're consuming more fossil fuels to boot.
Now let's talk about why I'm pointing this out to all of you. We both want the same thing. I don't want the environment destroyed for my children anymore than anyone else does. Anyone who is not certifiably insane doesn't want that. However, when you're not doing what you think you're doing, the problem gets worse, not better.
If everyone in the US was using this new technology that Nissan came up with, our daily gasoline consumption would be just shy of 106 million gallons per day, rather than 369 million gallons per day. The tech in question still uses electric motors and Lithium-ion batteries, but drastically smaller and therefore less energy-intensive variants. Consuming 2/3rds less fuel per day would do more to reduce total emissions than a wholesale replacement of all motor vehicles and most of our electric power generating infrastructure. I know it's not ideologically "perfect" for the purists out there, but you would accomplish more and much faster by doing this, rather than attempting to ban internal combustion engines while ignoring basic math and physics. Even if you find this solution unpalatable because some part of it disagrees with your ideology, just remember that the alternatives are much worse and will drastically increase CO2 emissions.
You can't get to where you want to go using the technology that we presently have. Rather than "hoping for a better tomorrow", which is not a viable action plan, we have concrete steps we can take to reduce the severity of the problem by a lot. It's not ideologically perfect and probably never will be within our lifetimes, but we don't need to wait for perfection to put a major dent in the problem.
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Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with the quality of work that went into the con-job to get everyone to spend a lot more money on things that don't do what they're purported to do, any better than much less expensive technology. However, I'm also left wondering what the master plan is after the resources run out and nowhere near enough car batteries, let alone batteries for anything else, are available. There's not enough known Lithium reserves to cover battery production for any major use (cars, tractors, trucks, small boats / ferries, light aircraft), so where do we go from there?
Whatever this "future battery" technology happens to be, it won't be based upon Lithium unless we start processing massive quantities of sea water. Nobody's doing that at present, due to the energy cost. Sea water contains about 0.2ppm of Lithium.
1 ppm = 1mg/L
0.2 ppm = 0.2mg/L
1 / 0.0002 = 5,000L of sea water to obtain 1g of Lithium
5,000,000L = 1kg of Lithium
1,000L = 1m^3
5,000m^3 of sea water to obtain 1kg of Lithium
0.005km^3 of sea water to obtain 1t of Lithium
Naturally, all of that assumes 100% Lithium removal efficiency. If it's less than that, and it probably will be, then we may have to process a lot more sea water.
I'm pretty much hoping, without much more than faith, that Sodium-ion batteries fill in after the Lithium runs out, because there's simply not enough Lithium and everybody who can count knows it. Whatever does exist and can be readily obtained has essentially been spoken for already.
From GreenBiz.com's article on the coming Lithium crunch:
Nevertheless, Srinivasan is optimistic that the U.S. will solve its supply chain crunch. A lot of people are "throwing ideas at the wall," he said, and that means something has to stick.
No, that's not what that means at all. When highly educated people write stuff like that, it makes me wonder how all these supposedly "smart" people get the fundamentals so wrong. Whenever people start throwing ideas at that wall, hoping that something will stick, it means they don't even know what "right looks like". They're just trying random things because all their accumulated knowledge and experience has failed them. This is not what you want to hear from PhDs working at government labs on this exact problem.
When I write computer software, I don't "just try random things", because I know what specific result I'm after and how to get it. If I were to start writing software that way, then in all probability whatever problem I'm trying to solve simply won't get solved, because it means I really have no clue about what I'm doing. I'm simply hoping that one of my random guesses at what the solution might be, happens to be correct. That's also a terrible way to solve supply chain issues.
If these are the people you're putting your faith in, then prepare to be disappointed.
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Crewless robotic Mayflower ship nears Plymouth Rock
https://apnews.com/article/technology-r … 691c450e5a
One Day, AI Will Seem as Human as Anyone. What Then?
https://www.wired.com/story/lamda-senti … cs-policy/
Huawei files patent for Quantum Chip and Computer
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huawei-is … -computer/
Platform uses sunlight to efficiently purify oil-contaminated water
https://scienceblog.com/529019/new-plat … ted-water/
Such purification approaches use sunlight to heat water at its surface, evaporating the liquid and separating the polluted or salty counterparts from the water molecules, which then escape into the air as vapor to enter the natural cycle of condensation to become clean, consumable water. The
Biotech and Longevity experiments - Lifespan of Harold Katcher’s Rats
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/ … hers-rats/
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-06-30 11:12:20)
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For Mars_B4_Moon re #460 ... Thanks for finding and posting the link about desalination using evaporation caused by sunlight! That's how Ma Nature collects water for distribution to the entire planet, but Ma Nature has a random distribution procedure that is less than ideal from the human point of view.
I'm glad to see the work done on direct evaporation desalination!
On March 22 in Nano Research, they reported the details of a new platform that uses sunlight to purify seawater with high energy efficiency comparing with other similar approaches (above 90%) while also avoiding common pitfalls.
“There is a tremendous demand for freshwater in households and for industrial, agricultural and other applications, so various water purification technologies have been developed to alleviate the shortage of freshwater resources,” said paper author Miao Wang, Xiamen University’s College of Materials. “Comparing the pathways, solar-driven purification of seawater or contaminated water via interfacial evaporation is promising as a low-cost system.”
Such purification approaches use sunlight to heat water at its surface, evaporating ...
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The Large Hadron Collider Is About to Ramp Up to Unprecedented Energy Levels
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-large- … rgy-levels
Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.
it did not take long for the AlexJones, DavidIcke and JoeRogan types to start blabbing
'Bizarre conspiracy swirls after Large Hadron Collider relaunches for first time in three years'
https://www.news.com.au/technology/scie … 83502735c2
The Large Hadron Collider Is About to Ramp Up to 13.6 Trillion Electronvolts
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it did not take long for the AlexJones, DavidIcke and JoeRogan types to start blabbing
'Bizarre conspiracy swirls after Large Hadron Collider relaunches for first time in three years'
https://www.news.com.au/technology/scie … 83502735c2
I wish these idiots would read up on physics before mouthing off. There are cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere with energy 10^20 eV. Thats tens of millions of times greater than the LHC will achieve. If there were any potential to end the world with these experiments, it would have happened long before man had chance to evolve.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-07-05 16:30:29)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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The collision of particles is about the only way to study what may have been the first few moments in time after the big bang.
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LHCb discovers three new particles, International collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhc … -particles
A new fusion power station will mimic the Sun to provide limitless energy | 'The next technological step after the global ITER fusion experiment'.
https://interestingengineering.com/fusi … ess-energy
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-07-06 10:01:20)
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Artificial Intelligence Discovers Alternative Physics?
A new Columbia University AI program observed physical phenomena and uncovered relevant variables—a necessary precursor to any physics theory. But the variables it discovered were unexpected.
https://scitechdaily.com/artificial-int … e-physics/
In the experiments, the number of variables was the same each time the AI restarted, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, there are indeed alternative ways to describe the universe and it is quite possible that our choices aren’t perfect.
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older article but in interesting in regards biology / printers
Researchers 3D print calcium phosphate graphene scaffolds for bone regeneration
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Microscopic robots walk autonomously using simple 'brains' | Robots could one day treat health issues from inside your body.
https://www.engadget.com/micro-robot-au … 16556.html
MIT researchers invented cooling tech that doesn’t need electricity
https://bgr.com/science/mit-researchers … ectricity/
NASA to broadcast first asteroid redirect on Monday
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09 … for-monday
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-09-23 03:01:00)
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https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/mit- … 00212.html
Mars_B4_Moon has undoubtedly already reported on this new battery chemistry.
Here is another look:
MIT Engineers Design New Low-Cost Battery For Energy Storage
Editor OilPrice.com
Sat, September 24, 2022 at 1:00 PM
Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have designed a battery made from inexpensive, abundant materials, that could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources. Less expensive than lithium-ion battery technology, the new architecture uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials with a molten salt electrolyte in between.The new battery architecture is described in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
See all your investments in real time
Wind and solar advocates are building out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, thus need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific landscapes that are not always available.The MIT led group’s chemistry architecture could help to fill the intermittency gaps.
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Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry said, “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive [uses].”
In addition to being expensive, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, making them less than ideal for transportation. So, Sadoway started studying the periodic table, looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. The commercially dominant metal, iron, doesn’t have the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery, he said. But the second-most-abundant metal in the marketplace – and actually the most abundant metal on Earth – is aluminum.
“So, I said, well, let’s just make that a bookend. It’s gonna be aluminum,” he commented.
Next up was deciding what to pair the aluminum with for the other electrode, and what kind of electrolyte to put in between to carry ions back and forth during charging and discharging. The cheapest of all the non-metals is sulfur, so that became the second electrode material.
As for the electrolyte, “we were not going to use the volatile, flammable organic liquids” that have sometimes led to dangerous fires in cars and other applications of lithium-ion batteries, Sadoway said. They tried some polymers but ended up looking at a variety of molten salts that have relatively low melting points – close to the boiling point of water, as opposed to nearly 1,000° Fahrenheit for many salts. “Once you get down to near body temperature, it becomes practical” to make batteries that don’t require special insulation and anticorrosion measures, he noted.
The three ingredients they ended up with are cheap and readily available – aluminum, no different from the foil at the supermarket; sulfur, which is often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining; and widely available salts. “The ingredients are cheap, and the thing is safe – it cannot burn,” Sadoway said.
In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110° Celsius (230° Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25° C (77° F).
Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction.
The chloro-aluminate salt they chose “essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging,” Sadoway said. “We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting.”
“It’s funny,” he said, because the whole focus was on finding a salt with the lowest melting point, but the catenated chloro-aluminates they ended up with turned out to be resistant to the shorting problem. “If we had started off with trying to prevent dendritic shorting, I’m not sure I would’ve known how to pursue that,” Sadoway said. “I guess it was serendipity for us.”
Additionally, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. “As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat,” Sadoway said.
In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, “you’d store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you’d draw electricity after dark, and you’d do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature.”
This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.
For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year’s European Inventor Award.
The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway noted. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, “if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don’t have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility.” So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve those chargers.
The new technology is already the basis for a new spinoff company called Avanti, which has licensed the patents to the system, co-founded by Sadoway and Luis Ortiz ’96 ScD ’00, who was also a co-founder of Ambri. “The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale,” Sadoway said, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.
Would a battery based on sulfur run the risk of producing the foul odors associated with some forms of sulfur? Not a chance, Sadoway said. “The rotten-egg smell is in the gas, hydrogen sulfide. This is elemental sulfur, and it’s going to be enclosed inside the cells.” If you were to try to open up a lithium-ion cell in your kitchen, he says (and please don’t try this at home!), “the moisture in the air would react and you’d start generating all sorts of foul gases as well. These are legitimate questions, but the battery is sealed, it’s not an open vessel. So I wouldn’t be concerned about that.”
The research team included members from Peking University, Yunnan University and the Wuhan University of Technology, in China; the University of Louisville, in Kentucky; the University of Waterloo, in Canada; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; and MIT. The work was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and ENN Group.
***
This sounds pretty good! But no mention of how many watt hours by battery volume or weight. Then there are those “going to scale” things that come up when leaving the lab and getting to a factory setup.
One does hope there will be continued refinement. The press release makes it sound as if the whole thing just fell together by virtue of making low cost choices. One can be certain a lot of thought went into those decisions.
What we do know that gives some pause is this technology needs to be used to stay warm enough to work well. There has to be an energy price in this and that was not revealed or discussed. One might want to be sure these are real cheap as continuous duty with only cycles in the “hundreds” might not actually cut the economic starting ribbon.
By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel
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This post is about electric surfboards ... the technology is not new, but development of this particular segment of the consumer market on Earth is new(ish)...
I set one my work screens to watch the beach at Naples, but hurricane Ian is keeping the sunworshipers in their cabins. In their place, an electric surfboard rider crossed the field of view. I could hardly believe the speed that ? vessel ? was making.
For those (like me) who are not acquainted with the development of the electric surfboard, here is a collection of snippets from Google:
Electric hydrofoil surfboard - Fliteboard™ efoil - fliteboard.com
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Top 10 Best Electric Surfboards In 2022 | The Buying Guide - DIVEIN
www.divein.com › Boating
All the Electric Surfboards We've tested ; Best Overall. Awake RAVIK 3 & RAVIK S · Engine Power: 11kW ; Best for Yachts. Radinn Freeride · Engine Power: 12kw ; Best ...People also ask
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DresKar Electric Skateboard with Remote Control 32 Inch Surf Skateboard with Carving Truck Max Speed 12.5 MPH 350W Hub-Motor 8 Layers Maple Wood Deck ...Best Electric Surfboard You Can Buy Right Now ! - YouTube
www.youtube.com › watchSep 16, 2020 · Electric surfboard allow you to break the mold of traditional surfing. The basic principle behind ...
Duration: 6:52
Posted: Sep 16, 2020Top 10 Motorized surfboards. Best Electric Surfboards ... - YouTube
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Duration: 10:14
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The best electric surfboards for your toy box - BOAT International
www.boatinternational.com › luxury-yacht-life › lifestyle › best-jet-boards-...Mar 15, 2022 · Fliteboard 2.2. fliteboard 2.2 · €10,600, ; Waveshark Jetboard · $13,999, ; Lift3 eFoil. best-jet-boards-electric-surfboards-lift3 · From $10,900 to ...
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I admit the application of this technology to Mars is limited until Void builds one of his many ocean concepts, but it might be worth keeping in mind for other locations in the Solar System where the mix of materials and temperatures permits.
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The link to this article was long and convoluted... If someone finds a better one please post it.
The article/link could go in topics for electric aircraft and for battery technology advances
The Independent
Nasa invents ‘incredible’ battery for electric planes
Anthony Cuthbertson - 49m agonasa electric plane battery.jpg
© NasaNasa has invented a new type of high-performance battery that researchers claim could be used to power fully electric airplanes.
The US space agency made the breakthrough following investigations into solid-state batteries, which hold more energy and are lighter than industry-standard lithium-ion batteries.
Solid-state batteries also perform better in stressful environments, as they are less prone to overheating, fire and loss of charge over time, however they typically cannot discharge energy at the same rate as li-ion batteries.
Until now, this has made them unsuitable for powering large electronics, such as electric vehicles, as they require batteries capable of discharging their energy an incredibly fast rate.
This issue was solved by researchers at Nasa’s Solid-state Architecture Batteries for Enhanced Rechargeability and Safety (SABERS) unit, who were able to increase the battery’s discharge rate by a factor of 10 using innovative new materials that have yet to be used in batteries.
The wording of that last paragraph is confusing ... the article is about NASA ** using ** the new materials, so it seems counter-intuitive (to me at least) to state the new materials have yet to be used in batteries.
Perhaps this article is about ** research ** ... the article was published with a photograph of an electric airplane, so the reader might be forgiven for thinking the batteries have been tested in an actual airplane.
If someone has time to investigate further, I'd appreciate seeing a clarification.
Update later: Perhaps the reporter omitted the word "commercially" in the closing sentence.
The sentence ** may ** have been intended to read: "yet to be used commercially in batteries"
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For SpaceNut .... the article at the link below could go in multiple topics, so I'll launch it here and encourage other members to replicate it as appropriate...
Video: A grid-independent hydrogen EV charging solution
S. Himmelstein | October 13, 2022
This is from a tech newsletter that shows up here every so often ...
Here is a YouTube presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnz90xKFJGE
A new off-grid electric vehicle (EV) charging solution has been engineered by Israel-based GenCell to address range anxiety and grid limitation issues by use of alkaline fuel cells, hydrogen and ammonia. The system produces green, grid-independent, on-site power to charge EVs anytime and anywhere.
EVOX technology has already been deployed to deliver EV charging services to several commercial parking projects in Israel. The solution eases grid stress, both in remote locations where transmission infrastructure is lacking and in densely populated areas where demand for a large quantity of EVs places pressure on the grid.
The GenCell EVOX solution can service up to 10 75 kW DC fast chargers. The system is based on hydrogen-based fuel cell technology used in the GenCell BOX with up to 920 kWh stored as hydrogen together with a 372 kWh to 500 kWh energy storage device. Each EV reaches a charge of 80% energy capacity within 12 to 30 minutes.
What I'm picking up on in particular is mention of ammonia as an energy storage medium.
NH3
The chemical formula for ammonia is NH3. It has many names including hydrogen nitride, Nitrosil, and Vaporole. Its molar mass is 17.0306 g/mol[1]. Ammonia has a Page 3 strong pungent odor.Ammonia is made out of one nitrogen and three hydrogen ...
This looks like a good compromise between the challenges of working with ammonia, and delivery of energy to EV systems.
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For SpaceNut ... the article at the link below could go into multiple topics ...
It describes an improved process for releasing Hydrogen carried from supplier to customer site by ammonia.
This is still a laboratory demonstration...
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/scie … 00185.html
Oilprice.com
Scientist Invent New Way To Convert Ammonia Into HydrogenEditor OilPrice.com
Thu, December 8, 2022 at 1:00 PM
Rice University scientists have invented a light-activated catalyst that efficiently converts ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen using only inexpensive raw materials. The design is a light-activated nanomaterial to convert the ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel.
The effort is a collaborative project from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The research report has been published in the journal Science.
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The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth’s atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn’t require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs.The pace of chemical reactions typically increases with temperature, and chemical producers have capitalized on this for more than a century by applying heat on an industrial scale. The burning of fossil fuels to raise the temperature of large reaction vessels by hundreds or thousands of degrees results in an enormous carbon footprint. Chemical producers also spend billions of dollars each year on thermocatalysts – materials that don’t react but further speed reactions under intense heating.
Study co-author Naomi Halas of Rice noted, “Transition metals like iron are typically poor thermocatalysts, This work shows they can be efficient plasmonic photocatalysts. It also demonstrates that photocatalysis can be efficiently performed with inexpensive LED photon sources.”
Rice co-author Peter Nordlander added, “This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants.”
The best thermocatalysts are made from platinum and related precious metals like palladium, rhodium and ruthenium. Halas and Nordlander spent years developing light-activated, or plasmonic, metal nanoparticles. The best of these are also typically made with precious metals like silver and gold.
Following their 2011 discovery of plasmonic particles that give off short-lived, high-energy electrons called “hot carriers,” they discovered in 2016 that hot-carrier generators could be married with catalytic particles to produce hybrid “antenna-reactors,” where one part harvested energy from light and the other part used the energy to drive chemical reactions with surgical precision.
Halas, Nordlander, their students and collaborators have worked for years to find non-precious metal alternatives for both the energy-harvesting and reaction-speeding halves of antenna reactors. The new study is a culmination of that work. In it, Halas, Nordlander, Rice alumnus Hossein Robatjazi, Princeton engineer and physical chemist Emily Carter, and others show that antenna-reactor particles made of copper and iron are highly efficient at converting ammonia. The copper, energy-harvesting piece of the particles captures energy from visible light.
Robatjazi, a Ph.D. alumnus from Halas’ research group who is now chief scientist at Houston-based Syzygy Plasmonics explained, “In the absence of light, the copper-iron catalyst exhibited about 300 times lower reactivity than copper-ruthenium catalysts, which is not surprising given that ruthenium is a better thermocatalyst for this reaction. Under illumination, the copper-iron showed efficiencies and reactivities that were similar to and comparable with those of copper-ruthenium.
Syzygy has licensed Rice’s antenna-reactor technology, and the study included scaled-up tests of the catalyst in the company’s commercially available, LED-powered reactors. In laboratory tests at Rice, the copper-iron catalysts had been illuminated with lasers. The Syzygy tests showed the catalysts retained their efficiency under LED illumination and at a scale 500 times larger than lab setup.
“This is the first report in the scientific literature to show that photocatalysis with LEDs can produce gram-scale quantities of hydrogen gas from ammonia,” Halas said. “This opens the door to entirely replace precious metals in plasmonic photocatalysis.”
“Given their potential for significantly reducing chemical sector carbon emissions, plasmonic antenna-reactor photocatalysts are worthy of further study,” Carter added. “These results are a great motivator. They suggest it is likely that other combinations of abundant metals could be used as cost-effective catalysts for a wide range of chemical reactions.”
***
One might think the door could be open soon for the hydrogen transport and storage solution. For most folks looking at hydrogen for a transport fuel, portability, and lots more safety, ammonia containment offers a huge leap forward.
Ammonia is still fairly noxious, but its ignition and rapid combustion are negligible. It is also a non pressurized carrier for hydrogen. It does have a very strong odor, giving some warning of its escape. All in all, as a practical hydrogen carrier, its pretty good.
There are some questions like just how much light energy is needed to say, power an automobile. The scale up testing is underway. Then one wonders how to dispense with the nitrogen and if there is an energy cost as well to venting somehow a N2 or di-nitrogen molecule back into the atmosphere harmlessly.
We’re going to be watching for more on this.
Lastly, there is a long list of authors at the bottom of the press release. These folks have been at this for over a decade. There is also a list of funders there as well. They all deserve notice and our thanks. Lets hope this effort get to a real low cost commercial scale system!
By New Energy and Fuel
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This is a segment that recently aired on "Science Friday".
The link includes the Official trailer for the documentary "Good Night Oppy".
New Documentary Is Endearing Tribute To NASA’s Rover Program
9 minutes 28 seconds
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YouTube: A New Way to Achieve Nuclear Fusion: Helion
Tom posted something about Helion in November 2021, but this video is just 12 days old. This is generation 6 of the Helion reactor.
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