"Closed" Cycle Internal Reaction Engines

100kW power is only necessary to scoot across an intersection, a popular activity of dubious value to society.

On the highway you only need 10kW to cruise at 60 mph.

Engines are dirt cheap -- accounting for less than 10% of motor vehicle costs. It would be immediately cost effective to start putting two or even 3 engines in cars. No breakthroughs are even necessary.

What part of "trolling motor" do they NOT understand?

Auto manfacturers are just stuck on stupid.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill
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That excludes hydrogen-plus-nitrogen; it won't heat itself above about 500 K.

This may be interesting: deuterium-plus-nitrogen making ND3 should go about 70 K hotter.

Liquid fuel, liquid ash? Water and SO3 come to mind.

H2SO4 breaks up at much lower 'T', but it breaks up to water and oxygen and SO2 (this is part of the sulphur-iodine process).

That should work, though: SO2 is easy to condense.

And the whole deal should be never before thought of, and only now revealed to you.

Oil is cheap and many varieties are nontoxic. Water and CO2 are condensible. Why not burn oil and pipe the ashes back to the oil maker?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan Boron: internal combustion with nuclear cachet:

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Reply to
G. R. L. Cowan

We don't need battery improvements of even an order of magnitude.

I've been wondering if there is some maximum limit type of law to energy densities of reactants that could lead to much better batteries.

Supposing the highest energy density obtainable reacting chemicals in an ideal heat engine was related to that of the same chemicals in some ideal battery?

We already know, assuming materials, heat transfer, etc. aren't problems, that the Carnot efficiency of an idealized H2 + O2 heat engine is well over 95%. A real life fuel cell is somewhat less.

If some other reaction than H2 was possible in heat engines, there might be a corresponding battery or fuel cell almost as good or, taking the temperature limitations of engine materials into account, several times better.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

I've been looking at this long and hard for quite sometime now......and none of the available technologies are ready for automobiles except for the ICE and the EV, and of course the hybrid combination of the two....

You want efficiency, go to a deisel direct injection series hybrid. The highly efficient deisel direct injection engine can spin at it's most efficient operating point to operate a generator, and the electric motors will handle all the motive force. The engine/generator will have to be sized sufficiently to run the electric motors directly through all of their load requirements, and the batteries will need to hold enough power for normal range of driving. The engine has to be able to shut off when not needed to charge the batteries or drive the motors, and the generator should be able to run as a motor to turn the engine up to speed before starting (so the ICE doesn't operate outside its optimum range of efficiency.

As to the other "solutions" here is my list of problems.... h2o2 is highly caustic....all plumbing would have to be glass or stainless....I'm talking rend the flesh from your bones type caustic...so it would not be safe for refueling operations by your teenage son or your car clueless neighbor...

AMTEC, efficiencies comparable to ICE but a 10Kw system would be $50k and

2500lbs (I had someone do the math on this....might be justified for remote, fixed locations...but highly impracticle for cars...

Solar PV....efficiencies are too low, simply not enough area on a car to put the cells required concentrating PV and catalyst combustion IR heat source...efficiencies better, but still too low, and requires carrying on board fuel and lots of waste heat..they are best left to microCHP applications...wher the heat can be used for something

Nuclear batteries....yeah...lets get the consumer behind the wheel of a dirty bomb! Actually this one has promise as choice of isotope has a bearing on safety. Tritium is the isotope of choice, because it can be sheilded by a piece of paper, and the radiation cna't be absorbed through the skin....however, irradiated particles can be ingested or inhaled leading to radiation related ailments...so containment of the isotopes would have to be such as to safeguard from abrasion, fragmentation...etc. And of course the cost of producing the tritium would be insane...not to mention the regulatory hurdles...but you could run the car for ten years without ever refueling....

The others just don't have the efficiencies...pure thermo-electrics are only about 2% efficient...

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Reply to
<beard6801

Bret Cahill included:

You might like the data I assembled a few years ago at

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. Smaller numbers are better, and are represented by darker cell backgrounds.

Oxidations that produce dense oxides are entropy-reducing, but they are so energetic that at high temperatures the same oxidations yield low-density vapours, not so entropy-reducing any more, and are *still* highly energetic. So driving them backwards is hard. Maybe this is why you seem not to wish to consider oxygen as one of the reagents. I like oxygen and fire.

If you want something less fiery as it goes to the right, ammonia synthesis fits the bill, but really, with a 500-K-ish "flame temperature", it's not fiery *enough*.

The liquid ash that comes from a low-intensity -- but not too low -- fire, that you want to pipe away to a power station, and there, without excessively high temperatures, crack, may not exist. A defanged version of oxygen is needed ... sulphur, maybe. Pipe liquid sodium and an excess of sulphur to the power user, pipe sodium polysulphide back. Work is done by expanding sulphur vapour. Na2Sx is rather a hot liquid, though.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan Boron: internal combustion with nuclear cachet:

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Reply to
G. R. L. Cowan

...and you have sources of energy to perform the conversion....

Steve

Reply to
steve

You are a scary guy! let's put a million little breeder reactors on the road....so that everyone from Granny on down through the high school level has a facility for making weapons grade nuclear material....I'm pretty sure the Government (and rightly so) would shut you down before you got the bugs out of the drivetrain.....

Reply to
<beard6801

The real danger is from contamination. Bin Laden will never build a megaton bomb but he'll certainly wrap some contamination around a conventional bomb.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

The real danger is from contamination. Bin Laden will never build a megaton bomb but he'll certainly wrap some contamination around a conventional bomb.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

The real danger is from contamination. Bin Laden will never build a megaton bomb but he'll certainly wrap some contamination around a conventional bomb.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

Not really, your talking about technology (mostly) designed to produced electric power. Once produced electric power is worth about 4 times as much as thermal sources like gasoline, disel or natural gas.

Of course that requires the changing of the infrastructure that exists to use power as well as produce it which significantly increases the cost involved. But if you make the electricty cheap enough the cost of oil will drive a more natural switch, hopefully.

Ideally you would figure out a way to generate H2 directly using low quality thermal input. That would allow you to take a CO2 generator (limestone/quicklime) and generate methane, disel, plastic precursors, fertilizers, pesticieds and all the other wonderful oil based products.

I noticed that no one mentioned OTEC or high altitude wind, both of those are relatively large scale systems as I understand it.

Ghostwriter

Reply to
ghostwriter

Both of those would be true environmental disasters if applied on a large-enough scale to be significant energy producers. See "anthropogenic climate disruption -- genuine".

Reply to
LongmuirG

Yet, you previously wrote: "Coby Beck is right -- anthropogenic global warming is unproved."

How is it your first claim is a sure thing yet gw is unproved?

Do you have an agenda?

Reply to
Dan Bloomquist

Not knowing one way or the other, but he may be saying that what we have now is not anthropogenic, but that we might create it.

Doesn't seem right though.

Steve

Reply to
steve

Well, the ops words were, "Both of those would be true environmental disasters..."

But when it concerns anthropogenic gw, he calls it a scam.

It doesn't. A very strange way to do science.

Best, Dan.

Reply to
Dan Bloomquist

Thank goodness you are still talking to me (or at least about me), Dan! Ever since I cracked that joke about the Hirsch Report, you have been

-- well! -- distant.

We are talking about 3 different processes here; 3 quite different mechanisms for influencing global climate.

First, the standard politically-correct anthropogenic global warming model assigns the blame to increases in atmospheric CO2 at very low levels, Parts Per Million -- but strangely the politically-correct model blames only that part of anthropogenic CO2 related to fossil fuels, not the 40% or so of anthropogenic CO2 related to land use changes, primarily poor people in the Tropics cutting down forests. (Agenda, anyone?) And this focus on CO2 ignores the clear science that most global warming is due to water vapor, which is present in the atmosphere in concentrations that are orders of magnitude higher than CO2. (Agenda-driven poor science, anyone?) A measurable percentage increase in atmospheric CO2 corresponds to an insignificant increase in total radiatively active gases in the atmosphere. Yes -- anthropogenic global warming is indeed a scam. As the great Coby Beck once said so forcefully, it is also unproven.

Second, wind power works by slowing down the movement of air -- and the planetary circulation of air is the major element in global climate. On a small scale, wind power is irrelevant to climate, but unfortunately on a small scale it is also irrelevant to global energy demand. Extract wind power on the necessary tens of TeraWatt scale, with wind factories covering an appreciable percentage of the planet's surface, and this would indeed have a major anthropogenic influence on global climate. Admittedly, this issue is severely understudied. (Political agenda, anyone?). Dr. Keith at Carnegie-Mellon tried to investigate it, and now he does not live in this country anymore. (Remember Galileo, anyone?)

Third, extracting power from ocean temperature gradients is inevitably very inefficient thermodynamically, which means it would have to be done on a truly staggering scale to yield power at the relevant tens of TeraWatt level. Large scale (anthropogenic) alteration of surface water temperatures & deep water temperatures would have obvious impacts on global climate and on ocean ecology. Incontestable.

Yes, anthropogenic global warming is a scam, and large-scale wind power or OTEC would have major anthropogenic environmental impacts. So, Dan, what are you offering -- apart from snide comments?

Reply to
LongmuirG

To be fair, all you have offered us is snide comments in which you pooh-pooh those effects that you happen not to agree with as "insignficant", and aggrandise those you do agree with as "stupendously significant". If you're going to call others snide and make assertions like that, you might want to cite some numbers, rather than just superlative adjectives that happen to suit *your* personal agenda.

Eric Lucas

Reply to
<lucasea

Mr. Lucas -- so nice of you to join the discussion. Next time you do, it would be helpful if you put some content in your post. Discuss the physics of the processes. Provide some numbers, if you think the discussion would benefit from numbers. But please don't put quotes around your own words -- "stupendously significant" -- as if you were quoting someone else; that really is misleading.

The fact that alleged anthropogenic global warming is a scam does not mean that other very large scale human activities could not have impacts. We need to be careful with words. Some activitists like to use renewable, green, environmentally-friendly as if they were synonyms

-- but they are not. For example, hydro-power is called renewable, yet it has very obvious environmental impacts. Wind power would have impacts comparable to those of alleged anthropogenic global warming if used on a significant scale. Any energy source we use will have impacts, while not using any energy source at all would condemn most of the human beings on the planet to death. We are facing difficult choices about serious matters; there's no room for brain-dead political correctness.

Reply to
LongmuirG

Well, Mr. Lucas, I appreciate the 'content'. Mr. Longmuir is back to being relegated to the third person....

Haaaa. Mr. Longmuir makes a claim but demands 'proof of the contrary' from others. So typical.

But we will accept the 'fact' that 'high altitude wind' would cause irrecoverable damage. Gee, where are those numbers?

But Mr. Longmuir would argue that one is a puff of smoke while one would be the demise of our civilization!

Of course. How else to fool the uninitiated?

So usenet....

Reply to
Dan Bloomquist

I have a problem with your scale. The average tempature change of the atmosphere in the last 50 years was 0.6 C(0.012C/year) (wikipedia:global warming). The generation of 300 exajoules (100% current world usage) at 1% efficiency would shift about 2joules per kilogram of water(thats assuming reuse of the cooling water in aquaculture or deep reinjection rather than just mass dumping on the surface). Thats 0.002C per year cooling of the surface about 20% of the effects of global warming and in the opposite direction. The only effect would a slowing of the increase in surface water tempature. Extensive use of shallow lagoon aquaculture would cancel even that effect out given the extra surface area of the lagoons.

I dont know the wind speed increases for that same time so cant calculate the effect on high altitude wind but since tempature is the major contrubuting factor to wind speed it is likley in the same order of magnitude.

Ghostwriter Ghostwriter

Reply to
ghostwriter

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