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Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / Science and Technology => Topic started by: asian1 on November 24, 2005, 12:33:53 PM
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Most renewable energy sources cannot provide stable, continous supply (ie: Solar, Wind, Current, Tidal Wave etc).
The solution is energy storage.
There are many technology for energy storage from phase change, superconductor ring, nanotechnology for Hydrogen storage, Hydrogen Peroxide, Compressed Air, Flywheels, Bactery/Algae, Metal/Zinc/Vanadium/Engineuity, pumping hot water into underground caves etc.
http://dmoz.org/Science/Technology/Energy/Storage/
In Alaska there are giant geodesic domes with insulator and special glass for efficient energy storage based on greenhouse principle.
Which method is the most efficient and low cost for residential/home?
Which method is suitable for large scale power generators?
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Someone once commented that if Iceland could export it's steam, it would be the richest nation in Europe. Volcanic activity is the driving force behind power generation on the island, also assisting with heating water supplies too. Everyone's a winner, in Iceland at least.
Here in the UK, we are facing high oil/gas prices and stringent Carbon emission targets, which effectively make coal fired power stations a no no.
We have two choices:
1) Push for more energy efficient appliances and home heating, passing the costs on to the consumer with the possibility of government grants.
2) Find alternative means of power generation, with the inevitable public inquiries, planning inquiries and lobbying of residents. After all, would you want a nuclear station overlooking your back yard?
The latter method is going to be largely funded by corporations and government, however the costs of energy production will rise in the short to medium term to pay for it all. The former method has no guarantees of success, plus forecasts show the costs of fossil fuels will rise also.
Either way, the days of cheap energy are numbered.
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asian1 wrote:
Which method is the most efficient and low cost for residential/home?
Firewood!, always has been always will be!
Which method is suitable for large scale power generators?
Water, Wind and a little more risky but nuclear(the french is still making progress in that area) until Fusion actually starts being economical
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Dan wrote:
Which method is suitable for large scale power generators?
Water, Wind and a little more risky but nuclear(the french is still making progress in that area) until Fusion actually starts being economical
Slavery!!! We have a huge prison population that would be ideal!
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Slavery!!! We have a huge prison population that would be ideal!
condemn them to the matrix. :-P
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bloodline wrote:
Dan wrote:
Which method is suitable for large scale power generators?
Water, Wind and a little more risky but nuclear(the french is still making progress in that area) until Fusion actually starts being economical
Slavery!!! We have a huge prison population that would be ideal!
But what to burn when you have ran out of convicts?
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Karlos wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Dan wrote:
Which method is suitable for large scale power generators?
Water, Wind and a little more risky but nuclear(the french is still making progress in that area) until Fusion actually starts being economical
Slavery!!! We have a huge prison population that would be ideal!
But what to burn when you have ran out of convicts?
Peasants
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Karlos wrote:
But what to burn when you have ran out of convicts?
Witches.
Cue the Holy Grail quotes..
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:python:
"Good evening.
The last scene was interesting from the point of view of a professional logician, because it contained a number of logical fallacies, that is invalid propositional constructions and syllergistic forms of the type so often committed by my wife.
"All wood burns", states Sir Bedivere. Therefore he concludes, "all that burns is wood". This is, of course, pure bull$hit.
Universal affirmatives can only be partially converted; all of Al McCogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Al McCogan. Obvious, one would think.
However, my wife does not understand this necessary limitation of conversion of a proposition, so consequently she does not understand me. For how can a woman expect to appreciate a professor of logic if the simplest cloth-eared syllergism causes her to flounder.
For example, given the premise all fish live underwater and all mackerel are fish, my wife will conclude not that all mackerel live underwater but that if she buys kippers it will not rain, or that trout live in trees or even that I do not love her any more.
This she calls "using her intuition". I call it "crap" and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical.
"There will be no supper tonight!", she will sometimes cry, upon my return home. "Why not?", I will ask ask; "Because I have been screwing the milkman all day!", she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made.
"But", I will wearily point out, "even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may now logically be got."
:python:
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Karlos wrote:
This she calls "using her intuition".
Sounds more like witchcraft to me... BURN HER...
Getting back on topic..
What's happening with superconducting magnets thesedays?
Are they any closer to getting them vaguely near room temperature to build a near-lossless flywheel systems that were on Tomorrow's World all those years ago (and where's my flying car?)
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Yeah, bloody Tomorrow's World...
Back in 1981, I was convinced that by the year 2000 we'd be able to live on the moon, supersonic air travel would be commonplace as would those funky superconducting monorail trains that would spell the end of "points failure at Shenfield" for good.
It's 2005 and "points failure at Shenfield" is the main reason why my g/f is two hours late home from work, because the sodding monorail only exists on the embarrasingly twee covers of "2000 AD". Our only supersonic airliner was retired two years ago and NASA is having to dust off forty year old Apollo designs to get back to the moon in time for 2025.
To cap it all, 1981 fashions are back in vogue. :lol:
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An interesting thought occurred to me the other day after reading a bit of news on the Teletext...
It said that Firemen had to be called out one day to an office block where a man was giving off charges of static so high that he was scorching the carpet around him. Don't ask what the firemen did but it was discovered that his nylon/polyester jacket was holding a charge of 20,000 volts.
How that occurred I do not know, I've tumbled dried synthetics before and they've given me shocks but that is crazy.
Now, is it not possible that batteries could in future be wearable? Could wearable computers source their energy from the very fabric they are attached to/woven inside?
Also, according to some website (might have been Project X) experiments have been done with flywheels and anti-gravity, the flywheel has broken from it's spindle - destroying a room and failing to stop under friction for several days.
The disadvantage to flywheels to power cars/planes would be their weight I suppose. And unless the car was nailed to the floor there'd have to be counter-rotation taking place (if a helicopter didn't have a tail rotor it would spin with it's rotor).
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Flywheels have already been used in busses and cars. In 1996 Chrysler entered a car at Le Mans fitted with a carbon flywheel and powered by electricity. Because the flywheel was made of carbon fibre, it was built to disintegrate at the first sign of an accident, the only evidence of it's existence would have been a heap of cabon dust.
Metal flywheels have to be machined to extraordinary tolerances in order to keep them balanced at high RPM. If they fail, they tend to go without warning and send metal chunks flying at stupid velocities. Not great if you're sitting next to one in a racecar.
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I don't understand how you could make a flywheel out of carbon fibre. Surely it would need to be a)heavy to keep momentum & b)magnetic?
Cars of the future should be like Honda's solar powered effort but with a more SUV/4x4 structure to appeal to the US market.
I've heard of some concept where a vehicle's kinetic energy when braking can be sent into a flywheel, it might even have been built.
Another novel new idea that has come to light lately is the fact that diesel engines will happily run off cooking oil. A simple modification means the fuel source won't line your cylinders with crispy bits from the fryer and some companies even offer dual-fuel option (the cooking oil goes in the boot/trunk and you can switch from the dashboard between Flora/Esso).
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Hyperspeed wrote:
I don't understand how you could make a flywheel out of carbon fibre. Surely it would need to be a)heavy to keep momentum & b)magnetic?
A flywheel on minimal mass spins up to speed much faster. As a mountain biker I can say that you notice reduced rolling mass very quickly when swapping between lighter / heavier tyres. A flywheel needn't be magnetic, the energy is stored because the flywheel is moving at very high rpm. A greater emphasis needs to be placed on balancing the flywheel and having very high quality bearings to maintain momentum without vibration.
Cars of the future should be like Honda's solar powered effort but with a more SUV/4x4 structure to appeal to the US market.
The efficiency of solar panels is very poor indeed. Honda's solar cars were built for a race across Australia (where solar energy is very strong) but have a very small power output - we're talking tenths of horsepower here for a car with approx 75 square feet of solar panels.
I've heard of some concept where a vehicle's kinetic energy when braking can be sent into a flywheel, it might even have been built.
Yep, it's already here. On some hybrid cars the brakign energy is diverted back to the batteries.
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Hyperspeed wrote:
Another novel new idea that has come to light lately is the fact that diesel engines will happily run off cooking oil. A simple modification means the fuel source won't line your cylinders with crispy bits from the fryer and some companies even offer dual-fuel option (the cooking oil goes in the boot/trunk and you can switch from the dashboard between Flora/Esso).
:idea: New Idea!?
Rudolf Diesel, invented the diesel cycle engine in 1892. Diesel demonstrated it in the 1900 World's Fair, running on peanut oil.
Bio-diesel refers to any petroleum diesel-equivalent biofuel REFINED from vegetable oils or animal fats. Biodiesel can be mixed with petroleum diesel in any amount in modern diesel engines. Bio-Diesels have higher viscosity and a higher gel point than petrodiesel.
Unrefined vegetable oils require fuel pre-heaters and other engine modifications. Using UNREFINED vegetable oils in a standard diesel engine will result in carbonized injectors, engine damage, and fuel pump failure.
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So why are we lining up at gas stations making the Saudi sheiks and the Texas cowboys rich when we could be filling subsidised and unused farmland with sunflowers and peanuts?
I'm not quite sure of the legality of running a car in the UK on sunflower oil but I've heard of one guy who got permission to pay excise duty and he got around it. He wasn't filtering his oil at all because he said the engine would probably die before it clogged with whatever (buy an old diesel folks and run it to death!).
Surely solar panels could be made to be more efficient if the energy was somehow directed into a flywheel so as the car is moving it only needs a trickle charge, a bit like a dog will eat it's food as you're still pouring the biscuits!
:-)
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Hyperspeed wrote:
So why are we lining up at gas stations making the Saudi sheiks and the Texas cowboys rich when we could be filling subsidized and unused farmland with sunflowers and peanuts?
Some genetic engineering to develop a plant that produces Biodiesel directly would result in US farmers switching from food crops to producing oil. Would result in the US no longer exporting food!
Hyperspeed wrote:
I'm not quite sure of the legality of running a car in the UK on sunflower oil but I've heard of one guy who got permission to pay excise duty and he got around it. He wasn't filtering his oil at all because he said the engine would probably die before it clogged with whatever (buy an old diesel folks and run it to death!).
Vegetable oil requires Transesterification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transesterification) to become biodiesel
A homebrew method to produce Biodiesel (http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/biodiesel.html)
Straight vegetable oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_vegetable_oil) requires engine modifications or engine life is very limited.
Hyperspeed wrote:
Surely solar panels could be made to be more efficient if the energy was somehow directed into a flywheel so as the car is moving it only needs a trickle charge, a bit like a dog will eat it's food as you're still pouring the biscuits!
:-)
The power you can get from a solar collector is:
P (Watts) = efficiency x solar intensity (w/m sq) x area of collector (m sq)
US average 200(W/m sq)
Solar Cells are 15% efficient at best
converting energy from one form to another is at best 85% efficient
its the physics that make it impractical
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Wow, that methanol technique certainly sounds risky for your eyes!
I think it's definately worth trying though, just keep the place at a good temperature and ventilate.
To hell with the oil barons, that'll teach them to buy up all the fuel cell patents and destroy them!
:-D
Shell announced yesterday that they made a record profit of 12.3 billion GBP last year. The crooks pass on every hike in the oil prices within minutes of Opec raising them, even though the barrels take a few months to reach the refining stage. And Bush has the audacity to say on Monday "The US needs to cut it's addiction to oil"...
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converting energy from one form to another is at best 85% efficient
that's not quite true. dont want to get into willy measuring, but I've seen electric motors that have been quoted as 95% efficient at converting electrical energy into useful "work done" (ie: useful mechanincal energy).
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One of the most efficient means of converting energy to propulsion is probably sitting in your shed right now... A bicycle is able to return 90% efficiency.
In the short term, methanol fortified fuel seems to be a partial answer. Methanl burns cleanler than gasoline and can be produced reasonably easily.
Just watch our governments tax it to the skies!
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Isn't that Skycar thing using Methanol now, either that or Ethanol because one was a health hazard.
I'd say the bicycle is very energy efficient but the source of that energy is a bio-reactor - the human gut! I've read recently that scientists have made a lawn mower that is powered by the very clippings it cuts (wit the use of a bacteria engine).
There are companies now producing magnetic bearings too, ones that don't need balls but just levitate around the central ring with powerful magnets. Maybe this is going to increase car efficiency in the next decade.
Personally, I like the look of that 4,000 GBP hydrogen fuel cell motorbike they unveiled in London last year. 100 miles on a single charge, top speed of 50MPH and completely emission free & silent.
:-)