Just like I said in a previous article, Aiken County Administrator Clay Killian’s words are: “I think everybody understands that our nation needs alternative energy sources. And that’s one that has not reached its full potential and hasn’t been developed out yet, and we’d like to be a part of that. And I think we’re going to continue to do that.”

The Center recently opened a $230,000 solar powered hydrogen refueling station by venturing with Santee Cooper. That means solar power collected through solar cells is used to split water, generate hydrogen and possibly fill your hydrogen car’s tank cheaply (with free energy).

Indeed, not many hydrogen vehicles actually exist on the market today, and those that exist have a price that would buy 5 to 10 Priuses, but building free energy (hydrogen) fueling stations isn’t bad at all. This could ultimately lead to building more efficient and cheaper fuel cells, and a make a fuel cell car cost no more than your regular gas-guzzler.

In time, things would surely also improve for solar panels, and as fuel cell cars’ production increases, the same goes with the amount of hydrogen produced freely (or with a minimal investment). If not for fuel cells, at least let’s inefficiently burn some hydrogen in old-styled engines. That would still make a good deal with the environment at a minimal conversion cost (the hydrogen tanks would need to be safe and “roomy” enough to host a decent drive energy reserve).

We already have plenty of technologies available, let’s use them! If not for ours, at least for our children’s future.

General Motors, in its desperate search for new markets and viable technologies, has introduced a new concept: the HCCI engine (Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition), that uses the same old diesel burning principle to fire gasoline without a spark. They say it could offer a 15% reduction in gasoline consumption, if combined with other advanced technologies. Burning gasoline this way would reduce heat energy lost during the combustion process.

The HCCI engine practically gives the efficiency of a diesel engine and the cleanliness of burning gasoline (compared to diesel). In addition, burning diesel requires complicated and expensive exhaust filtering systems, which gasoline powered ones don’t need.

GM says they will have the engine finished for commercialization in less than 10 years, but don’t give any specific details as to when exactly this will happen. Slowly but surely, the HCCI engine will help power Volt and the other hybrid projects branded by General Motors. In fact, they already equipped an Opel Vectra and a Saturn Aura with HCCI. Let’s hope they ease the transition to full electric cars, although generally, when you want to quit smoking, you quit suddenly, otherwise you’ll find all kinds of excuses not to do it.

Toyota, on the other hand, through licensing their technology to GM, sees their hybrid technology establishing as an industry standard, and minimizes the losses of the past few months’ recession.

Another big company that doesn’t seem very affected by recession is Volkswagen, who truly wants a joint venture with the Chinese car manufacturer BYD.

BYD has made a significant progress by introducing their electric car to the Chinese market, the F3DM, which - by the way - is a competitor to GM’s future Volt. BYD has been producing batteries, covering 30% of the global Li-Ion cell phone battery market (you probably have one of theirs in your phone and don’t know).

VW wants BYD to help them grow their hybrid-electric vehicle projects, and BYD wants to have the opportunity of reaching other markets through VW’s already open commercial channels. So, it’s a win-win situation for both cases of venture presented here. It remains to be seen how long it will take until something good gets to us, the end users.

Ecofriend, via the Design Blog, presents the general design of such a method in a simple picture:

 On the other hand, the idea sounds pretty impressive, but before hurrying to reach the land of Oz, we should consider a few aspects:1. Satellites usually transmit signals, weak ones, signals that are amplified on the ground and converted into useful information. Anyway, the energy is small enough not to disturb anything.
2. In the design presented above, the energy focus is not meant to be unidirectional. This means that a greater amount of power would be lost on the way down, in some way or another.
3. Say the energy was unidirectional and somehow we would manage to have limited distinct points, the system would still be very costly.
4. …the most important part: lasers and microwaves are the best wireless energy carriers that we know. Whoever saw a microwave oven knows their power. Whoever saw a laser knows what it can do in large amounts. The point is we would have several hundred thousands of focused microwave-spectrum lines, and at that power (hundreds of thousands of kilowatts per hour) they would simply burn what ever crosses them. The same goes with lasers, no matter what wavelength. To whoever can demonstrate me the opposite, I am open to any rational argument, as I don’t pretend I can’t be wrong.

I agree with installing a huge solar space-based power station, and having a clearly delimited area at the North Pole, for example, where the airspace is not crowded and the signals couldn’t damage many birds crossing them (microwaves are very directional in space).

What’s your opinion on this?

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So far, only microscopic amounts of ultra-dense deuterium have been produced, but measurements show that the distance between its atoms is much smaller than in the most heavy of the matter. Ultra-dense deuterium is thought to be present in giant planets, such as Jupiter.

The interesting fact for us is that ultra-dense deuterium can be a source of energy through laser-driven nuclear fusion. Using high power lasers, it’s possible to achieve fusion between deuterium nuclei, and release huge amounts of energy.

Past experiments on frozen deuterium, or “deuterium ice” show that lasers can produce nuclear fusion, but the results have been rather poor until now. Ultra-dense deuterium is a million times more dense than frozen deuterium.

“If we can produce large quantities of ultra-dense deuterium, the fusion process may become the energy source of the future. And it may become available much earlier than we have thought possible”, says Leif Holmlid, Professor in the Department of Chemistry, at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.

“Further, we believe that we can design the deuterium fusion such that it produces only helium and hydrogen as its products, both of which are completely non-hazardous. It will not be necessary to deal with the highly radioactive tritium that is planned for use in other types of future fusion reactors, and this means that laser-driven nuclear fusion as we envisage it will be both more sustainable and less damaging to the environment than other methods that are being developed.”

It would be interesting to find out how would such a dense material be handled, and how a 10 cm sides, 130 tons cube would be manufactured and transported to its usage location. I guess it would sink into the ground if left sitting on earth. They would need a piramidal construction made of very strong concrete and steel. Well, nobody said anyone would make such a cube, it was rather an example, but this finding could revolutionize the energy industry forever if put into practice. We can’t wait for actual numbers to show up from an eventual nuclear fusion experiment.

Despite the Europeans’ optimism, the Obama administration, on the other hand, announced that they are now quitting Bush’s hydrogen $1.2 billion fuel cell plan, and saving $100 million a year with that. That’s it, people: the recession now told us we should not invest in hydrogen anymore. Not because it wouldn’t be a good technology, hydrogen being the cleanest fuel on Earth, but because the Americans don’t have enough money, or it isn’t profitable enough for them to build the infrastructure and make the technology cheap and reliable.

There have already been innovations in fuel cells sector that could give them a boost, and make them more cheap and reliable, but it seems Obama doesn’t read the news. Instead, observing the trend for electric cars powered by batteries and battery technology evolving quicker than fuel cells (we already have lots of expertise in battery making), Obama is now rather pursuing battery-powered cars. Of course, batteries have their drawbacks: the energy density is smaller, directly affecting weight, and they also pollute a lot in their fabrication process.

So, mr. Obama, if you ever read this, know I have the deepest respect for those who pursue clean technologies, but isn’t the US spending a lot of capital on other non-productive businesses (more than $100 million a year)? Why should we quit researching something just because it’s too expensive, at the price of our children’s lives? Wouldn’t it be safer for us to have as many options as possible for alternative energy? In this case, hydrogen becomes an alternative to the alternative, doesn’t it? Bush had many weak points in promoting green technology, but what he already started and invested in should not have been quit, even if it costed more in the beginning.

They even set up a demonstration to show their Daewoo Cielo going. It only needs a drop of gasoline to start it, and then it runs totally independent of any petrol fuel.

The car doesn’t pollute the atmosphere, they say. The whole invention is now kept in secret, but the Bordeianu brothers have been working at this project since the 1980’s. From a television interview, it results that their car works on hydrogen, being fueled by a form of hydrogen on demand system, catalyzed by the vinegar and the soft drink. Yes, hydrogen can be extracted more easily by using vinegar, as this 2007 discovery reveals.

The brothers say they will patent their invention in Graz, Austria, this summer. They even have a series model in plan, but the lack of money keeps their dream pretty far away, at least for the moment.

For whoever understands romanian, here’s the ProTV video showing the car running. The words are not important, what is truly amazing is the principle:

Eliott Campbell, from the University of California, Merced, and his colleagues found out that directly putting biofuel into the car’s tank is far less efficient than burning it in more sophisticated machinery to create electricity, and then run cars with it. Biofuel emmits CO2, but it is more convenient over fossil fuels because that CO2 is reabsorbed at the next crop of the plant that biofuel was made of (corn, for example). It seems this equation can be more efficient if we centralize the transformation of energy from chemical to electric.

In their study, the researchers have also taken into account the pollution generated by car manufacturers and by producing the fuels. They tested their solution comparatively on cars, and discovered that an electric car with the electricity obtained from biofuels goes 81% farther than if that biofuel was used onboard that car. That figure even offsets hybrid cars fed with biofuels.

Even more, in terms of air pollution, the electric car powered this way saves about 10 tons of CO2/acre compared to a similar-sized gasoline-powered car (gasoline was out of the question anyway, this was merely a brute comparison).

The facts these scientists did not take into account were the costly differences between electric and internal combustion cars, as far as sciencemag.org reports. As far as I would think, added to these are the “cleanliness” of producing the batteries that power the electric cars. They also have to evolve, along with renewable carbon-free technologies, such as solar, to give us truly clean transportation. Until then, it’s all trial and error. This discovery, anyway, shows what more and more people think: electric cars are better and are here to stay.

There is one kind of plastic that doesn’t seem to obey the same rule: polystyrene. Mechanical engineers from Iowa State University in Ames have proved how they can boost the power of biodiesel by dissolving polystyrene cups in it. Song-Charng Kong, a co-author of the experiment, says: “A polystyrene cup will dissolve almost instantly in biodiesel, like a snowflake in water.” He also says that the plastic doesn’t break down as well in petroleum-based diesel and other liquid fuels.

Until the threshold of 5% in polystyrene concentration, there is an equal amount of power increase in a tractor engine they experimented with. Over that limit, there’s a drop in power.

Of course, burning polystyrene cannot be as clean as burning clean biodiesel, but the researchers say they will work on the engines’ fuel injection system to yield a more complete burn and fewer emissions.

The industry of biodiesel is not properly developed everywhere, and the biodiesel itself is debated, some saying it does more harm than good in the long run. Melting plastics into biodiesel to burn them down is still a temporary solution, and not one we should adopt for our vehicles. Maybe big and efficient power generators could take advantage of this change, as they are fewer than cars, and the technology would be easier to implement, but it’s still a compromise. Getting rid of all those polystyrene piles in exchange to creating electricity for future electric cars would be a more equitable bargain.

At least, that’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Scientists from the University of St. Andrews, partnering with Strathclyde and Newcastle have discovered a method of making clean batteries that also have a chemical reaction, but do not carry a chemical component used in batteries today. Instead, they use a reaction with the oxygen drawn from the air to generate electricity.

The battery is called STAIR (St Andrews Air), and should be cheaper than current rechargeable batteries. The oxygen, drawn in through a surface of the battery exposed to air, reacts within the pores of the carbon to discharge the battery. “Not only is this part of the process free, the carbon component is much cheaper than current technology,” says Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at St Andrews. He estimates that it will be at least five years before the STAIR cell is commercially available.

STAIR is also long-lasting: the project 8 times longer than a lithium cobalt oxide battery. The overall goal was to achieve a battery with 5 to 10 times more lifetime.

The team is now working on a prototype to be used on small applications such as MP3 players, to demonstrate their concept. Let’s hope the researchers will also find a solution to not using lithium anymore, bring mining for battery chemicals to an end, and pass us into the next era of carbon-based electronics. This seems to be the trend everybody begins to follow in their inventions, anyway.

The method for making these ultralight and ultrathin supercapacitors is pretty simple: they spray carbon nanotubes on two pieces of plastic, and put a thin layer of gel electrolyte between them. So, one nanotube layer acts as the anode, and the other as the cathode. After that, everything goes the same old way: when you apply a voltage on the capacitor, the charge is stored in the two conducting nanotube layers. “The performance of the device is comparable to other devices,” says Cui. “The key is that everything is printable.”

The printing process goes like this: carbon nanotubes are suspended in water and sprayed onto the plastic with an air gun resembling that of an ink-jet printer. The water evaporated, and leaves two 0.6 micrometer thick layers. The gel is made of powedered polyvinyl alcohol and an acid, mixed in a mold. The gel electrolyte doesn’t spill, and that makes the newly created supercapacitors flexible.

The energy density of the flexible nanotube supercapacitors compares well with existing supercapacitors, made using other technologies - even higher. The energy density is of about 70kW/kg, higher than that of commercial devices. The prototype, though, doesn’t have enough capacity to do anything useful, but the researchers are now studying methods to increase the energy density, so that one day supercapacitors could replace old lithium-based batteries for good, and spare important environmental resources now ruined by mining for lithium.

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Penn State University researchers discovered a bulk glass that can hold up to 12 MV/cm, and have a high permitivity, resulting in an energy density of 35 Joules/cm³, whereas standard polypropylene has only 10 J/cm³. Polypropylene is the most common dielectric in pulsed power applications.

Nick Smith, a Ph.D.in materials science and engineering at Penn state is the the lead author of the experiment. He used a commercial glass with a thickness of 50 micron that he thinned down to 10 to 20 microns by using hydrofluoric acid. The glass he obtained was so thin that it could be bent like a plastic film, but at the same time very delicate. The thinner the glass, the more electric field can be applied before it fails (and conducts).

The etched glass was placed in a polymer fluid for testing and up to 30,000 volts were applied. When the breakdown point was reached, electricity began to flow through the glass suddenly, with a flash and a bang that resembles a lightning bolt conducting through air. The polymer fluid was used to contain the lightning. In each case, failure occurred within 40 to 80 seconds.

The bulk glass the researchers tested is an alkali-free barium boroaluminosilicate used in large quantities for flat panel displays and microelectronics packaging. The very good energy storage capacity is due to the highly polarizable barium atoms, that also contribute to the high permitivity, and the alkali-free composition, inhibiting the energy loss. The more defect-free the glass is, the highest the energy the ultracapacitor can store.

The scientists are optimistic, saying that their defect-free barium boroaluminosilicate glass will be commercialized in the near future. It all depends on who is going to invest in their research. Maybe someone has to convince Warren Buffet, who is already investing in chinese electric cars. That way the bulk glass ultracapacitors will surely have a chance on the market.

After all, that’s life - it all depends on who’s investing trust in you. That should be something you should think about, if you didn’t. If you have the money, invest in these technologies, and bring them to the public, for your and everybody’s wellness.

Keeping into account that ITER has an estimated deadline of about 40 years, and remembering the recent inventions in room temperature nuclear fusion, it seems a little bit too exaggerated to think about present technologies wanting to be followed and implemented 40 years from now. The important thing is all these nations, including South Korea, India and Russia, have realized that such a big energetic project cannot be built by only one nation. What we have to do nowadays is make things work, and do that in a timely manner, not with plans half a lifetime into the future.

Nuclear fusion may be the ultimate energy resource, but it has to be implemented on smaller, more inexpensive scale to keep the future developments and upgrades alive.

I’ll take a quote from that letter on Kevin’s blog: “In my vision, the hydrogen is produced from sea water using state of the art high temperature nuclear reactors (like China is now building) cooled by sea water. On board production is done far out to sea away from population centers and sensitive eco systems. The government has large stock piles of nuclear material from the end of the cold war that can be converted to hydrogen. Nuclear waste can be recycled and or deposited in the safe depths of the Arctic Ocean where Russia has been safely doing so for years. With cheap clean nuclear power the hydrogen can be liquefied for efficient storage and distribution.

“This relatively newly developed nuclear technology can produce energy to run our cars with the cost efficiency close to that of oil.( $1.50 / kg) This newer method described above could bring costs for production and distribution under $3 a gallon equivalent. Even factoring in the cost of uranium and enrichment.”

I’m not an expert in nuclear energy, but I guess the only real problem standing in this plan’s way is the governments involved and the political aspects. It’s like turning weapons into farming tools… it could be viable for a while… don’t know… What do you think about it?

The protection system relies on the “hydrogen effect”, discovered in 2000. Since then, it has not been used by standard radioactive storage plans, but now Patrik Fors, the creator of the dissertation, says “now I have shown that it’s even more powerful than was previously thought.”

The hydrogen effect relies on the existence of large quantities of iron connected with the nuclear residue. The first barrier consists of a copper capsule reinforced with iron. The second barrier is made of bentonite clay, and the third layer is made of 500 meters of granite. Microorganisms and fissure minerals in the rock will consume all the oxygen in the groundwater.

In the unlikely case that all three barriers would be damaged, the iron capsule will be anaerobically corroded by water, producing hydrogen in large quantities and at high pressures - it would reach 5 megapascals (50 bar), at 500 meters below the surface. For a comparison, the pressure in your car’s tires is of about 2.5 bar.

That hydrogen will protect the fuel from being dissolved into water, even though the radioactive material creates a corrosive environment in the water as a result of their radiation. Hydrogen keeps the uranium from oxidizing and converting to liquid form. In fact, tests have shown that the hydrogen makes the already existing uranium in the water in liquid form turn into solid, cleaning the water, which becomes less radioactive than natural levels present in the groundwaters of Sweden.

“The hydrogen effect will prevent the dissolution of nuclear fuel until the fuel’s radioactivity is so low that it need no longer be considered a hazard,” says Patrik Fors. The large quantities of iron in the capsules would produce enough hydrogen to protect the radioactive fuel for tens of thousands of years, making it harmless.

Let’s just hope our followers won’t lose the trace of the spots that the uranium has been buried, and future civilizations will try to dig the place. Let’s hope they’ll evolve differently than we did. Except that, Sweden has nice blonde girls, it would be a pity to make them