Forum Home » Sound Reinforcement » The Basement » OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share
| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321746 is a reply to message #321731 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 16:00   |
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| Charlie Zureki wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 16:25 |
Helium 3 would be a great source for Reactors, nonhazardous waste, controllable, but, there is no one lobbying for it.
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Helium 3? It should be pointed out that we are no where close to harnessing fusion cycles as heat bath processes. Also the while the fusion of Helium three does not produce stray neutrons, the other potential fusion reactions in the system (eg H and H) produce large amounts of energetic neutrons.
Additionally, the accepted method for the production of Helium-3 is from the decay of tritium, which itself is produced from the neutron bombardment of lithium 6, which is not exactly a benign, earth-friendly, precursor.
While I am definitely a proponent of atomic energy (see a long thread I started here in the a couple years back), Helium 3 would not be on my list of methods to consider.
As an undergraduate, I rode the bus to campus every day with a physicist who was working on other alternative "aneutronic" fusion reactions. After talking to him, I am convinced the one with the best potential is the fustion of a proton with Boron-11.
Even this is a very long way off from our immediate needs for a solution. Regardless, I keep my ear to the rail on Boron-11 progress.
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If you really want to save money on gasoline... always purchase your gas in the morning hours 4-6am. Gasoline pumps use volumetric measurements, not by weight. When the Gas temperature is the coolest it is more dense.
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This is a fascinating thought, but personally I would fire any design engineer that did not compensate for this relatively simple behavior with temperature... If it is really true, then it is a major oversight on the behalf of gasoline pump manufacturers.
Phill Graham
Doctoral Candidate
Georgia Tech
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321755 is a reply to message #321741 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 16:12 |
 Charlie Zureki
Messages: 266
Registered: April 2008
Location: Detroit Area |
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Although this device and it's methodology may be new, the Idea is not. It dates to atleast the 1930's. Injecting a higher temp burning gas into the engine cylinders to try to achieve higher horsepower (Nox) or to get better fuel efficiency by burning ALL of the fuel.
A side note:
In the forties a General Motors Engineer supposedly developed an "engine" that used water as it's fuel. I Don't know too much about it but, the story goes, that this man quit his job and continued research on his own, and when he died suddenly, his Home and Garage were ransacked, with all of his papers missing.
If you wrote any postings for the last thread on Fuel/ Prices/ ecology etc... and were concerned... write a Letter to Nascar and tell them they need to start using Unleaded gasoline.
Hammer
Be prepared, you'll need it!
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321761 is a reply to message #321756 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 16:19 |
Charlie Zureki
Messages: 266
Registered: April 2008
Location: Detroit Area |
Has No Life |
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Great experiment...
two containers of same dimensions, both containing 1/2 gallon, put one in the sun and one in the shade.
They'll weight the same, but see the difference in volume.
Hammer
Be prepared, you'll need it!
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321763 is a reply to message #321705 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 16:19 |
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| Mac Kerr wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 15:14 |
I admit I know little about modern car engines, but after the battery recharges, isn't there excess electricity available from the alternator? It keeps on spinning whenever the engine is running. If that's the electricity that's used for the electrolyzing, how are wasting fuel?
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There is a potential voltage at the alternator output, yes. However, the more things that are connected to the alternator (i.e. the magic electrolysis machine), the lower the impedance and the higher the amount of current flow from the alternator. The higher the current flow, the harder the alternator is to spin, resulting in an increased load on the engine. The higher the load, the more fuel required.
So no, there is not excess electricity.
Ryan Lantzy
"In the beginner's mind the possibilities are many, in the expert's mind there are few."
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321785 is a reply to message #321724 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 17:00 |
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John Roberts {JR}
Messages: 6401
Registered: April 2004
Location: MS |
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| Phillip Graham wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 15:08 |
Its actually a little worse than a zero sum game, JR. I just did the thermodynamics out to double-check.
The heat extractable to the surroundings from the decrease in entropy caused by the formation of the H2O from combustion of H2 and O2 will always be lower, in the case of a reversible, isothermal process (ie the best case scenario).
This is a function of the definition of entropy under these conditions: dS=dQ/T. Since, for irreversible processes dS>dQ/T real processes are worse than in the reversible case.
Even if you consider the behavior of the system as reversible, and use an ideal Carnot cycle (ie two isothermal steps linked to two constant entropy steps) The energy from the chemical reaction of combustion of the hydrogen and oxygen (which takes place at the high temperature point of the carnot cycle) has an inherent penalty.
Ach, that's still complicated. One more try:
1. Put a fixed Q into the system by a chemical reaction at some high temperature: dQ=T_high(dS), or after integration at constant T: deltaQ=T_high*deltaS That means you get an amount of entropy S for a given Q.
2. Now you cool the system to a lower temperature under constant entropy conditions, so S stays the same. dQ is now: dQ=T_low(dS) or deltaQ=T_low*deltaS. Since S is fixed, and T is smaller, the extractable Q is always less at T_low that the Q you put in at T_high.
The difference between the input Q at T_high, and the extracted Q at T_low then represents the total work done by engine during its cycle.
It should be clear then that the lower T_low is, the less heat you have to pull from the system to return to the beginning of the Carnot cycle, and the more was converted to (Pressure)*(Volume) work on the surroundings during the isentropic expansion phase. Hence the desire for the largest temperature gradient possible between the Q in (chemical reaction) and Q out (e.g. radiator sending heat into the ambient air). Since T_low is not 0 Kelvin, and dS for a real engine will be greater than dS_ideal for a reversible system, there is always a penalty for the extraction of mechanical work.
In a real system, the input Q is fixed per amount of fuel burned, in this case from the electrolysis of water.
At a minimum you therefore take the Carnot efficiency penalty, and the efficiency penalty of the battery/alternator combination.
The are only two ways the system would seem to come out ahead. First would be with the production of the hydrogen by an external battery, which of course is just passing the buck for input Q.
The second way the system might possibly come out ahead would be if the injection of H2 and O2 dramatically increased the T_high for the car's engine (ie increasing the average internal cylinder temperature). The efficiency of a Carnot engine is related to the difference in (T_high-T_low)/Absolute temperature. I give this a remote, at best possibility of happening, but it is at least conceivable.
BTW, if anyone reads this and feels just totally confused, don't feel bad! I had two semesters of undergraduate thermodynamics/kinetics, and two semesters of graduate thermo/kinetics, and THEN TA'ed for a graduate level thermodynamics class. It didn't start to make any real sense to me until graduate school and TA'ing. J. W. Gibbs was a genius!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
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Thanx, I was aware of inefficiencies both ways but not the details...
I feel like this level of scientific detail while interesting is not going to help Randy understand what is going on. These purveyors of "something for nothing" depend upon customers who want to believe in simple answers, and that they are being screwed by car companies or oil companies, or.. whatever all powerful organization.
The modern IC engine is mature and well refined. There may be a couple percent inefficiency here or there, but there is no free lunch. Easy improvements have already been taken.
The odds are 99.9999% that this product is a scam. There were a bunch of similar products when people were equally desperate during the oil embargo back in the '70s.
I would really love to be wrong, as this one product could solve the worlds marginal oil supply issue. I am not holding my breath, or shorting oil.
JR
https://www.resotune.com/
"A bus in a console is spelled with one 's', but you can buss your girlfriend while riding in a bus."
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321798 is a reply to message #321731 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 17:45 |
Patrick Tracy
Messages: 1189
Registered: February 2006
Location: Boulder, CO |
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| Charlie Zureki wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 14:25 |
We burn stuff because currently it's cheaper, more efficient, and that it is the technology afforded to us at the moment.
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The price we pay depends on whether you factor in the hidden costs of their use or just pass those costs on to the next generation. That can't last.
Is it more efficient when braking to dump momentum as heat or to regenerate it as electricity? The reasons that we don't have electric vehicles are political, economic and social, not technical.
Afforded to us by whom? There are other technologies in existence, but many have the potential for decentralized production which may not benefit those who currently control our energy.
| Charlie Zureki wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 14:25 |
The "grid for distributing it electrically", the majority of power from this grid is from burning. (some from hydro, wind and solar, but a very small percentage)
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Umm, yeah, but my point is that the grid is there if we decide to find other sources of energy. There's no real reason that the source must be combustion other than the substantial economic momentum for doing it that way. There is energy everywhere and all we really have to do is be creative about extracting it. The grid can even make decentralized generation like home photovoltaic more efficient by allowing those generating excess to supply those with a shortfall.
| Charlie Zureki wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 14:25 |
The laws of Physics are quite clear, you cannot create or destroy matter, all that you can do is change it's form. That the changing of it's form is where we get our "energy". We can only create energy through, Chemical, Mechanical, or Thermal methods.
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Yes, the laws of Newtonian physics are clear, but in the quantum world what you say isn't necessarily so. Even within your constraints there are lots of other ways to use the energy all around us. I'm not talking about cold fusion or anything equally questionable, I'm talking about leveraging our solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, tidal etc. technologies into a practical system of generation. I think it can be done on a technical level but it's the political and economic forces that resist the change.
http://home.earthlink.net/~patrickgtracy
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321805 is a reply to message #321756 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 18:16 |
Dick Rees
Messages: 1542
Registered: September 2007
Location: St Paul, MN |
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Howard Mohr had a hilarious take on the whole thing in one of his books. The "Compost-o-carb" which you refueled with road kill. He's the author of "How to talk Minnesotan" and a funny kinda guy.
Neo-Luddite, Rocket Surgeon
"The bum sat on the boxcar, his feet were on the ground"......Longfellow
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321812 is a reply to message #321803 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 18:26 |
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John
Any schematics on how to do that? my tailpipes emit plenty of water
when does Oxford arrive at this train?
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| Re: OK off Topic but this is useful to us all and i will share [message #321821 is a reply to message #321793 ] |
Sun, 11 May 2008 18:40 |
E. Lee Dickinson
Messages: 942
Registered: February 2007
Location: Richmond, VA |
Has No Life |
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| Phillip Graham wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 18:34 |
| Marjan Milosevic(MarjanM) wrote on Sun, 11 May 2008 18:21 |
I dont know about the device in question but...
My very close friend is a real "nut", and for more than a year he is working on some kind of device that will convert the normal petrol engine to run on water.
As he explained to me there is a way to separate HH form O with some different electrolyze (combining 4 different frequencies applied to the steel plates) and he already succeeded in achieving this.
According to some science literature hydrogen has more calories when burning than petrol and he made some calculation that with 2 liters of distiled water you can run around 100 kilometers.
He is now working on the injector part where hydrogen will be injected to the cylinder.
Knowing him, either he will do that or he will blow up his garage 
Regards
Marjan
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The direct electrolysis of water is very inefficient, there are better ways to "thermochemically crack" water.
Also, the volumetric energy density of gasoline is much much better than hydrogen, so your friend had better revisit his calculations. Gasoline is about 35MJoule/Liter, and highly compressed hydrogen (600+ ATM pressure) is about 5MJoule/liter. That is a seven-fold difference... 
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Yeah, but Phil, he's not talking about compressed hydrogen, he's talking about hydrogen electrolyzed from water. When I spent a semester soldering (without understanding) the voltage monitoring systems for a fuel cell in Virginia Tech's hybrid vehicle team, I often overheard the engineers around me lamenting that "There's more hydrogen in a cup of water than in a cup of compressed hydrogen."
E. Lee Dickinson
Advanced Visual Production Inc.
sound - lighting - video - design
www.avpric.com
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