How About Starting An Alternative Energy Section?

Hello ronwagn,

The main problem with all energy, is that it all eventually degrades into heat energy, of which some gets lost trying to heat interstellar space.

You say "on the verge", but I have yet to discover some energy source as cheap to purchase (I say that because all petroleum is subsidised heavily - real price should be presently somewhere around US$117 - yes $117 per US Gallon ), also being as concentrated in actual energy stored, easy to re-load your supply, and simple to transport.

I remember from the Popular Science or Popular Mechanics magazine, (I forget which), printed early 1950's, "A fully vaporised pint of petrol, if mixed carefully with the correct amount of air, and detonated, would lift the Empire State Building one foot off the ground."

So, we have a very long way to go, and in an increasingly short time available, to solve the energy shortage, and an "Alternative Energy Section" at CR4, may assist in this, let's hope so.

Kind Regards.....

You mention heat. Biomass can very easily beat petroleum at heating. That is a no brainer. Pellet fuel, gasification, methane, wood furnaces. Wood gas would give you a great explosion to. There are people driving trucks in Scandinavia with wood gas. They just stop and put in some more wood. Of course we need all the technologies, and we need some great minds to figure out how to coordinate them. Unfortunately few people are interested in the facts, just in promoting their own point of view.

Ron Wagner

Gotta a link for the wood gas burning trucks?

Really hard to beat the energy density of liquid fuels.

We need to do more w/less & harness some of the waste heat.

Do a search on mother wood burning truck. Mother Earth News has an article on ho to do it. Also Just do wood burning trucks. Wood gas trucks etc.

All the best,

Ron Wagner

Check out youtube.com . They have some nice videos on wood powered vehicles. A tractor, trucks, car. One truck is from 1914, others current. All good proofs of concept. This technology is nothing new.

Ron Wagner

Hi ronwagn.

You forgot to inform us that not any old wood is good enough! I lived in Norway for 22 years and the only time I saw a wood gas burning vehicle was in the science museum, and it was from the last war.

I do know how dangerous wood gas is, there was company in Norway that developed a secondary burning wood stove, the problem was that if the air for the secondary buning was not precisely controlled there would be an almight explosion!

I went to see a demonstration of one such stove because I wanted to put a stirling engine heater head into the secondary combustion chamber. The heat from it's secondary chamber was enormous, in the region of 1500C, but after about 10 mins the stove exploded into thousands of small pieces.

I also know that there were experiments in Norway in the 1990s to bring back a modern version of the wood gas burning vehicle, but the experiment failed.

Spencer.

Thanks, I will get back to you with more current information. I have seen reports on current, reportedly successful vehicles. Unfortunately I lost a lot of data on a bad hard drive.

I am not recommending this for actual individual use, but for power plants or businesses. It is similar to coal or any biomass gasification.

All the best,

Ron Wagner

Any dry wood or other biomass is good enough, as far as I know. The technique of feeding and burning it might differ. Coal dust might work great.

Ron Wagner

First of all, let's quit wasting heat. There are many ways to do that.

1. Insulation

2. Fluorescent lighting, and newer technologies.

3. Outlaw production of any new internal combustion vehicles, unless a real need can be proven. Use up the ones we have.

4. Attach Stirling engines and newer technologies to all large waste heat sources.

5. Use community steam heat where possible.

6. Use geothermal heating.

7. Advanced architecture to enhance the use of solar heat.

You could thinks of lots of other ways, I am sure.

I'll vote a 'yea' for the Alternative Energy section.

But when I get ready to ask about a "Technolosophy" section I need to know I can count on you!

cr3

seriously, I believe the blog index has an alternative section in it. Lem'me go check.....

yup, right.......... here. (http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/10/Alternative-Power-Blog)

Technolosophy

Could you define that for us?

Why is APB In electrical engineering?

It would seem to belong in NTR

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know what you were referring too until I clicked on it. It looks pretty underused and lost.

Ron Wagner

Thank you for bringing that timely reminder.

I had overlooked the fact re the:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/10/Alternative-Power-Blog

Kind Regards....

Dear ronwagn, Greeting and salutations! We are already able to to undercut the cost of oil. Because the cost is many-fold. Pollution, noxious fumes, and greed are the costs that immediately come to mind.

However there is at least one better way: Hydrogen. It releases between %200 to %300 percent the energy in a ICE that gasoline does. (Partially because gasoline is an inefficient fuel, and partially because the most efficient ICE is designed to waste nearly %75 of the fuel that enters the combustion chamber, supposedly as part of the lubrication)

Hydrogen can be made from many different sources. The best and least offensive is: water.

There are several methods. As the saying goes "You pay your money and you take your choice."

More later if anyone is interested. Dragon

Thanks for your comment. Of course there are lots of alternative energy technologies. Hydrogen is a great gaseous fuel. The problem is storage. If we can just turn hydrogen, biomass, focused solar, photovoltaic, wind, wave power etc. in to electricity we will have the common denominator of power. Electricity can run anything. Liquid and gaseous fuels have their place too.

We need to consider distributing power sources, and building redundancy into our systems. Then we can avoid the ridiculous outages the Midwest has suffered the last two years from ice storms.

This site has some brilliant minds. It will be an evolution of various technologies blending together, and supporting one another that will bring us to fast progress.

Ron Wagner

Dear ronwagn, Storage is not really a problem since Hydrogen can be made as needed on site. There are quite a few researched methods. Type in "hydrogen production" on any good search engine and you will get dozens of hits.

Cordially yours Dragon

Any of the dozens of hits for hydrogen production have a method(s) that are any where close to efficent?

burning coal [losing 2/3 of the energy to heat] to produce electricty & losing a bunch of that energy to tramission losses to produce hydrogen on site is counter productive.

Dear Garthh Producing hydrogen on site is as simple as connecting a few solar cells in series. The voltage required is between 9 and 16 volts DC. But it is unnecessary to manufacture and store hydrogen when it can be made as is needed in your car.

For further reference enter "Stanley Meyer" in your search engine.

Regards Dragon

How about a reputable link?

http://www.waterfuelcell.org/index.html

Lots of unfounded claims, broken links, vague plans, smoke mirrors & conspiracy theories...........

You couldn't suppress this application w/a machine gun if it worked!

All that being said, point us towards some verifiable info!

Re hydrogen. I was thinking of hydrogen cars storage. I have heard that there were concerns. Does hydrogen have more power than other gaseous fuels? Is it cleaner burning? Less polluting?

Ron Wagner

Ronwagn. Hydrogen has %300 more power per unit volume than gasoline, %450 more than propane and natural gas, The only byproduct from its combustion is water. I would say that it is cleaner and less polluting.

Dragon

Thanks for the info. My gut reaction is that it sounds a little scary to work around. Maybe you can fill me in on safety issues. Also recommended web sites. When you say unit volume, do you mean under high pressure? Concentrated energy is a definite plus though. I think Honda has provided individuals with leased vehicles and hydrogen generators that work off electricity. If they sign off on it, that is good enough for me.

We still need the energy to produce the hydrogen. Any electrical producing technology could be used. The distributors need the electricity and water. These things should be available wherever there is a gas station. The volume of hydrogen they need for fast fill ups is a question. Do you have any data comparing to gasoline storage, or an educated guess. Also safe storage. Underground? Would a service station tank be designed to store under higher pressure than an individual vehicle tank? I know there has been progress on storage and fuel cells. Do you see a drop in the cost of the technology over the long term? I would think so, based on mass production. freeenergynews.com is my base site for exploring all these issues.

All the best,

Ron Wagner

Ron, Thinking out side the box, there is no need for a centralized distribution center like the petroleum monopoly. The HHO fuel (and I wrote it that why on purpose) is NOT made and stored at fueling stations for sale to the driver by yet another corporation whose only interest is financial gain. HHO fuel can be produced in the automobile on demand from water. Every user becomes their own fueling station. There is no need for pressurized tanks, no dangerous transportation of liquid HHO. And while running the engine consumes %100 of the emitted gas.

I hope this makes sense Dragon

Everything except the actual production of the hydrogen makes perfect sense!

Can you really use resonant effects to split Water in to hydrogen?

A conversion for a ICE [internal combustion engine] to hydrogen, would not be markedly different than a propane or natural gas conversion. Keeping the amount of hydrogen gas to a minimum, would certainly make such a system safer than gasoline.

Still the basic flaw is the inability to produce the hydrogen!

Garthh, yes, the resonance effect is the key. Water is a very polar molecule and rapidly switching the current on and off ( not alternating it) makes the water "fracture" for want of a better term. The electrodes should be stainless or silver and the volume is quite amazing.

Dragon

Does that mean you've actually seen this happen in a controled environment?

Pulsed dc sine wave, sq, sawtooth or something else?

Garthh, Yes and I have done several proof of concept tests using pulsed dc sine, square wave fed through a rectifier and a high frequency circuit of my own design. All show great promise.

Dragon

Hello Dragonsfarm,

How about sending me the info via PM.

It would be really appreciated here.

I would like to get started in making my own fuel, thank you....

& how will you make the massive amounts of hydrogen, required?

Huge amounts of hydrogen.................. In about 1900 when the airship industry got off the ground (groan) there was suddenly a demand for the manufacture, storage and transport of millions of cubic feet of hydrogen. Industry managed to do this more than 100 years ago, seems to me that it should be able to manage it today. TrevorL.

This is a great idea! I'm all for it.

oilcan13

I read of research by the University of Florida on solar energy some years ago. They were using sodium thiosulphate pentahydrate for a storage medium. STP is a waxy substance that changes state (to a liquid) at about 120 degrees. This, and it's relativly low cost, makes it ideal. I was talking about it with a friend and we decided that burying the heat transfer coils in a septic tank full of STP might be a good way to go. What do you think?

Hi Skelly.

That is a great Idea.

Spencer.

http://www.h2stations.org/