New Ethanol Fuel Cell being developed for vehicles

[Still_Small_Voice]

A new fuel cell is being developed by Nissan.  It might have potential.  It uses 55 percent ethanol and 45 water as fuel.  Read the below:

 

When the world at large thinks of fuel-cell vehicles—to the extent it does, at least today—they are associated with hydrogen as the fuel to power them.

But a fuel cell, more broadly speaking, is any device that produces electricity from a variety of input fuels or energy carriers.

This morning, at a briefing in Japan, Nissan said it planned to develop vehicles using fuel cells powered by ethanol rather than hydrogen.

Read more at:

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1104467_nissan-takes-a-different-approach-to-fuel-cells-ethanol

[Guest]

I guess it's fine that we're developing new technology and all.  But the economic viability has not been addressed with this technology.  It would not be able to compete with gasoline in a free market.  It will only survive through government subsidies.

[unixknight]

@Carborendum Just like electric cars.

[Sunday21]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commentary/the-problem-with-ethanol-in-gasoline/article29103634/

[Still_Small_Voice]

This is not ethanol in gasoline.  This is ethanol with a fuel cell.  The fuel cell transforms the fuel into electricity which feeds a battery that powers an electric engine.  There is no fuel burning involved in the process.  I am curious as to how efficient the ethanol-water fuel cell is at the conversion into electricity.  I am imagining it is better than the internal combustion engine which is only about 15 to 20% efficient.  We shall see what happens with the technology.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, unixknight said:

@Carborendum Just like electric cars.

I already did the math on electric cars in another thread.  They will eventually pay for themselves.  But it is often after the five year average ownership period of cars.

With this method described in the article, it may or may not be as efficient as gasoline engines.  But the cost of almost any alcohol is going to be higher per unit of energy than the production of gasoline or diesel.  If, however, they changed to hemp instead of corn for the ethanol source, then it can be competitive without government subsidies.

44 minutes ago, Still_Small_Voice said:

This is not ethanol in gasoline.  This is ethanol with a fuel cell.

I still don't see a fuel cell car out on the market today that doesn't blow up -- not a common, mass produced one.  I can withhold judgment until I see the working model.  But so far, what I've been impressed to judge is that the efficiency can only be had with a higher production cost.

[unixknight]

14 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I already did the math on electric cars in another thread.  They will eventually pay for themselves.  But it is often after the five year average ownership period of cars.

Whether or not they'll pay for themselves has everything to do with whether you have a place to recharge for free.

In any case, that isn't why I said that.  The issue with electric cars is, despite the Government's claims and marketing, the technology isn't mature enough to replace gasoline powered cars.  My wife recently needed a new car and, as we were considering options, looked at some electric cars.  The trouble with electric cars, besides cost, is twofold:

1) Range.  No electric cars that we looked at could make a single one-way trip to my office from home in the event that I needed to use it, and that's assuming no unexpected problems like traffic or detours.  Where I work has free electric car charging, but where I live doesn't.  So even if I somehow got it to work, the battery wouldn't hold enough charge to get me home then back again for another recharge.

2) Availability of charging stations.  Unless you have a charging station installed in your home you're going to need to rely on publicly available charging stations, and they aren't nearly as common as gas stations.

Edited June 17, 2016 by unixknight

[Guest]

22 minutes ago, unixknight said:

The issue with electric cars is,

I guess you didn't follow the discussion on the new Tesla.  The latest model addresses all that.  I'm afraid I haven't researched whether the Tesla uses government subsidies or not.

[unixknight]

forgot the quote

Edited June 17, 2016 by unixknight

[unixknight]

1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

I guess you didn't follow the discussion on the new Tesla.  The latest model addresses all that.  I'm afraid I haven't researched whether the Tesla uses government subsidies or not.

I said the issue with electric cars "is" and not what it "will be in late 2017."

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, unixknight said:

I said the issue with electric cars "is" and not what it "will be in late 2017."

Fair enough.

[Still_Small_Voice]

I just want to throw this out.  I hear talk about government subsidies for electric cars a lot.  But there are government subsidies for the oil companies as well.  If we really want to level the playing field subsidies for oil companies and electric car manufacturers should be eliminated.

[LeSellers]

1 hour ago, Still_Small_Voice said:

If we really want to level the playing field subsidies for oil companies and electric car manufacturers should be eliminated.

So, what,. exactly, are these oil company subsidies?

And how do they stack up against the huge amount of money the petroleum companies pay in taxes?

Lehi

Edited June 18, 2016 by LeSellers

[Still_Small_Voice]

Lesellers I think you are inferring at how broken and complex are current tax system is.  Our tax system is an abomination.  Over 70,000 pages of confusing regulations.  The system is designed to control and manipulate and punish success from what I have discovered.  I guarantee if the Internal Revenue Service wanted to get someone on violations they can.  The current corporate tax rate is up to 39 percent.  The top income tax rate is 39.4 percent.  That is immoral in my opinion.

What is the solution?  Abolish the Internal Revenue Service and reform the system to simple tax rate such as a 10% income tax rate and a 15% corporate tax rate.

[LeSellers]

9 hours ago, Still_Small_Voice said:

LeSellers I think you are inferring at how broken and complex are current tax system is.

Only partially. All you say is true, but I disagree that corporations should pay more than individuals. "Why?" you ask. Because corporations do not pay taxes, people do. The owners (whether shareholders or partners or whatever) pay some of the taxes and they are people. The customers/clients pay the taxes and they are people, too.

Then, too, when a corporation "pays" taxes, that means the people who own the company pay twice, both the 15% you propose and the 10% they pay directly. That means they are paying 25%. Corporations should "pay" no taxes at all: only the people who own them should, assuming taxation were moral in and of itself. It is not.

Taxation is theft. The government puts a gun to your head and says, "gimme yur dough!" You have no effective say in how much they take, nor in how they spend it. If you're logical, you do not agree with their having it in any way, at any time, for any reason. But, for all that, the problem is not taxation. The problem is spending and power.

The USAan federal budget is at least five times what it should be. 90% of the things the federal government (and at least 90% of what state and local government do) should not be done by the force of the state at all. There are lobbyists, not solely, or even mostly, because companies and unions and Planned unParenthood want to direct government, but because they want to protect themselves from the power of the government and get government money (which was stolen, remember). Get government out of things it ought not be doing, and the lobbyists would have no reason to exist.

Still, though, you did not answer the question. What are those oil subsidies? Depletion, for instance, is not a subsidy, it is a recognition that what the company had as a resource no longer exists — it was taken out of the ground and sold (the sale of which was taxed). Exploration is a heavy cost every oil company pays. It comes out of profits in anticipation of future profits, which will also be taxed. Do oil companies take advantage of these "loopholes"? Of course they do, and if I were a shareholder, I'd demand a new board of directors and new management if they did not. I want my (taxable) income to be as high as possible.

Lehi

[Vort]

On 6/18/2016 at 8:12 AM, LeSellers said:

Because corporations do not pay taxes, people do.

I am completely baffled by peoples' inability to understand this. Some months back, my pro-Bernie niece (I should call her Bernice -- but I digress) was lecturing me about the evils of corporations. After reminding her that modern life and technology would not even be possible without corporations, I brought up this central fact, that corporations do not directly pay taxes. She simply disbelieved me. So I said, "When a corporation is forced to pay taxes on its product, do you think it takes the taxes out of the paychecks of senior management? Of course not. They raise the price of their product or service."

Her response: "They should make laws to make that illegal!" Which is pretty much exactly the response I would expect from a Bernie supporter, sad to say.

Honestly, people just don't think. They react according to their conditioning. I suppose it has ever been so, but it's discouraging when you finally get old enough to see it all around you. Maybe that's why we die by the time we're 100; it's just too much of a pain to see how foolish everyone is, self included.

[jerome1232]

4 hours ago, Vort said:

Maybe that's why we die by the time we're 100; it's just too much of a pain to see how foolish everyone is, self included.

This has the workings of a great signature.


One thing has me confused about this fuel-cell but maybe I'm just slow. It says it uses heat to reform ethanol into hydrogen which then is used to generate electricity. It mentions that it is a high heat system. Where is it getting this heat from? Is it also burning the ethanol to produce heat?

[Still_Small_Voice]

I appears some heat is generated in the process of the fuel cell converting the ethanol-water mix to electricity.  That was my understanding when of it when I read it again.

Edit:  No ethanol is burned in the process of generating electricity.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Still_Small_Voice
Adding

[Guest]

I still don't understand how a fuel cell is even possible.  It appears to be both chemically and physically counterintuitive.  It seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics.  But apparently it can work.  I just haven't seen a model that actually does work without a lot of problems and inefficiencies.

[Vort]

3 hours ago, Carborendum said:

I still don't understand how a fuel cell is even possible.  It appears to be both chemically and physically counterintuitive.  It seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics.  But apparently it can work.  I just haven't seen a model that actually does work without a lot of problems and inefficiencies.

Think of a fuel cell as a reverse electrolysis machine: Instead of putting energy in to splitting a (lower-energy) molecule into its constituent parts, it gathers energy from making (higher-energy) components into CO₂ and H₂O. In effect, it is a controlled oxidation of the fuel. Heat is one of its by-products, but not the only (or at least primary) by-product, as in normal oxidation.

Remember that internal combustion engines are nearly 200 years old, and that there is well over a century of intensive design improvement behind them. Let's give a few years or decades for fuel cell technology -- the idea for which is itself almost 200 years old, and which has been developed, albeit not intensively, for probably 80 years -- to catch up.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Vort said:

Think of a fuel cell as a reverse electrolysis machine: Instead of putting energy in to splitting a (lower-energy) molecule into its constituent parts, it gathers energy from making (higher-energy) components into CO₂ and H₂O. In effect, it is a controlled oxidation of the fuel. Heat is one of its by-products, but not the only (or at least primary) by-product, as in normal oxidation.

Remember that internal combustion engines are nearly 200 years old, and that there is well over a century of intensive design improvement behind them. Let's give a few years or decades for fuel cell technology -- the idea for which is itself almost 200 years old, and which has been developed, albeit not intensively, for probably 80 years -- to catch up.

That

1. Sounds like a very common reaction, albeit highly controlled.
2. Sounds completely unlike what they described it as when they tried to make a big stink about it 15 years ago.

What I understood it to be was somehow taking a proton (H+) off of the ethanol molecule and letting that move along a conductor (wire) instead of an electron.  This would truly be the current direction rather than the reverse current direction that electrons take.  This then means that electrons flow along a reverse path or something.  That made no sense to me.  How on earth does a proton move along a conductor?  Is that even possible?

This link modifies what they described before.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/fuelcells/basics.htm

But it indicates a separation of the H+ and the e- and they collect again at another point.  That is like running a car with a bunch of wind turbines mounted on it and hoping to make more energy than it takes to run the car.

Now you're saying that was completely wrong.  I'll admit that I'm more inclined to believe you than these other explanations.  So, do you have any idea what they were trying to say that I could have gotten mixed up somehow?

 

Edited June 21, 2016 by Guest

[Vort]

The link shows a GIF that gives what looks like a reasonable, though vastly simplified, explanation of the process for hydrogen. The chemistry is a bit different, though functionally very similar, for a hydrocarbon. It's the e^-s that travel through the wire, while the H⁺s pass through the membrane and then oxidize.

I have no idea what the others were trying to explain. My guess is that they did not understand what was going on, but they had received an explanation and, without actually thinking it through, they thought they sort of got it and tried to pass that onto you. I find this to be distressingly common: Someone does not really understand even the basics of something, but thinks he sort of does, so he goes about giving his "explanation" to others. Happens all the time in religious discussion. Bummer, really.

EDIT: In rereading your post, I realized that I did not really respond to your question. At the "entering" part of the diagram, a catalyst oxidizes the fuel. (Here, "oxidizes" is used in its electrochemical sense of "removes an electron".) The electrolyte consists of an unusual substance that allows positive ions to pass but blocks electron passage, so the electrons take a circuitous (heh, heh) path until they meet up again with the hydrogen ions (protons). They are then combined with oxygen, and it is this oxidation that actually drives the process, because this is where the energy is actually liberated.

Edited June 21, 2016 by Vort

[Guest]

Well, I don't really see why the circuitous path is required.  Maybe that is part of the reaction control mechanism.  It seems like the circuit and the membrane would be completely unnecessary if it were simply an internal combustion engine with the oxygen added at the point of the catalyst.  What is the desired result that is different with this mechanism than with an ICE?  You still have CO2 as one of the byproducts.  So, it's not that.  Does it have to do with the ability to get alcohol to burn properly in an ICE?  Corrosion?  I'm searching here.

And what happens to the rest of the methanol molecule?

Edited June 21, 2016 by Guest

[Vort]

Better efficiency and lower temperatures, I believe.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, Vort said:

Better efficiency and lower temperatures, I believe.

I dunno.  I guess I'll be patient and wait the 200 years for the technology to catch up.  Oh, wait...