Posted on 06/08/2007 1:08:55 PM PDT by Red Badger
Most of what I have seen for sale is B20, or 20% biodiesel, 80% petroleum diesel. There is also B100 (100% biodiesel) for sale some places, but I’ve never seen it. I don’t know if they change the blend in the winter time like they do with ethanol. E85 is 85% ethanol, except that in the winter time they make a “winter blend” that is a good bit less than 85% ethanol because really high concentrations of ethanol in in your fuel makes it hard for you to start your engine in the winter time. Biodiesel will gel when it gets too cold.
From what I have heard, the farther north you go the lower the blend. I don’t think it is changed even in the summer. Down here, B80 is good enough for winter. I don’t know of anything running B100 except for maybe a few peaking generators.
I think the real problem is we are trying to figure out how to fuel machines that have been designed around petroleum fuel.
The trick is finding an abundant fuel and designing fuel around them.
Creating a replacement for gasoline and diesel will be very dificult. They have great fuel properties including high heat value, reasonably long shelf life and still reasonable price. They also work perfectly in the engines designed to burn them.
Luckily, in the next few years, there are products coming which will allow creation of engines that are much less picky about the fuel they will consume.
It is said that we have 500 times more coal energy than saudi arabia has in oil energy. Whatever the actual number, COAL is the hydrocarbon fuel we should be concentrating on, not ethanol, nor bio-diesel, nor even fission-nuclear. MHD is anywhere from 60% to 90% efficient, depending on who you’re talking to.
The PROBLEM with coal-MHD is that coal slag quickly coats the throat walls, gumming it up. So they’ve been shooting the coal plasma thru the throat at mach 2 to get around that problem. But that in turn creates still further problems/inefficiencies in the system.
Years ago this inventor thought of an easier solution : 4 film-belts, as endless loops, that slide thru on the throat walls. They get coated with the coal crud/particle damage and are then cleaned off on the outside, recoated with fast setting gel/paint, and fed back thru the throat again. They also help COOL the cryogenic MHD unit.
With (former) Sen. Conrad Burns help, got the idea to the DOE where it got the one-soldier-at-attention finger salute, as I knew it would. The DOE is the LAST place you go for innovative thinking.
Why not just use TEFLON COATED our SILVERSTONE process?......
Teflon/silverstone? What’s that? In coal burning MagnetoHydroDynamics you have a superconducting field of E vector on say the y axis and M field on the x axis. It’s usually rectangular in cross section. The coal plasma comes thru on the z axis. The z axis plasma has to do WORK against the intense EM field lines, and just like some people you know, will do almost anything to avoid WORK.
Here that means coal slag slides sideways and piles up as gunk/slag on the throat walls, quickly gumming up the process. Also there is some radiation damage to the delicate, highly machined walls, actually a grid of nested buttons.
Yes, you could place 4 pads on the throat walls, but how fast would you have to replace them? But at least you’ve got the basic idea : protect the MHD walls from coal slag and radiation damage.
In thinking of the continuous 4 film-belts solution on waikiki beach 5 years ago, this solves the slag/radiation problem as well as keeping the walls cooler. The remaining problem, the CO2 coming out, could possibly be solved by shooting it thru a CaO(lime dust)chamber and thus getting CaCO3(limestone), nature’s way of storing CO2.
Anyway, as I envisioned it, the whole MHD package would fit inside a semitruck trailer and be moved around the coal field with mobile electric lines following along. A sort of muhammed coming to the mountain instead of transporting whole mountains of coal to muhammed.
Be as it may, imagine what it would mean to export electricity at 60%+ efficiency directly from the coal fields, and leaving only limestone blocks behind?
That's not gunk, that's DIAMOND COATING............
That’s why I said “currently made from food crops”.
Yes, algae is promising as a bio-diesel source. I wouldn’t go the whale route. I like whales.
You would think that since power lines already run alongside most roadways, that an inductive pickup would be a no-brainer. Maybe it is, or maybe the difficulty in metering the usage per vehicle would be very expensive. Or maybe allowing inductive taps would allow too high a bleed loss even when there is no vehicle around. It isn’t really necessary in the cities, anyway, since battery tech is already good enough for short distances. Where you really need it is on the long stretches between cities, but the traffic density on those stretches may not justify the cost in infrastructure.
I like the idea of cars tailgating with their braking and acceleration coordinated by computer to form “Trains” on the road. It would fit more traffic on the same highway and use less energy because wind resistance would be less. Can’t be done until a significant numbers of vehicles are designed to take advantage of it, though. Vehicles joining and separating from the “Trains” becomes a problem, especially when there is an entire train of vehicles in the lane you need to move into. Instead of finding a space between two 20ft long vehicles, now you have to look for spaces between 200ft long trains of ten vehicles each.
Be careful if you decide to use cooking oil as a motor fuel, you could get arrrested!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1847746/posts
It seems to me that the conclusions are stilted toward the plug in hybrids by the fact that they are assuming an efficiency of 120 miles per gallon equivalent (3.5 mi/kWh) vs. 34 MPG for a gasoline powered sedan. Further, the assumed electric car only has a range of only 60 miles. If these huge differences in vehicle types were normalized, I'd wager that CTL would come out significantly better than the electric option.
The whole report is just skewed for some reason. They don’t even mention diesel fuel being made from coal, nor do the bring up the subject of a diesel-hybrid combo.........
IMHO, the impact of liquid fuel type is far less significant than the wiggle room allowed by comparing IC to electric powered vehicles. I think they’re comparing a suped up commuter golf cart to a real car.
You know, after re-reading this from another viewpoint, maybe it was designed to be anti-gasoline and pro-diesel, in the first place.............
And what do you propose to run such a plant on?
Solar Towers ?
http://www.time.com/time/2002/inventions/rob_tower.html
That is pretty cool. Be interesting to see if it will work.
You mean the coal GUNK that piles up on MHD walls is DIAMONDS? Please demonstrate said diamond production....
We are talking about different things. The walls of the MHD throat have to be kept as clean and clear as possible. Thus the film-belt has to interfere with the E and M fields as little as possible, and yet remove the gunk that gets blown sideways onto the walls, as well as remove some of the heat from the throat.
This is sort of what my body is going thru now : ulcers(erosians in esophagus)and congestive heart failure(fluid in lungs) : a week in the hospital.
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