Duke Leto wrote: Just another use for the old abandoned coal mines.
I don’t know about that, I mean how do you get sunlight down there? There plenty of uses for old mines and if worst comes to worse just fill them with carbonated salt water, and run electrolysis to make hydrogen and carbonates that fill the mine shut, but that a subject for a diffrent thread.
I already covered the fuel system, just line it with plastic or corrosion resistent metals, it not expensive and they are alreayd doing it.
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I asked you to look it up, but here are some links:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT1996/6000/6920v.htm
http://www.evworld.com/archives/testdrives/gmshev.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UDO/is_12_14/ai_72765923
As I mention before there no variable load on the turbine, its more fuel efficient then a diesel or gasoline engine in such a hybrid configuration. The exhaust gas is not a problem for a <40kw turbine, you can run bleed air over the exhaust system if need, turbines already do this to keep cool, or even better with such hot exhaust you can run a thermocouple or steam turbine and increase the fuel efficiency to up to 50% making it as efficient at a fuel cell, but less massive (though more complex) and more fuel variable. They are already working on making combine cycle engines with steam or thermalcouple enhancements, do I need to provide links?
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I’m already aware of the limitation of biofuels (see fusion oil thread) biodiesel are limited feedstock choices, we can make ethanol (or better yet butanol) on a much wider varity of feedstocks, most importently agriculture waste! How much land is required for soybeans to biodiesel? You want cheap energy to replace oil first things first get all the enregy we waste in our waste (hey that kind of catchy). I’m not against biodiesel, i’m just for what products we can most efficently extract for what we get, biodiesel from soy will have its place, ethanol (or butanol) from cellulose waste will have its, methane from garbage will have its, etc, unless cheap fusion comes around then its everything into oil.
Well there a many ways you can get CO2 out of the air, you could cool the air until you get CO2 ice but that would be energy intensive (though simple). You could run a brine solution past open air then pump it through a semipermeable membrane with a vacuum on the other side, CO2 would selectively enter the vacuum, but this would be expensive to make and maintain. Thirdly you could just grow organic matter, plants already do most of the work for you by capturing the CO2, polymerizing it, and adding some hydrogen to it; all you need for it is sunlight, water and a place to grow, all of which are plentiful and cheap. Only desalination plants could compete economically because they already produce products (fresh water and mineral salts). Algae with waste CO2 or organic matter feed into them have achieved conversion efficiency many times that of normal (from .5% of the sunlight utilized to 7%!) but you have to consider the cost of building enclosed ponds. Open prairie land will do for growing energy crops, it requires almost no maintenance, re-grows rapidly, and provides natural habitats, all you have to do is collect it before every winter when it naturally dies, the disadvantage is that it does not produce much organic feed stoke, maybe a 1-2 tons per acre per year, with intensive care and monocultures maybe 10 tons per year. Waste conversion would already complete most of our oil needs, so not much extra would need to be grown. Algae farms could do the trick but their advantage is only when you pump waste CO2 in. There plenty of waste CO2 though, even when you consider the removal of all fossil fuels: concrete and cement for example produce a lot of CO2 from the thermal decomposition of limestone, aluminum and other electrolysis refined metals and minerals also release CO2 (or produce carbon residue), etc. The advantage of algae over using the waste CO2 directly is that the algae does most of the work for you with free energy (sunlight) the disadvantage is you need to make enclosed ponds, I would just assume that economically the advantages out weights the disadvantage, greatly.
I have not seen any research suggesting extensive corrosion problems with E85, especially any research that claims ethanol
Look the centrifuge will never work, it would have too limited range and accuracy. Why not have a focus fusion powered laser? There working on high wattage diode lasers for weapons to take down missiles and artillery fire, a DPF fusion reactor could start up much faster then a turbine so the response time after detecting a missile would be much shorter. Or you could use a DPF (non-fusion) to make a plasma cannon, far fenched I know. Or how about a DPF fusion powered rail gun.
Well a plastic lined fuel tank and fuel lines then. Plastic are cheap, heck most of those parts area already made of plastic. Look there already making E85 capable trucks and cars for a few hundred dollars above regular models.
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That why I said hybrid for turbines, you can run the turbine at a constant load to charge the batteries, even when you consider the efficiency loss of the generator and the batteries a turbine with a recuperator would still be a more efficient, especially if it
I not a perfect solution, I’ve just went over the numbers:
I agree about the limits of biofuels, I once did a study 2 years ago on cellulose to ethanol and found that if we converted all agriculture waste in the USA it would only replace 16% of USA gasoline (7% of oil use), we would need energy crops, lots of it, I estimated up to 45% of the nation (~20% now) would have to become farm land making energy crops to replace the nations oil use. Even with fusion oil we could not replace all of today
Cellulose from ethanol still produce mineral fertilizers (phosphorus) nitrogen has to be added as is. In fact many cellulose to ethanol plans run on
Ethanol really is not that bad, all that needed to modify an engine for it is to change the fuel air ratio, and replace pieces exposed to the liquid ethanol with stainless steel or plastics. Despite having only 2/3 the energy per mass as gasoline, ethanol burns better then gasoline under compression and engines with very high compression ratios can be used thus increasing the amount of power per engine mass considerably.
Why diesel engines anyway?, why not foil bearing turbines? Turbines can be more efficient (at least in a hybrid platform) and it does not care what fuel it runs on, you could run on any liquid fuel, not to mention that they are smaller and easy to manufacture.
I would like to see how biofuel ethanol is a greater pollutant then gasoline, I
Duke Leto wrote: Like I said, if you can synthesize fuel from atmospheric CO2 and water, then you’re not digging up trash fuelizing it and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. The optimal thing would be to make extra oil and pour it back down the wells, trapping the carbon back in the geosphere where it originally came from.
You ask to extract CO2 from the atmosphere correct? Well lets see: plants get CO2 from the atmosphere and make up most of their dry mass from it, we eat the plants or make them into paper products, if we take the waste and used paper and make oil out of it and then make that into asphalt or other commercial products then we have successfully extract CO2 from the atmosphere, not to mention that we solved several other problems such as waste management and profitability. No one is going to make oil just to pump it back into the ground, they want to make a buck, so let them. We could also make oil from CO2 directly out of the air or water (there is far more CO2 in water then air), a fusion powered seawater desalination plant could make clean water for people and farms, as well as mine mineral salts, and extract CO2 and organic matter to make oil. Or if you really bad wanted to remove CO2 you could just run wires in the sea, run a current through them and grow limestone, make limestone to sell or make artificial islands.
Duke Leto wrote: You may well be right Transmute, but I’d much prefer to pull some CO2 out of the atmosphere for a certain period after the emissions stop to put the breaks on warming.
Elaborate?
Duke Leto wrote:
Why not just make oil out of waste using fusion power to provide heat and hydrogen and run conventional aircraft off of it with no infrastructure change?
Emissions is my worry.
Well there will be no net CO2 emissions, NOx will still be a problem but as others have mentioned: we replace building heaters/boilers with electic heaters (running on fusion power), replace all fossil fuel powerplants with fusion, replace large ships and train powerplants with fusion, replace small cars and buses with hydrogen/battieres or some other electrochemical storage fuel, that means that we cut 100% of all coal burning, almost all natural gases uses (aside for sporting goods uses) and 40-45% of oil uses (making gasoline), all you need “Fusion oils” for is heavy machinery, sports craft and goods, aircraft, asphalt, plastics and other commercial material. All this at the sacrifice of having to retain a small percentage of our present day NOx pollution, oh and at the sacrifice of all our garbage and waste… and sacrifice in CO2 as it is sequestered from plants into making food and waste, which is transformed into oil and then into plastics and asphalt, ripped from the carbon cycle. So we could even reduce and stop global warming and make commercial products at the same time, what a horrorable idea!
as for all your other questions, they should be answered at
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/102/
or even better post them there.
Corn to ethanol, yes I agree that is a joke, but cellulose to ethanol (or butanol) has much greater promise, all agricultural waste could become fuel without harming food production.
1. If we retire the gasoline engine what do we replace it with? Hydrogen has major limitations in storage and fuel cell prices have got to drop a full 10 fold! Batteries could replace short range transport, Metal-air fuel cells have potential, but lets be honest all of this requires massive infrastructure change.
2. I would love to replace coal with fission: pebble bed reactors, maybe even thorium cycle, but the general public will never go for it, their too afraid of the N word (no not the personified N word, the N word erroneously associated with giant mushroom clouds.)
3. Ethanol does not present the same ground water contamination problems, ethanol is very biodegradable.
I doubt that DPF fusion reactors are going to have a high enough power to weight ratio to compete with a jet engine, a jet engine is power and thrust all in one package, a DPF fusion reactor would need somekind of amazing electic motor and fans capable of propelling a plane to speeds beyond 800kph, and forget about supersonic travel with a electic pusher! Why not just make oil out of waste using fusion power to provide heat and hydrogen and run conventional aircraft off of it with no infrastructure change?
Well the problem is that Bussard reactor is spiting out fusion products in all directions, or at least in the six directions permitted by the holes in the toroid magnets of the polygon electrostatic confinement device, so to use a direct converter you would need at least six decelerators sticking out of it like a giant jackstone, or a very large magnetic funnel to aim the particles into a smaller number of decelerators.