Guys, we should put our money together and invest into this.
Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#92He will change the world if he can get 50-60% efficiency. Photovoltaic cells would be out and parabolic mirrors aimed at a heating elements would take their place - even better, tubes running under asphalt streets all circulating water through JTEC heat exchangers. A huge unmet need is extraction of heat energy at lower temperature differentials - it could put to use tons of waste energy at industrial plants, your ca…
But what if it's double the efficiency at twice the cost to produce? It does sound rather more complex than a solar cell.
Assuming it has the same lifetime/maintenance costs, then the profitability will be double that of the alternative.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#93This is like the ultime HN article. * Born hacker * Issues of race and oppression * Entreprenuer spirit * Issues with patents * Big companies stifling innovation Someone should write "Inventors at Work".
Not only that, but he's a huge supporter of science education for kids. He is a judge at the local Atlanta FIRST Robotics regional.
That is really cool. I guess I met him then. FIRST is an amazing thing, it got me started with Computer Science.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#94Assuming a proof-of-concept is developed, this guy has just managed to create a more-efficient way of converting heat into electricity. If that's the case, that technology could be applied to other heat-generation plants (nuclear, coal, gas), so those technologies would hypothetically still be more efficient. Am I missing something?
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electrons are a lot smaller than protons. Why wouldn't they go through the membrane?
Apparently, it's an insulated membrane that only lets protons through. A proton can move through the membrane more easily than an electron can. It has more to do with other properties of the material and the ions than the effective size of electrons vs protons.
Assuming my reference to proton exchange fuel cells is in the ballpark, the mechanism is to use the membrane plus pressure to separate the hydrogen into electrons and protons. The electrons are routed through the load, i.e. extracted electrical power, and the protons pass through the membrane. The inactive (non-dissociated) hydrogen molecules are blocked from the "cold" side by the semi-permeable membrane.
The electrons and protons recombine on the cold side to reform hydrogen. That hydrogen has to be compressed sufficiently to move it back to the "hot" side of the system. This is probably a pretty substantial compression and will probably limit the efficiency of the system - it also raises the "perpetual motion machine" red flag in my mind, except the sun is adding lots of thermal energy to make it go for real.
I'm picturing the system working at a molecular level like reverse osmosis of seawater: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis. Reverse osmosis requires a substantial amount of pressure (~1000 psi) to force the water through the semi-permeable membrane while the salt cannot pass through the membrane and thus stays on the salty side.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How would this work? Surely sunlight can't create enough heat to ionize a gas (creating plasma?). He isn't ionizing the gas, he is increasing the gas pressure by heating it. "Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or a wheel, he’s forcing ions through a membrane." See next for why that is important. > Why don't the whole hydrogen atoms go through the membrane to the lower pressure area? He u…
So if the sunlit side is under higher pressure, how do the hydrogen atoms return to that side? I must still be missing something. Also, is there really enough hydrogen ionizing at 400C?
> So if the sunlit side is under higher pressure, how do the hydrogen atoms return to that side? I must still be missing something.
The article says it is compressed in order to move it back to the high pressure side.
> Also, is there really enough hydrogen ionizing at 400C?
I don't believe (traditional) ionization is occurring. My guess is that it works at the molecular level like reverse osmosis works with salt water to form fresh water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis The dissociation of the hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons is through heat and pressure, facilitated by the semi-permeable membrane.
Note that the membrane is key and is very unique. Johnson [...] proved he could make a ceramic membrane capable of withstanding temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius. A semi-permeable plastic membrane is non-trivial. A semi-permeable ceramic membrane that passes protons, strips electrons, and blocks hydrogen atoms while running at 400^C has to be really, really tough to do.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#97I don't get it. Why isn't Google investing in this along with robot self-driving cars? Why isn't Khosla investing in this? Or is this the article that gets them interested? I don't pretend to have the engineering knowledge to know whether this will work or not, whether it's snake oil or not, but surely, if an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy. I'm assuming the guy isn't peddling snake-o…
It seems like he still needs to proof that his idea is working. Other scientist say that it seems to be a good idea. So investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there's economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there's still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is. On one hand it is probably this kind of thinking which mak…
Google also had a talk about liquid Thorium fission reactors. That seemed doable.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#98He will change the world if he can get 50-60% efficiency. Photovoltaic cells would be out and parabolic mirrors aimed at a heating elements would take their place - even better, tubes running under asphalt streets all circulating water through JTEC heat exchangers. A huge unmet need is extraction of heat energy at lower temperature differentials - it could put to use tons of waste energy at industrial plants, your ca…
There's not much you can do to get useful work out of low temperature differentials. Carnot's theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine#Carnot.27s_t...) says that the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is n = 1 - T_cold / T_hot, where the temperatures are given on the Kelvin scale (i.e. absolute temperatures).
That means between say 20 Celsius and 45 Celsius you will never convert more than 8% of the thermal energy that needs to flow from hot to cold into useful work.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#99If anyone is interested in reading more about how exactly he invented the Super Soaker http://www.isoaker.com/Info/history_supersoaker.html
Thanks. You should submit it.
Re: Super-Soaker inventor may have solar-powered fuel cell breakthrough
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand how there could be "solar heating" but no "heat exchange". Hmm, I thought that "heat exchange" referred to direct transfer of heat energy, perhaps I'm misremembering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer#Radiation doesn't seem to differentiate, but bear in mind that there's no way to focus molecular vibration with a mirror. And if more photons hit the cube with your lens than without it, th…
Then focus the infrared light on a thermoelectric generator instead of a cube. The generator powers a widget. The dissipated heat from the generator and the friction on the widget goes back to the walls and is later reemitted as infrared. That's a perpetual motion machine.
...until it hits a new equilibrium, at which point you're back to square one.
btw, from what I've been reading, it looks like you're right (ie. you can't heat anything directly to > the sun's temperature) but I can't find any explanation which makes any intuitive sense at all, just lots of stuff like http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/Black-body-radiation... (note the hand waving) or else a bunch of hard core entropy equations.