Imagine a car that doen't need gas!!

Great! Now we can use all that powdered iron and aluminum that's just been lying around and making a mess. Of course shoveling the slag out of the fuel tank at each fillup will be a pain in the ass, but that's progress :_>

Yes, it is. Progress, I mean.

But the fuel will be pellets, not powder, and the slag will go to its own bin, not back to the fuel bin. Their combined volume will be about 2.5 times more than an equivalent gas tank's, but their location on board won't be as restricted as a gas tank's.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan

as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

I read about boron years ago. It had several flaws, including solid waste disposal and dealing with impurities. I never got the feeling that it would be as easy to use nor as cheap as battery power. As an energy carrier, you'd have to look at the whole energy chain needed to purify it, pelletize it, etc.

And, of course, the inefficiencies of de-oxidizing the boron and of recovering the energy by burning. There are hurdles in that path.

Mike

I've been doing that. As another poster said, there are hurdles. At least two billion people are going to become motorists in the next few decades, one way or another.

If he has a hurdle-free way for them all to be, by their own choice, zero-local-emissions motorists the world needs to know about it.

Solid waste disposal? Hard to use? Please explain.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan

as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

As I understood the process, solid waste was created in the purification and during the burning. Sort of like the waste created by burning coal.

That's not zero local emissions in my book.

If it takes more room than gas for the same amount of power, the design of cars has to change. Since it's a solid fuel, it will need proper hopper design and they tend to be bulky too. You would hate to be accelerating onto the freeway only to find the pellets had jammed up in the hopper's feed mechanism.

I still think the new Li-Ion batteries using nano surfaced electrodes is a much better answer for energy storage.

*We used horses for hundreds of years for transportation, Free energy, very bio-degradable too, renewable resource, horse shit can be used for any thing,in the garden grow plants or heat the house! What happened? Switched to fossil fuel driven automobiles, now we fighting wars for oil, polluting the planet to death! How stupid mankind is! JS

Right, and a farting horse never tires. Of course the population has grown considerably so there would be one hell of lot more farting horses. Darn it, now I can't get that song out of my head: Horse chestnuts roasting on an open fire....

Do you happen to recall your source?

Burning produces B2O3: not a waste. Here is it with a lot of water:

B motors would produce it much drier than that, and colourless. (Yes, two colourless oxides' glassy alloy, in a certain composition range, is brown. Not quite sure why.)

But why isn't it a waste? Because the amount of it that is produced per driveshaft kWh, supposing 20 percent efficiency, is two dollars' worth. 1 kg. From its on-board bin it goes back to the plant the B came from.

No, not like that. Not like CO2, not like fly ash.

I hope your book is subject to revision.

All true.

, p. 17 of 42,tells me Li-ion batteries' mass per driveshaft kWhis at least 7 kg, at least seven times heavier than B2O3. One can imagine a roadway strewn with B pellets and charged-up Li-ion batteries, and two vehicles that scoop up their respective fuels and dump them aft when they're done. But the Li-ion batteries aren't going to stand up to being scooped and dumped as happily as B atoms, and as noted they are seven times heavier as they leave.

22 times heavier than B coming in.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan

as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

• What is the chemistry of the reaction(s) that produce energy from Boron? What type of engine is required?

earle

*

As Graham points out, the initial production of the metallic boron has byproducts (as does the production of the materials making up the rest of the car) but the burning process does not release large amounts of boron or boron oxide; they are recovered and separated into boron and oxygen again. Obviously, *some* boron oxide will evaporate and that has to be dealt with because of the scale of the operation. Another emissions problem is NOx; since it burns at high temperatures (which is a requirement for efficiency with any heat engine) it produces copious amounts of NOx. The big challenge in NOx control for all air-oxidizer heat engines is to allow the gasses to cool slowly enough to give the NOx time to dissociate.

Since it is solid fuel, fuel supply problems will not cause an immediate loss of power as it does with fluid feed - it takes a while to consume the local supply of fuel. Needless to say, boron won't work in an internal combustion engine as the technology stands.

Personally, I don't see boron as a leading contender for vehicle power in the near future, but I'm not ruling it out.

Mike

I don't recall the source.

If the boron oxide is created and needs to be recycled (using more energy), it is waste in my book. Just as an aluminum can is.

If the waste from 1kwh of storage is worth $2, it will not be scattered along the road. The brown color may be from impurities. It's not burned in pure oxygen, it's burned in air.

The nano textured Li-ION will (per the press release) charge quickly, have similar density to current batteries and have a much, much improved life. It can be fast charged in minutes, making it equal in many ways to the boron for quick refueling. While heavier, it is much smaller, so it will fit in a smaller car that has less wind resistance.

The li-ion still wins in my book.

The energy is what makes boron (like hydrogen) a storage medium. Batteries are "recycled" in that sense every time they are charged. Oxidized boron and discharged batteries are not waste; they are storage waiting to be re-energized.

Mike

It's an external combustion engine, like a stirling or rankine cycle engine. That's one of the major sources of inefficiency in the concept. I tend to think of boron as being a cleaner, rechargable version of coal... except, of course, coal is an energy source while boron is only storage. The problems with it are less than with hydrogen, but boron can't be used in fuel cells without a breakthrough and that limits the potential efficiency.

Mike

No. Internal.

It is a Brayton-like cycle, semi-closed to allow for injection of fuel and oxidizer, internal combustion, and removal of B2O3.

In

"Michael Pardee" included

B2O3 has very low vapour pressure. NOx is produced in quite small amounts, small enough to scrub out with alkali, although suspended particles of condensed B2O3 should be removed before the gas gets to this alkali.

In

"dbs_use" included

Right!

It is burned in pure oxygen.

Seven times heavier, much more than seven times denser? Bin packing densities for B2O3 are on the order of 1.2 kg/L. How does he figure Li-ion batteries are over -- "much" over

-- 8.4 kg/L? They aren't. Two, maybe three kg/L, tops.

In

"Michael Pardee" included:

Right.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan

as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

Do you have a link for that? I haven't seen much on boron fuel and it looked like they were talking about hockey-puck like discs, with a really high ignition point.

Mike

Mike

Ok, so it needs pure oxygen in quantities large enough to run an internal combustion engine? Where does that come from? A 1 litre engine running at 4500 RPM would seem to suck 4500 litres of oxygen per minute. That's a lot.

I read somewhere of a silver filter to adress the above, but that would imply that you have perfectly filtered air presented to the filter so the filter will not clog.

If this is such a great idea, where are the proof of concept vehicles garaged? I've seen proof of concept vehicles for all manner of strange batteries, solar and various gasses, but never for boron. Why?

This is certainly one of the reasons I put it in the "also ran" category for now. We are more steps away from putting boron on the road than we are with many of the competing technologies. Considering there was even a (failed) proof of concept car for that odd theory about using electron spin as an energy source, and a rumor of one for that laser-on-gallium cold fusion thing, it is a telling point.

Mike

Or even the French compressed air car that made some of the popular media a year or so ago. These things are all hopelessly impractical, tinkerer's wet dreams, and will never see the light of day.