From the CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS and the “those who don’t pay attention to history are condemned to repeat it” department. See the money quote about kerosene below, bold mine.
Liquid hydrogen may be way forward for sustainable air travel
Professor Hermans from Leiden University’s famous Huygen’s Laboratory acknowledges that oil-based liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene will be hard to beat when it comes to how much energy they pack in relation to their volume and weight–not to mention the sheer convenience of using them to get from A to B.
The author of popular books such as Physics is Fun (2012) and Energy Survival Guide (2011) acknowledges that achieving sustainable transport in the post-fossil fuel era will be a huge challenge–but finds that liquid hydrogen could offer a potential solution for future air travel.
“Given the severe weight limitations for fuel in aircraft, liquid hydrogen may be a viable alternative in the long run,” he argues:
- First, handling of liquid hydrogen would be carried out by professionals, which reduces the safety issues involved with liquid hydrogen to the same level of risk involved in handling kerosene.
- Second, liquid hydrogen itself is very light (in fact, it is in a gaseous state at ordinary temperatures), which is an important advantage for air travel.
- Third, the disadvantages of “boil off” (created by the low boiling point of liquid hydrogen) would be reduced in air travel because of the low outside temperature at cruising altitudes.
Hermans discounts the use of solar power for air travel without revolutionary changes in the airplane concept, but concludes that it seems wise to extend the availability of oil products as long as possible. However, he argues that the low cost of kerosene is a huge disincentive in this respect:
“It is a defect that kerosene is so irrationally cheap, which triggers much unnecessary air travel,” he writes. “A worldwide tax on kerosene–if at all politically possible–should be something to pursue.”
For road transport, Hermans argues that liquid hydrogen is not a viable option due to safety issues around handling it. He finds that electric vehicles offer the most promising solution. However, the challenge is to improve the performance of batteries to prolong the driving time for electric cars, as well as improving the performance of supercapacitors for more rapid charging of the batteries, he argues.
Direct driving using solar power is difficult, Hermans finds, even under a clear sky. However, students from Eindhoven University of Technology are among those that have taken up the challenge; they built a four-seater solar-powered family car that can be driven indefinitely under clear skies at a speed of about 43km/h. The only drawback is that the car is just over 1m tall and is not very comfortable. Hermans concludes that solar family cars will be feasible in future if consumers are willing to sacrifice on comfort.
Alternatively, Hermans writes, the most efficient way for us to reduce energy use in future is to reduce our mobility, for example, by having shorter distances between the workplace and home. “In other words, urban planning provides an important key,” he concludes.
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MRS E&S, a journal of the Materials Research Society and Cambridge University Press, encourages contributions that provide viewpoints and perspectives on the all-important issue of how humankind can work towards, and build, a sustainable future.
The contents of this press release refer to the following article which is freely available
The challenge of energy-efficient transportation, by Professor Jo Hermans
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Oh, I know….
Because hydrogen is so bulky, just use all the entire fuselage for hydrogen storage, and then strap the pesky passengers on the outside of the plane!!!
Only “professionals” would be in charge of “passenger strap-on”, so there wouldn’t be any problems..
Its a good thing no-one uses highly inflammable liquids to power air and road transport. Can you imagine the conflagration if any of the machines were to crash?
It really is sad the depths trolls will go to convince themselves that they have something intelligent to say.
The many differences between liquid hydrogen and other fuels have been detailed above. Your attempt to proclaim that all flammable liquids are identical is an insult to your readers intelligence.
Yours on the other hand has never been demonstrated.
Hilarious!
“solar-powered family car that can be driven indefinitely under clear skies at a speed of about 43km/h”
Please don’t use it in a tall buildings city, their shadows would imply that you never reach your destination without push the car by its back.
🙂
Why don’t they use the Green House Gas Effect?
Its simple, science is settled. From 100+ years ago and from laboratory experiment – we are *constantly* reminded. Surely older and more reliable tech than even Wind Turbines!!
How it works is get a big bag (like the Hindenberg) and fill it with CO2. That ain’t gonna blow up. Safe as ‘ouses innit?
Then, the GHGE says the contained CO2 will rise in temp, so the thing will become lighter than air and float up into the sky – like a hot-air balloon.
Then, being red-hot by now, some of the high temp and consequently high pressure CO2 can be shot out the back of the thing to push it along. Like a rocket. 1000’s of years old technology.
And the really great thing, the sky is now so full of CO2, it can re-fuel as it goes along.
What’s not to like? Its perfect.
PS. All these Nobel prizes are getting a bit tedious, just a nice cuppa tea will do this time 🙂
You are a genius ! Where do I send your gazillion dollars in grant money to ?
This is a perfect way for the CAGW minions to prove their case.
I expect to see it in pal-reviewed publications soon.
Where, again, do I send the money?
The usual reference when hydrogen is mentioned is to the Hindenburg, but it’s not commonly known that sister ship the Graf Zeppelin covered over a million passenger miles, and was only scrapped because the Hindenburg incident made passengers wary of airships.
The American and British airships suffered some bad prangs but that was mainly due to poor design; the R101 hit the ground due to poor controllability, the Akron broke up in flight.
The Apollo and Shuttle spacecraft both used hydrogen extensively, and neither suffered any serious incident due to hydrogen. Paradoxically, the Apollo programme suffered two serious incidents due to pressurised oxygen starting fires, and one due to a helium tank exploding on a test stand.
The main issue with hydrogen is its very low density, and hence huge tankage required. That, and ice formation on liquid hydrogen tanks can have secondary safety issues.
The comments seem to have nailed the scientific side of this idea comprehensively, but I find the line about “unnecessary air journeys” (spotted by one contributor) particularly sinister.
Who does Hermans think he is to decide on who can travel; although I’m sure there would be an endless queue of green activists only too ready to serve on the committees of public Green compliance that they would love to impose if only given the chance. You can see where that would quickly lead, Big Brother where art thou?
The correlation between climate obsession and a hatred of freedom to travel is very high.
Prior to the 2005 general election in the UK, there was a televised debate, in front of a studio audience, involving the minor parties contesting the election. The Green Party representative said it was their policy to immediately double the tax on petrol (gasoline) and then increase it annually by 10% over inflation to stop people driving cars. About 60% of the price of petrol in the UK is tax. A member of the audience pointed out if they did that then the bus and rail networks wouldn’t cope. The Green representative replied “you don’t understand, we want to stop people aspiring to travel’. They may not talk about this now, but that is still their intention.
The burning of hydrogen results in water vapor. What’s all that water injected into the upper atmosphere going to do?
Be ignored!
In the same way that CO2 emissions from wood which emits more CO2 than coal or gas mass per mass, are ignored because of the magic words ‘green’ and ‘renewable’.
Once it is understood this is a quasi-religious issue based in Faith, the realisation that trying to use science and reason to rationalise is futile becomes apparent.
” supercapacitors for more rapid charging of the batteries” – the man is out of date. Yesterday’s solution. I have tested lithium ion batteries for hundreds of cycles charging at a 3C rate.(nominally a full charge in 20 minutes)
And does he realise that the main source of hydrogen commercially is natural gas? Why not cut out the middle-man and use that instead?
If much unnecessary air travel is a problem why not simply ban plebs from having foreign holidays? That would have the added benefit, for important people, of making tourist hot spots much less crowded.
I’ve always believed that this is why most celebrity types favor making travel more expensive.
Mark Jacobson, the crackpot with all the 100 percent wind, water and sunlight (WWS) studies, proposes that all new long-haul aircraft by 2040 be electrolytic cryogenic hydrogen:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf
On page 2112:
The obvious solution is to simply build a single high-rise structure to house all the people on Earth. Ignoring engineering and physics (as the Greens and the Left does), put the farms and factories in the top of the building and use gravity (it’s renewable!) to elevator things around. Workers can get to work by gathering on platforms which will be lifted upward to their work space by the counterweighted goods moving down. At quitting time, same principle where raw materials move up while the workers move done. The math should be simple – Mann and Jones can write a model for it.
make sure its only librals who do the first 100 test flights
Air travel? Bloody nonsense. Go by rail, bus or ship, recreate and enjoy the landscape.
“It is a defect that kerosene is so irrationally cheap.”
There are a couple of things wrong with this. First is that bio-kerosene is no different from kerosene made from coal or oil. It’s renewable, numbskull.
If you have a pile of hydrogen and you want to make it into a useful fuel, just add carbon and you have kerosene. Eliminating the carbon is stupid. Why would you want to make a dangerous fuel standard when a far safer, several orders of magnitude, fuel can be made from it?
Both of these technologies, kerosene and hydrogen, pale in the ability to store energy compared with super-capacitors of the future. Sulphur battery technology will come along, but supercaps will dominate principally because they can be recharged in a few minutes.
Aircraft will be recharged in flight by drones, supercap to cap. There is no need to carry the fuel for an entire flight – that is so old school.
If we want to think far ahead, the future is all electric. There are just so many ways to generate and store power. That of course doesn’t rule out entirely new forms of physics based on future discoveries of as yet unanticipated forms of locomotion.
Aircraft thrive on simplicity leading towards increased reliability. Kerosine pumped into a jet engine, is quite a straightforward concept. Admittedly, control, monitoring and emissions increase the complexity, but simple it is.
Liquid hydrogen adds another level of complexity: the cold liquid would be pumped into a vapouriser, turned into a gas then pumped into the engine at a controlled rate. The vapouriser needs power to heat the hydrogen. This power source needs to be simple and reliable. On ships (LNG dual fuel) we use steam to heat the LNG. Perhaps additional shaft driven electrical generators could provide the additional power, but it would eat into the efficiency of the total system.
There would need to be a safe way of venting ‘boil off’ or you need to use a compressor to compress the ‘boil off’ and perhaps use it in the aux power unit (apu) and leave it running all the time. But vent offs will still be needed in the event of system failure. On a LNG carrier, sometimes, some of the ‘boil off’ is re-liquified. Depends upon the length of voyage.
So at any time, excess hydrogen could be vented off – at the wrong time (passengers performing an emergency evacuation in a hot country after a successful emergency landing without power).
It just does not seem safe enough to my simple eye….
PS: Before you query the above, please realise you can not rely upon ‘boil off’ alone, you need to pump your cold liquid into the vaporiser to give you enough gas to burn. After all, just like on a ship, when the pilot asks for 100% power, they want it now, not when the sun comes out to give you more ‘boil off’.
http://paleocave.sciencesortof.com/2010/06/suck-squeeze-bang-and-blow-or-how-a-jet-engine-works/
Hyperloop.
Electric air travel is too hard. Synthetic fuels are too hard. Hydrogen air travel isn’t much better.
Electric ground travel at the speed of air travel is pretty easy. It is called the hyperloop and it will be cheaper and more efficient than air travel. The only problem is building the infrastructure.
Hydrogen gives four times the lift than helium, it’s as simple as that. It’s far better to build sensible protection into a hydrogen dirigible than to use helium. Really, there’s no alternative, the difference is so profound.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/10/this-airship-transports-lockheed-into-new-territory.html
Helium used in a brand new design.
Incorrect, Willy. The difference is slight, not profound. The average molecular weight of air is approximately 29 grams/mole. Hydrogen is diatomic, and hence its molecular weight is about 2. Helium has a MW of about 4. The lift, or buoyant force on the vessel is provided by the difference in MW between the gas inside and the air outside. The delta for hydrogen is 29-2 = 27. The delta for helium is 29-4 = 25. Hence, the buoyant force or lift provided by hydrogen is greater than helium by a multiplier of only 27/25, meaning less than 10% more lift for hydrogen.
when is this so-called post-fossil fuels? With all of the methyl hydrates in the ocean off our coasts, just waiting for us to figure out how to mine and refine them correctly, don’t see that happening for 1000 years..
Hydrogen powered Aircraft
This is not a new idea.
http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=1808
A 10 foot stretch to accommodate the fuel tank.
The crisis this idea served was the Arab Oil Embargo.
It’s not even that they don’t pay attention to history, so much as are not concerned with repeating it.
Remember, a few over-populated human lives is an insignificant cost to preserve the warm fuzzy… so long as those lives are appropriately buried in ‘statistics’ and therefore sufficiently removed from the forefront of consciousness.
The warm fuzzy – it’s worse than meth.
I suggest mega hydrogen storage sites in LA, Portland, and Boston. That would be worth the tax credits to watch.
The Left hates consumerism because it allows the Masses to have nice things.
Leftists Love Global Warming Because They Hate the Middle Class
I disagree about solar powered cars. They can never be viable because the average amount of solar energy that falls on the area of a car will never be enough to power that car, even with battery storage. The fact that some students built a lightweight car only one meter high that only runs in bright sunlight proves nothing. This car would probably not pass crash tests, and can only make 30 mph under a clear sky. When the sky clouds over the power is reduced by 50%. It’s far more practical to have a solar array at home to charge an electric car. Then if need be the charge can be topped up from the mains if the sun lets you down.
Seems like “playing with fire” to me.
I can’t help but be reminded of this song by sme fellow STL musicians…
This guy forgets that because hydrogen is so lightweight, you cannot take advantage of its high energy per unit weight ratio. It is energy per unit volume that counts, and then you will always lose.