Water fuelled cars - the way forward?

[nic_brix]

Yes, I searched, and found one or two threads on water fuelled cars, but none about this specific method of power. (With boron playing a part in the chemical process.) I apologise if you feel it is too similar to previous threads on the subject of water fuelled cars.

Anyway...

Forget cars fuelled by alcohol and vegetable oil. Before long, you might be able to run your car with nothing more than water in its fuel tank. It would be the ultimate zero-emissions vehicle.

While water, plain old H2O, is not at first sight an obvious power source, it has a key virtue: it is an abundant source of hydrogen, the element widely touted as the green fuel of the future. If that hydrogen could be liberated on demand, it would overcome many of the obstacles that till now have prevented the dream of a hydrogen-powered car becoming reality. Producing hydrogen by conventional industrial means is expensive, inefficient and often polluting. Then there are the problems of storing and transporting hydrogen. The pressure tanks required to hold usable quantities of the fuel are heavy and cumbersome, which restricts the car's performance and range.

Tareq Abu-Hamed, now at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have devised a scheme that gets round these problems. By reacting water with the element boron, their system produces hydrogen that can be burnt in an internal combustion engine or fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity. "The aim is to produce the hydrogen on-board at a rate matching the demand of the car engine," says Abu-Hamed. "We want to use the boron to save transporting and storing the hydrogen." The only by-product is boron oxide, which can be removed from the car, turned back into boron, and used again. What's more, Abu-Hamed envisages doing this in a solar-powered plant that is completely emission-free.

A diagram that was also printed with the article shows in more detail how the system would work, in practise, if it was ever implemented.

In the end the energy is actually coming from the sun, not from the water or the hydrogen or the boron, they are just ways of transferring it. So this is sustainable energy. These would be water-fuelled cars, not water-powered cars (however obvious that may seem).

And for those of you wanting to read more about the chemistry involved:

The hydrogen-on-demand approach is based on some simple high-school chemistry. Elements like sodium and potassium are well known for their violent reactions with water, tearing hydrogen from its stable union with oxygen. Boron does the same, but at a more manageable pace. It requires no special containment, and atom for atom it's a light material. When all the boron is used up, the boron oxide that remains can be reprocessed and recycled.

When I read all of the above, some thoughts occurred. Now I'm not particularly hot on chemistry, but to me, that aspect (the science of it) seemed fairly flawless. I felt the main places it would fail would be actually implementing it and getting it to "catch on" with the general public. I feel to get it into action, extremes like legislation might have to be necessary. And I should think that definitely wouldn't be popular.
The other main area that I though may be a disadvantage, was the actual performance of the water fuelled cars. The article however, went on to snuff out any doubts I may have had, when it said this:

The team calculates that a car would have to carry just 18 kilograms of boron and 45 litres of water to produce 5 kilograms of hydrogen, which has the same energy content as a 40-litre tank of conventional fuel. [...] The car giant DaimlerChrysler built a concept vehicle called Natrium (after the Latin word for sodium, from which the element's Na symbol is drawn), which used slightly more sophisticated chemistry to generate its hydrogen. Instead of pure water as the source of the gas, it used a solution of the hydrogen-heavy compound sodium borohydride. When passed over a precious-metal catalyst such as ruthenium, the compound reacts with water to liberate hydrogen that can be fed to a fuel cell. It was enough to give the Natrium a top speed of 130 kilometres per hour [81mph] and a respectable range of 500 kilometres [311 miles].

Not bad for a first go really, and whilst it used varying chemistry, the actual performance would have most likely been very similar to a car using Boron.

So are water/boron fuelled cars the right way forward? It's obviously not going to happen any time soon, but could it work? My guess is yes, it probably could, but it has a lot of obstacles to get past yet. The article from New Scientist certainly seems to imply that it's a good possibility.

Thoughts?

 

[Jim Prower]

Will this require any energy input?

How stable IS boron?

will the water passageways rust? (BIG concern in Rustbelt)

 

[nic_brix]

As far as I know, the only energy input would be from the sun, reflected by the panels, and focused on the "solar tower" (see diagram in post #1).

Boron is a fairly inert element.

Good point about the rust, but there are ways around this.

 

[Dave A]

Not all metals rust.

 

[nic_brix]

...which is why one of the ways to get around the water passageways rusting... is to use a metal which doesn't rust. 💡 [/SARCASM]

 

[niky]

http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

Still reading. Nice stuff regarding boron-powered engines. Too bad they require nearly pure oxygen to work.

I still don't understand how the steam-boron process would work... we're trying to assume that the formation of boron oxide plus the waste heat of the combustion process would be able to continuously supply the steam generation process, but that portion of the system looks like it would take a jimungous amount of energy...

Let's wait for the smarter people to get on and comment.

 

[nic_brix]

The reaction between the boron and steam is not actually what is providing the power to heat the water. The hydrogen that is "taken" (for want of a much better word) from the steam by the reaction process is where the energy to turn the water to steam is coming from. The hydrogen, as well as doing this, powers the rest of the car.

...or at least I think that's how it works...

Anyway, I agree, we sould wait for some of the clever people to arive. (Mentioning no names.)

 

[Sniffs]

heh. let's see how fast the boron stock suddenly goes if this goes through. it's along the lines of what I was thinking, though, seperate out one of the two elements and burn that...except I was always under the impression that hydrogen and oxygen are so bleeding unstable...and you couldn't let any waste oxygen out, right?

 

[Kylehnat]

Boron is a fairly inert element.

Quite the contrary. Boron is one of the LEAST stable elements there is. It is an electron whore, owing to the fact that it only has 3 valence electrons, which is just about the most unusual electron configuration you can have.

I don't know a whole lot about boron chemistry, because boron chemistry is freaking bizzare. It doesn't like to follow many of the rules. I've never ever heard about this type of reaction between boron and water, and can't find an actual reaction to look at, so I don't really know if it's true or not.

Everything I've looked up about this only refers to Abu-Hamed, and nobody else. Therefore, I have no other choice but to believe that this is bullhooey and little more, until more evidence is revealed. If it were so simple, it would have been thought of already.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

Phase 1: Develop water-powered car
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Profit!

But seriously, the concept seems like it could work, but it may be too complicated/expensive/impractical for it to catch on, especially reconverting boron oxide to recover the boron. Reproccessing will still cost money and it can take quite a bit of energy to isolate an element from a compound, and may require another, expensive chemical to faccilitate it.

 

[Kylehnat]

Phase 1: Develop water-powered car
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Profit!

Ah!!! So these guys are behind all of this...

 

[niky]

Actually, boron burns in oxygen. But it requires pure or nearly pure oxygen. In the 80:20 nitrogen/oxygen mix (I know it's not exact, sue me) we breathe, it's largely inert. That's the one problem with using boron in motors.

Now, boron doesn't react with water in normal conditions, but I've read some other sources that suggest it will[/b[ react with steam. Unfortunately, as Abu Hamed's motor requires steam at 800 degrees C, I wonder if the boron oxide formation (which produces heat) and the subsequent combustion of hydrogen in the motor (which produces waste heat, but not enough by itself) are enough to produce the steam pressures necessary for this.

How about aluminum burning engines, using a mercury catalyst? May pollute like hell, but they'd be fun.

 

[Casio]

The team calculates that a car would have to carry just 18 kilograms of boron{...}

According to wikipedia, 99% crystalline Boron costs US$5 a gram and amorphous boron cost about US$2 per gram. Or $2000 to $5000 a kilo. Or $36000 to $90000 a tank.

[/topic]

 

[sutton.a]

Australia is going through a water shortage. So guess no for aussies then

 

[nic_brix]

Everything I've looked up about this only refers to Abu-Hamed, and nobody else. Therefore, I have no other choice but to believe that this is bullhooey and little more, until more evidence is revealed. If it were so simple, it would have been thought of already.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota also say that this system may be possible.
But I like your skepticism, kylenhat.

According to wikipedia, 99% crystalline Boron costs US$5 a gram and amorphous boron cost about US$2 per gram. Or $2000 to $5000 a kilo. Or $36000 to $90000 a tank.

That was in 1997. But yes, the cost of boron probably would be a huge downfall in the system.
And "Some people" are writers of a scientific magazine that has been printed since 1956, and one that I respect. I'm not saying you should believe just anything you read, but I didn't just pull this article off some website that I'd never heard of before.

 

[niky]

I found those prices, too... but I didn't post them because I found another source quoting raw boron at $900++ per metric ton.

But boron is difficult to work with, and refined boron can actually get up to those ridiculous prices. Fuel-ready boron would benefit a lot from economies of scale if put into widespread production, though.

 

[Casio]

That was in 1997. But yes, the cost of boron probably would be a huge downfall in the system.
And "Some people" are writers of a scientific magazine that has been printed since 1956, and one that I respect. I'm not saying you should believe just anything you read, but I didn't just pull this article off some website that I'd never heard of before.

I'm not saying they can't do it. I'm saying that Boron will never be cheap enough to think about using it as a primary means of powering stuff.

It'd probably be cheaper for everyone to drive nuclear powered cars in the long run.

 

[nic_brix]

I'm not saying they can do it.

 

[Kylehnat]

I found those prices, too... but I didn't post them because I found another source quoting raw boron at $900++ per metric ton.

That might be for borax, which is the main ore from which boron is refined. Pure boron does not exist anywhere on earth, so yes, once you start having to refine it, the cost goes through the roof.

 

[niky]

But if you can recycle boron oxide ash, it then becomes renewable. The only glitch is how easy it would be to generate the boron reaction on cars.

Limiting factor for this system: superheating steam, takes too much energy

Limiting factor for boron-oxygen system: creating/storing pure oxygen

 

[Kylehnat]

Yeah, like I said, I'm not to up on boron reactions, but it seems to me that there is a significant energy input not being disclosed here...

And I would guess that boron oxide is somewhat stable (relative to other boron compounds), and would take a fair amount of energy to separate the boron from the oxygen.

Another problem is that there is no way the EPA would let any boron/boron compounds be released into the air. So, if it can't be proven that 100% of the boron will be recycled or captured in some way (much like an RV toilet), it's a no-go.

 

[niky]

There's that problem, too...