On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Pete, > >Thank you for your information regarding the use of Titamium dioxide >catalysis of solar radiation capture. > >What bothers me is that despite large sums being spent on solar cell >research, the likely conversion-efficiency that will be obtained is still >likely to be very low (circa 10-20%) compared with biological methods >(80-90%). Also, the capital costs of producing solar cell technology will >be very high indeed because it is energy-intensive. > >As a former chemist, I am somewhere in the middle between physics and >biology in judging the respective merits of solar cells and biological >methods (e.g. bacteria, plants such as sugar cane). As a putative >evolutionary economist (!), however, the main point of my piece is that >the initial phase of what I was writing about (the production of hydrogen >and/or electricity) will be able to be dispersed more more evenly around >the earth's surface and thus it is highly likely to have big effects on >the infrastructure of tomorrow's world when fossil fuels become >exhausted/prohibivitely expensive (in comparison with solar methods).
I don't think I have any quarrel with your assessment of the potential for fermentation technologies. I'm just fascinated by this newly emerging field of titanium electrolysis, and the synergy with hydrogen production. Imagine longlived, rustproof, lightweight cheap titanium vehicles powered by hydrogen engines (or hydrogen fuel cell driven electric motors). And talking about widely geographically dispersed technologies, TiO2 is literally everywhere! It remains to be seen how critical the form and purity of TiO2 required for all these new processes will be. Who knows what sort of new processes and economies the burgeoning research in this field might yield? It is a wide open frontier. Now here's another wild idea from a new discovery to add to the mix: I guess you might have seen the news articles this week http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1066645759515_78///?hub=SciTech about the guys from Alberta who decided to put conductive coatings on the upper and lower surfaces of a plate of glass with a massive number of tiny holes through it (rather similar to the active element in a microchannel plate electron multiplier) to see if they could observe the long known but little explored effect of charge separation by fluid flow along a surface. Somewhat to their surprise, they found, even with a small water pressure such as one foot of gravity, there was enough current and voltage generated to light a small incandescent lamp. Now, imagine using this technology to generate the 0.3 volt necessary to bias the TiO2 electrode for hydrogen generation. You now have a technology whereby you drop a large apparatus into a river, just under the surface, and the combination of water flow and sunlight generates hydrogen for you virtually for free. If this sort of thing all pans out, it will be pretty exciting times... -Pete Vincent _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
