On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 20:21 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote: > Sorry, but that forum is located in just the right place: in the > vicinity of other pseudoscientists and ufologists. Water has been > their favourite topic for ages (I mentioned the "Age of Aquarius" > deliberately). If you want some more water quackery, check > this gallery: http://www.chem1.com/CQ/gallery.html
The tragedy is of course that there **IS** some good science being done in sheds, back bedrooms and basements, it is just that this is NOT it! If these guys would put half that effort into actual research (or at least into building some decent calorimetry), then they might actually discover something interesting. Hell, there are people doing D-D fusion under those conditions (with the neutron meteorology to prove it), and while not all their science is good, some of it is, which is more then can really be said for that site. Speaking as a guy who actually WORKED on hydrogen cars for a while (The Think C264 project for Ford/GM), I can assure that anything which quite so blatantly violates the laws of thermodynamics (without extraordinary proof) does: A: Fail the giggle test. B: Not work as anything other then a lossy way to convert electrical energy into a not terribly practical fuel gas (H2 has a very low energy density at reasonable pressures, and if liquefied suffers from requiring almost as much energy cool as it releases when oxidised)!. Still, it is a mostly harmless activity (Unlike say publishing fake stem cell results which wastes the time of folk who could be doing something worthwhile). BTW: The cheapest way to make H2 in reasonable quantities is still what amounts to a redox reaction between steam and carbon (often from natural gas). CH4 (or similar) + 2(H2O) = CO2 + 4H2. In practise this often results in CO rather then CO2 (which is fine, CO is also a fuel gas). Guess what process would have ended up being used at a local 'hydrogen filling station', and guess where the CO2 would have ended up.... For all the theoretical advantages of a fuel cell stack (No Carnot cycle limit), it is actually very hard to beat the ~1/3rd efficiency of an IC engine in a practical machine (especially for short trips where the energy cost of heating the cell stack to operating temperature can dominate). Having drifted WAY off topic... Now me, I think that if you are going to do a hydrogen powered car, do it right! A tank of LH2, a tank of LOX, a turbopump and a thrust chamber - this is known to work and the acceleration can be really something! Regards, Dan (who only has A level physics, but is slowly working his way through the Feynman lectures to improve that omission). _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
