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Post by jimbaerg on Jun 5, 2012 11:12:46 GMT 9.5
I recently read _Prescription For The Planet_ by Tom Blees & have some questions about the proposals. In this comment I will put the questions about boron as an energy carrier.
How much of the technology to use boron as an energy carrier has been built & tested?
Eg: Has anyone built an engine that runs on the heat from burning boron?
Would the existing ways of extracting elemental boron from borax deposits be useful for the recycling of boron oxide to elemental boron?
Would the boron recycling facilities be easily scaled up or down to fit an available power source?
Would the cost of the boron recycling facilities be small compared to the cost of a power plant, so it could be run part time only when the electricity supply was greater than the other demands?
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Post by anonposter on Jun 5, 2012 21:04:03 GMT 9.5
Not much has been tested to my knowledge. The US military did quite a bit of work on boranes for jet fuel and rocket fuel applications (the later after they discovered what the combustion products did to turbine blades) and while they advanced Boron science by quite a bit they didn't actually end up using it as a fuel. From John D. Clark's excellent Ignition, specifically chapter 10: Fifteen years ago people used to ask me "What is an exotic fuel anyway?" and I would answer "It's expensive, it's got boron in it, and it probably doesn't work." I had intended, originally, to entitle this chapter "The Billion Buck Boron Booboo," but decided against it on two grounds.[…] Though using elemental boron should allow for some of the problems of the boranes to be avoided but may also create it's own problems. G. R. L. Cowan has produced a good summary of how he proposes to use it at www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html (and I understand he has an account here, or at least I think I've seen him around). |
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Post by grlcowan on Jun 6, 2012 5:25:33 GMT 9.5
I recently read _Prescription For The Planet_ by Tom Blees & have some questions about the proposals. In this comment I will put the questions about boron as an energy carrier. How much of the technology to use boron as an energy carrier has been built & tested? Eg: Has anyone built an engine that runs on the heat from burning boron? ... I think there have been some ramjet motors with solid propellant that included particulate boron. The question I ran afoul of a couple of years ago, and I would welcome anyone who has tried to answer it to give his answer here, is at www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/. |
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Post by grlcowan on Jun 8, 2012 5:44:34 GMT 9.5
... Would the existing ways of extracting elemental boron from borax deposits be useful for the recycling of boron oxide to elemental boron? Would the boron recycling facilities be easily scaled up or down to fit an available power source? Would the cost of the boron recycling facilities be small compared to the cost of a power plant, so it could be run part time only when the electricity supply was greater than the other demands? The main existing way, for ~100 tonnes annually, is magnesium reduction. I don't expect it would be the method anyone would choose for scaling up. After use, the magnesium needs to be reduced in its turn. If the whole operation is to be part of an electricity plant, the method most likely to be used is electrolysis of molten magnesium chloride, a hot (about 750°C) liquid. This is an established method. I don't know of a nice way to electrolyse B2O3 directly, but zinc can efficiently get you boron -- 6 Zn + B2O3 + 1½ O2 ---> 2 B + 6 ZnO and zinc electrolysis from zinc sulphate solution is an established zinc production method. Since it does not require the electrolyte to be kept far above ambient temperatures, it is a good candidate for using interruptible power. I expect a zinc oxide electrolyser, and the kit to do the boron reduction with the zinc, would fit the cheap-compared-to-the-rest-of-an-electricity-plant criterion. Also, the electricity plant could do just the zinc electrolysis, and multiple plants could send zinc to, and get zinc oxide from, a boron plant. Reasons for not sending the zinc all the way to the cars are suggested at www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html#Zn. Please answer the interesting question at www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/ |
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Post by max on Jun 9, 2012 0:05:02 GMT 9.5
Boron will not be adopoted as an energy carrier because our engines and turbines are designed for hydrocarbon fuels.
The transportation sector will be the last of the economy to be decarbonised. On the roads, the first step will be electrification and partial electrification through hybrid vehicles. These hybrids would still use fossil hydrocarbons, which would then later be replaced by synthetic hydrocarbons. I don't see the world economy moving off hydrocarbons, especially since they form a basis for many of the materials we encounter in daily life, too.
Hence, future synfuels will be carbon-based.
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Post by anonposter on Jun 9, 2012 2:04:00 GMT 9.5
Boron will not be adopoted as an energy carrier because our engines and turbines are designed for hydrocarbon fuels. Boron might turn out to be superior enough to be worth a redesign at least for land transport (though it isn't the kind of order of magnitude superiority that nuclear has over chemical fuels). Though I do suspect that it'll end up being a combination of electrification and synthetic hydrocarbons which actually end up doing the job (we also don't know how hard it actually would be to use elemental boron for that task). |
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