Interesting if true: fuel from air

[james_davis_nicoll]

A British firm based on Teeside says it's designed revolutionary new technology that can produce petrol using air and water.

Seriously, BBC? "It's" for possessive it? Never snark before coffee.

Presumably there's some kind of energy source, assuming they have not gone the heart of a forsaken child route. Also

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced 5 litres of petrol since August, but hopes to be in production by 2015 making synthetic fuel targeted at the motor sports sector.

it's not quite ready for prime time.

This is a way of moving energy from energy rich regions to energy poor ones.

(usual bbc & technology disclaimer: they still do puff pieces on Moller)

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Recent discoveries that you can change, at a very teeny scale, the properties of space-time in ways that influence chemical reactions

Cite?

(If this is supposed to be a general-relativistic effect, I say it's bullshit. If it's the Casimir effect or something, some kind of cavity effect on field modes, that's interesting but should probably be phrased differently.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/09/14/chemistry_in_the_quantum_vacuum_no_really.php is probably the popularisation that pointed at it; the underlying paper is at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201107033/abstract and, whilst the full text costs dozens of dollars, the graph indicates that the molecule indeed behaves differently when in a very small conducting cavity.

(though the discreteness of the point positions on the graph suggests that this is a very small signal being measured, you're seeing lines for log(n) at n=2 n=3 n=4 ...)

that is indeed the popularization I hit.

[(Anonymous)]

That's also location of the comments thread with the chemists going "Wait, wait, this might explain how enzymes work!"

-- Graydon

Re: that is indeed the popularization I hit.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

... no.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

OK, so it's a cavity effect. I think I'd heard of that before.

(This is not intended as a stab at Graydon because this is all over the place, but I get a little tired of journalists waxing science-fictional about the Casimir effect and related phenomena. While it can be described in terms of properties of the electromagnetic vacuum, it's basically the same thing as the van der Waals force that keeps gasoline liquid and geckos sticking on walls, and there's no reason to think you can use it to get infinite free energy or hyperdrives or any such thing.)

[(Anonymous)]

(No stab perceived.)

I don't at all think there's infinite free energy or a hyperdrive in there.

I am hopeful there's a general-purpose designed catalyst chemistry possibility in there; use all this nano-machining we learned how to do for computer chips to make a fancy-surface that will take a couple orders of magnitude off the power requirements for some basic chemical synthesis tasks.

(The more optimistic version is being able to build complex materials using a bunch of reaction-biasing cavities in sequence, kinda like designer enzymes only on a much wider range of chemistries.)

-- Graydon

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

So, same spacetime we've always had. Just that one of its properties may now be better understood.

[(Anonymous)]

It's always been the same space-time, really. :)

I'm not even sure it's getting into "better understood"; this looks to my (totally not a physicist) reading more like "we can get this consistent result" than "we know what's going on in here".

-- Graydon

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Or, rather, of the electromagnetic field that lives there, fizzing away in its quantum fashion at all times.

[yorksranter.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Derek Lowe blogs it here: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/09/14/chemistry_in_the_quantum_vacuum_no_really.php

Thinks it's very significant indeed.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's a really clever idea.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard anything about that, but you CAN increase the energy content of some solid fuels by exposing them to gamma rays. Radiation polymer crosslinking lets you change the properties of materials in interesting ways, including increasing the enthalpy of the polymer.