Sources, sustainable power from

FIGURE 8-7. Sustainable power from renewable sources. 

One nuclear reaction seems to fill the bill fusion. The awesome process that powers the sun and the stars, and the hydrogen bomb, fusion occurs when the nuclei of smaller, lighter atoms are squeezed together—fused—under intense heat to form larger, heavier, and more stable nuclei. The reaction produces enormous bursts of energy which, if controlled and made self-sustaining, could provide a virtually unlimited supply of power from so innocuous and plentiful a source as seawater, and do it far more safely than the fission process. 

Self-excited vibrations are vibrations caused by some mechanism inherent in the system such that the energy supplying these vibrations is obtained from a uniform source of power. For the case of self-excited vibration, the alternating force that sustains the motion is created or controlled by... 

Despite the fact that enzyme-based biofuel cells progressed a lot in the last 20 years reaching the state where the electrodes operate in vivo being implanted in living organisms, the motivation for their design is not always clear. In most of the published papers the authors claim their use as a source of sustainable power extracted from renewable biological... 

An argon or helium plasma is sustained in a microwave cavity which serves to focus or couple power from a microwave source, usually operated at 2.45 GHz, into a discharge cell which is a capillary tube, made of quartz, boron nitride, alumina etc.. Microwave plasmas of different cavity designs may be operated at atmospheric or under reduced pressures [12, 13]. The 50-100 watt power levels for analytical microwave plasmas are much lower than for the DCP or the ICI giving... 

The use of inadiation or electron bombardment offers an alternative approach to molecular dissociation to the use of elevated temperamres, and offers a number of practical advantages. Intensive sources of radiation in the visible and near-visible are produced by flash photolysis, in which a bank of electrical capacitors is discharged tlrrough an inert gas such as ktypton to produce up to 10 joule for a period of about 10 " s, or by the use of high power laser beams (Eastham, 1986 (loc.cit.)). A more sustainable source of radiation is obtained from electrical discharge devices usually incorporating... 

Can hydrogen be produced sustainably Over the next few decades, and probably well into the twenty-first centui y, fossil sources such as natural gas or coal may offer the lowest costs in many locations, with small contributions from electrolysis powered by low-cost hydropower. 

A major problem with the new sustainable energy sources is their reliability. Inherently they will produce electricity as the wind blows and the sun shines. The need for power is not constant either, with peak demands during the day. Hence, ways are needed to store energy that enable release on demand. Synthetic fuels and methanol are candidates, but the most important will be hydrogen. It can be produced conveniently from water and electricity with a reasonably high efficiency of 70 %. Hydrogen is the ideal fuel for fuel cells. 

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