Chuck52
Veteran Member
I think it was reading an article in National Geographic about production of ethanol and biodiesel that set off my latest 3AM musings. Usually when I wake up at 3AM I lie there thinking about stuff like the "check engine" light on my '91 F150 and whether I should try to find out why it is almost always on or if I should just put a piece of tape over it. This morning I was thinking about the various "bio" fuels and how we still seem to be wed to the idea of burning something in an internal combustion engine to get ourselves from here to there and how very inefficient that is.
Burning, or "exploding", any fuel to produce mechanical energy, or movement, always wastes much of the potential energy in the fuel as heat or sound, or as unused mechanical movement such as simple vibration. By contrast, biological energy transformations tend to be very efficient. Some phisico/chemical transformations can also be very efficient, like the production of light by LEDs as compared with using electricity to heat a filament to produce light, or moving heat using Peltier devices rather than by the usual compression/expansion cycle systems.
Why don't we work on the direct generation of electricity by biological systems, or possibly by bio-analogs which mimic biological systems which generate electrical potential using bio-transformations? Think of the electric eel, for instance. The eel uses normal metabolic processes, the metabolism of glucose via the same metabolic processes found in our own cells, to produce and store electrical charge in what amounts to a bio-capacitor. Instead of producing some intermediate fuel, and then burning it to produce energy, why not make electricity directly? Fuel cells do this in a way, but are very limited in the fuels they can use, presently only hydrogen and perhaps methanol. Glucose, the common fuel of metabolism, is probably the most common organic molecule on earth, at least if you count cellulose and the various other starches which are polymers of glucose. Glucose is the principal intermediate in the production of ethanol by fermentation, but much of the potential energy of the original glucose molecule is lost in fermentation to ethanol, and then much more of the potential energy of the ethanol is wasted when it is burned as a fuel. Direct generation of electricity from glucose via biological processes should be much more efficient.
So, this morning I did a search, and of course I hadn't had an original idea.
Bioelectric
I would imagine there are more recent articles, and, yes it will probably be a long time before we get there, but I'll bet this is one way we'll be doing things in the near future. Might be sooner than later. Imagine buying a new culture of bacteria to add to your bioelectric generator when the old culture pooped out. Then you just pour in some corn syrup and turn on the lights.
Chuck
Burning, or "exploding", any fuel to produce mechanical energy, or movement, always wastes much of the potential energy in the fuel as heat or sound, or as unused mechanical movement such as simple vibration. By contrast, biological energy transformations tend to be very efficient. Some phisico/chemical transformations can also be very efficient, like the production of light by LEDs as compared with using electricity to heat a filament to produce light, or moving heat using Peltier devices rather than by the usual compression/expansion cycle systems.
Why don't we work on the direct generation of electricity by biological systems, or possibly by bio-analogs which mimic biological systems which generate electrical potential using bio-transformations? Think of the electric eel, for instance. The eel uses normal metabolic processes, the metabolism of glucose via the same metabolic processes found in our own cells, to produce and store electrical charge in what amounts to a bio-capacitor. Instead of producing some intermediate fuel, and then burning it to produce energy, why not make electricity directly? Fuel cells do this in a way, but are very limited in the fuels they can use, presently only hydrogen and perhaps methanol. Glucose, the common fuel of metabolism, is probably the most common organic molecule on earth, at least if you count cellulose and the various other starches which are polymers of glucose. Glucose is the principal intermediate in the production of ethanol by fermentation, but much of the potential energy of the original glucose molecule is lost in fermentation to ethanol, and then much more of the potential energy of the ethanol is wasted when it is burned as a fuel. Direct generation of electricity from glucose via biological processes should be much more efficient.
So, this morning I did a search, and of course I hadn't had an original idea.
Bioelectric
I would imagine there are more recent articles, and, yes it will probably be a long time before we get there, but I'll bet this is one way we'll be doing things in the near future. Might be sooner than later. Imagine buying a new culture of bacteria to add to your bioelectric generator when the old culture pooped out. Then you just pour in some corn syrup and turn on the lights.
Chuck
