carbon copy emissions from cars and other vehicles are a Brobdingnagian part of what is driving current climate change . Now a high school student has made a passionate literary argument for ammonia - fueled railway car , and he even got it put out in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .
Doo Won Kang is a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria , Virginia . Ammonia fuel is n’t a novel idea , but Kang does a enceinte chore explaining how it work , and why it would be a sound solution scientifically and economically .
In theBulletin , Kang explains why ammonia is a good candidate for an alternative fuel :
An ammonia corpuscle is frame of one nitrogen atom and three atomic number 1 speck . Ammonia can be burned in interior burning engine with minor modifications — pass off only nitrogen and water vapor from the tailpipe , even when only low - cost discharge control are used . Unburned ammonium hydroxide and nitrogen oxides in the engine ’s exhaust would be take out by a selective catalyst reduction system . Ammonia can be produced , at an affordable cost , by a catalytic reaction between nitrogen ( obtain from air , which is 78 per centum atomic number 7 ) and hydrogen ( obtained by split up water mote into hydrogen and oxygen ) .
Ammonia - fueled vehicles operate in much the same style as gasoline - fueled vehicle : Liquid ammonia is burned with oxygen , producing energy that is harnessed to drive the vehicle ’s wheels . This familiar technology mean that ammonia water - fueled vehicle can mostly be built and maintained in the same means as the current vehicle fleet . But unlike conventionally fueled vehicle , ammonia - powered carswould not emit carbon dioxide .
Most cars on the route can run on a mix of 90 percent gasoline and 10 pct liquid state ammonia , and could be modify to run on a variety of up to 80 percent ammonia — at acostof $ 1,000 to $ 5,000 per fomite . Anengine that could run entirely on ammoniais presently under developing .
A 2005 subject area by theRisø National Laboratory in Denmarkconcluded that ammonia would be no more dangerous than current fuels . Ammonia has been used as an industrial and agricultural chemical for more than a century , and it dissipates rapidly when released because it is lighter than air .
The infrastructure for large - scale production and distribution of ammonia water already exists worldwide . gaseous state station would ask only pocket-size change to dispense ammonium hydroxide . It can be stored easily in pressurized tanks at relatively low atmospheric pressure .
Read more at theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists
ChemistryClimate changeEnergyScience
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