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Plasma Converter

Hydra vs Leviathan

15:17 / 27.02.07

Joseph Longo's Startech Corporation has invented a machine that can dispose of "anything from dirty diapers to chemical weapons", in a way that frankly seems like crazy sci-fi worthy of Marvel Comics.

Just how the hell does this actually work? Almost any kind of earthly matter (with the sole exception of nuclear waste) turned into "an obsidian-like glass" and a gaseous mixture of CO and hydrogen? The only science qualification i have is chemistry A level, but surely that would involve breaking down actual atoms and turning them into atoms of other elements - which is pretty much impossible without nuclear-bomb levels of energy being released, isn't it?

This sounds like a cure-all techno fix quite literally taken to the level of deus ex machina. It sounds like something the Silver Surfer would do. Is it for real?

Closed for Business Time

17:41 / 27.02.07

Looks legitimate, but it doesn't involve any free energy as such. That is, it doesn't produce more energy than is put into it - although the article says they produce surplus energy, this is energy surplus to the energy used to power the machinery. The rest comes from the garbage disposed of within it, which is a helluva lot more than the surplus. As for the science bit - well, I've less of a science background than you, so I'll pass that buck. Evil, maybe?

07:13 / 28.02.07

It sounds good in theory, but there are a number of problems with the way that this article presents the science behind the technology. Not all the toxins are necessarily destroyed, there is a risk that the "glass" produced by the process still contains toxic chemicals which could leach out and be reintroduced to the environment.

I'm a little sketchy on the science behind this myself ("Dammit Jim! I'm a microbiologist, not a physicist!") but as I understand it this process isn't actually annihilating the atoms rather the intense heat breaks the waste down into their constituent molecules.

Like I say, it sounds good in theory, and it isn't free energy. At least it's an energy efficient form of disposal (although I'd would expect a lot more investigation would need to be done into possible eco-hazards).

Kiltartan Cross

11:19 / 28.02.07

It sounds to me like it's simply maintaining an area which is hot enough that (anything thrown into it) starts reacting with (air blown into it) to produce heat. Which is fair enough; get an iron bar hot enough and it will (so far as I know) burn in air, a process which can be self-sustaining. So I'd guess the "chuck anything into it and get a net gain of energy" is reasonable enough in principle (although probably a serious technical challenge to actually run, particularly if the fuel is a mixed bag, so kudos to them if they've worked it all out).

As Evil noted, I'd be very wary of the "harmless glass"; the process is only chemical, so whatever elements you throw into it are the ones that come out the other end; throw in mercury, get out mercury; it might be sealed in something, but it's still there. Not a panacea, but it might make things easier to manage, I suppose.

11:36 / 28.02.07

Which is fair enough; get an iron bar hot enough and it will (so far as I know) burn in air, a process which can be self-sustaining.

It wouldn't be self-sustaining though. Although an iron bar could be (theoretically) heated to the point where it was combusting the air around it, as soon as you took away the energy source you used to heat the bar with it would begin to cool back down. The thermal reaction of the air would not be hot enough to maintain the thermal reaction in the iron.

At least I think that's the case.

Is there a physicist in the house?

Kiltartan Cross

12:24 / 28.02.07

Is there a physicist in the house?

Yes, albeit somewhat, ah, rusty. So far as I know, iron, and metals/metal alloys in general can burn, and keep burning, given the right conditions. Steel wool certainly burns like buggery, which might be down to the large surface exposed to air, but from some trawling of the interweb it looks like iron will burn even in large chunks.

13:46 / 28.02.07

Yes, albeit somewhat, ah, rusty.

(Groanz.) How is this thing different to a very hot fire, exactly?

14:05 / 28.02.07

From the article (which, let's face it, is not the most balanced bit of journalism I've read) it would seem that the inventors are claiming that the process totally destroys the waste and leaves only useful fuel and building materials as by-product. I think that's the supposed big difference to a furnace (positive emissions rather than harmful ones).

I'm generally dubious of tech that claims to provide such a benefit at such little cost. I've been doing a little data-mining on the subject in-between, y'know, working. But I can't seem to find much in the way of criticism of the technology.

Perhaps I'm channelling too much of my cousin, Cynical Scientist.

Kiltartan Cross

13:12 / 02.03.07

Been thinking some more about this, and I'm feeling very sceptical about the whole thing.

Closed for Business Time

13:32 / 02.03.07

Care to flesh that out, Kay d'Boltzmann? Do bear in mind that I'm a non-physicist and a near arithmophobe to boot.

13:47 / 02.03.07

'...two by-products. One is a syngas composed mostly of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is fed into the adjacent Starcell system to be converted into fuel. The other is molten glass that can be sold for use in household tiles or road asphalt.'

Syngas? Thanks, wikipedia-
Syngas for use as a fuel is most often produced by gasification of coal or municipal waste mainly by the following paths:

C + O2 → CO2
CO2 + C → 2CO
C + H2O → CO + H2

Okay. Makes sense. So the good thing is the emissions are used to power the machine and generate energy. It's not very *new* though, is it?

Today, we can burn garbage in special plants and use its heat energy to make steam to heat buildings or to generate electricity. This may sound amazing, but it is really nothing new.

Hydra vs Leviathan

14:56 / 02.03.07

Ok, i've found an article on Wikipedia about plasma arc waste disposal, which seems to be the same thing, and makes it seem a bit less deus ex machina, altho it's clearly an area of controversy, skepticism and scientific dispute (ie, no one seems to be really sure how, or if, it works)...

According to Wiki, then, it's not just syngas and "obsidian-like glass", but also molten metals that leave the chamber, and the "glass" would appear to be a mixture of compounds (as opposed to a single compound, as was strongly implied by the phrase "obsidian-like glass", as both obsidian and most manufactured glass consist mostly of one compound, SiO2). The PopSci article made it seem as if some sort of (possibly impossible) nuclear fission/fusion process was going on, that was converting all kinds of metals and other elements into just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and silicon...

Not actually an artificial star, then...

jentacular dreams

08:21 / 03.03.07

I'm pretty wary of the effect this will have on recycling. Plus we can recycle more materials today than we could ten years ago. I also suspect that the production of this glass will slow biodegredation considerably (given the reduction in surface area and increase in density, along with the possible existence of toxins in the mix).

Kiltartan Cross

21:15 / 03.03.07

Care to flesh that out, Kay?

Yah, sorry, I meant to write more but was overcome by crapness. What makes me feel wary is firstly this: if the machine can convert anything thrown into it into power - by burning it in air - then we must ask: "why bother throwing rubbish into it, why not throw rocks in, and power the planet?"; and as even the more optimistic blurbs don't say that*, I guess that the machine isn't capable of burning anything, just some things - fair enough (one of the blurbs I came across said something about "carbonaceous waste" or something similar - which puts the ability of the machine to run as a self-sustaining operation in question, although I do suppose that most household waste is fairly flammable. Next objection is that chemical reactions don't happen exclusively - if we burn something in air we are generally causing a range of chemical reactions to happen, and although the relative rates at which the different products are produced may greatly favour one thing over others, it doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be traces of them; in other words, the "syngas" may contain traces of nastiness.
Last is that it's only a chemical disintegration, so whatever unpleasant elements go in will come right back out again in the sludge/obsidian/whatever residue - possibly even traces in the gas - and that's probably not a good thing.

In summary:

1) Whether or not it's self-sustaining will depend on what you disintegrate.
2) The gas may not be entirely "clean".
3) The sludge won't be entirely clean.

It's not so much that it isn't feasible, just that claiming it as "free and clean" is a bit over-the-top.

*that task is left to my own rather dim musings earlier.

12:22 / 07.03.07

I'm confuzzled. Could someone please explain?

There's no mention of "burning" in the article, or combustion. Mr. Lynch even said "There's no fire or flame inside, just electricity".

Here's what I think is happening, but my physics is limited, so could someone please explain to me where I went wrong:
A batch of electricity is shot through air. The air turns into plasma, which Wiki says is "typically formed by ionizing a gas, stripping electrons away from atoms". So when you throw garbage into plasma, the plasma's electron-starved atoms pull at the electrons from the garbage, tearing the garbage apart.

I'm confused because I thought lightning was a batch of negatively charged electrons, and I don't see how shooting negatively charge electrons through air would encourage more negatively charged electrons to leave the air. Like charges repel, right? Maybe they're attracted to the positive charge that the lightning's going to. And I also don't understand how this is self-sustaining. If the garbage is supplying electrons to the plasma, then why does it stay plasma?

Kiltartan Cross

13:30 / 07.03.07

Right, I think I've finally got straight what the process is supposed to do:

Air is kept in a sealed and insulated vessel.
The air is heated by an electric current to a very high temperature, forming a plasma.
The air will stay in this plasma with only a minimal amount of extra energy being put into it (because thermal losses will be small).
Rubbish is put into the vessel.
Being exposed to the plasma breaks the various molecules of rubbish up into components. This raises the temperature of the rubbish a lot (but not to anything like the temperature of the plasma) and would lower the temperature of the plasma, but the plasma is kept hot using an electric current.
Some of the rubbish is not heated high enough to vapourise it, and escapes as molten slag. The rest escapes as gas.
As the gas cools down, some of the heat from it can be harnessed for power (but not as much as was used to heat it). However, the gas can then in theory be burned in air, and this burning provides more power.

For it to be self-sustaining, it needs to provide:

(heat produced by burning) + (heat recovered from cooling) > (heat used to maintain temperature of plasma)

(heat used to maintain temperature of plasma) will, for a well insulated vessel, be roughly equal to (heat used to raise temperature of rubbish to the point where it breaks apart)

Whether this can be done in practice seems to be one of the main points of contention.

Also, apparently burning the gas produced may be more of a technical problem than it is presented as being, for both power and cleanness reasons.

Still and all, if it can be made to work, good luck to them.

(edit)
Something I'm not clear on is how the slow moving (by comparison) gas is removed distinct from the fast moving plasma; I'm guessing some kind of fractional distillation setup, but I can't see how it would work. Thoughts?

jentacular dreams

16:21 / 09.03.07

The slow moving gas presumably has no charge. Could a magnetic field draw the charged plasma to the poles while the uncharged gas is vented?

17:14 / 09.03.07

There's no mention of "burning" in the article, or combustion

Plasma is basically (in this instance) very hot fire. An arc-welding torch, lightning and the Sun are examples of plasma for comparison. In fact fire can be considered to be a low temperature partial plasma.

I'd guess the syngas is lighter than air and gets vented although the specific mechanics of it escape me. The plasma wouldn't vent because it's sustained by the electrical arc.

14:47 / 11.03.07

Thanks a lot! I think my head hurts a little less.

16:48 / 05.04.07

This sounds a bit similar:- (from a friend of mine on another forum)

"Some Irish company, Steorn, claims to have invented a Free energy device. That is, a device that outputs more energy than is put into it. This is in direct contradiction of the First Law of thermodynamics (In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.) They call this device Orbo.

Now normally I would dismiss this out of hand as another get rich quick scheme by some shady dealers, but two facts dissuade me from this slightly: Firstly, they have refused to accept any investment until their claims are validated by scientists, and the second is that they have spent vast amounts of money publicising this discovery (£75,000 for one ad in the economist). This is not common behaviour in the crack pot fake schemes.

On the other hand, they do have some features common to the fakers. They make grandiose claims, and provide no evidence to validate their claims (they are currently undergoing testing with a panel of 12 jurors of scientific background, bit have still released no results from this test.) They have not published any designs, hiding behind vague claims of "patents" (Despite the fact almost all patent offices will refuse to patent any device claiming to violate a fundamental physical law)"

what do you think?

Steorn Homepage
Wiki Article

17:42 / 05.04.07

I'm a little hesitant to believe Steorn's claims.

From the Wikipedia article, about their free-energy concept/device "Orbo."

Steorn maintains that its invention has already been validated by no fewer than eight unnamed independent scientists and engineers "with multiple PhDs from world-class universities", and found to work, but that none of them were willing to publish their results. The company has declined to name them, citing mutually binding non-disclosure agreements.

I'm a bit of a pessimist, but if their device is viable, despite the fact that I can't get my head around the concept easily, wouldn't it make sense for these independent scientists to publish their results? Or is it possible that Steorn's thinking is that if they were to publish the results, then that would pre-empt an even more impressive eventual announcement of success in 2007?

Anywho, is it ordinary for research companies to big-up their own research before its proved viable, or even conceptually possible?

21:52 / 07.04.07

I think one important point is that, from my understanding, the plasma gasification would be done in an anoxic environment, meaning that the gas that's produced can then be oxidized (burned) to create energy. The big difference between this process and simply burning waste is that in the second case, the waste products are various nasty oxides, whereas the in this tech the plasma gasification stage breaks down the waste to its component elements.

As an aside, "glass" doesn't imply any specific chemical composition; glass is a generic term for any amorphous, acrystalline solid. Window glass is mostly SiO2, but you can turn anything into a glass by liquefying it and then quenching the liquid quickly enough that there's no time for crystals to form. Turning nuclear waste into glass is a fairly common way of attempting to make it chemically stable so that it can be stored.