Hello,
In science, we watched a video about carbon and it talked about carbon fiber and a type of ethanol made from cellulose rather than corn. Carbon fiber is much lighter and stronger than steel. If the Smat-Air-Car is built out of carbon fiber, it will be lighter, which in turn will make it more fuel efficient. Also, carbon fiber is very strong. It is used in race cars because it doesn't crumple around the driver like metal, but it breaks off taking the force of the impact with it. Another thing that I learned about is a new type of ethanol made from the cellulose of plants. We can use this instead of the hydrogen made from water because water is a very valuable resource and many places have a water shortage so people wouldn't approve of using a much needed resource to power cars. Cellulosic ethanol is made from all parts of a plant so it wouldn't use much needed resources like water. Studies done by the U.S. Department of Energy show that cellulosic ethanol reduces green house gas emissions by 85% over gasoline, while starch based ethanol may not reduce emissions at all because it uses natural gas to provide energy for the process. We should implement carbon fiber and switch the hydrogen fuel to cellulosic ethanol for our Smart-Air-Car. We can mention why we decided to do this instead of our previous idea of hydrogen in our presentation.
Thank You,
Mihir Iyer
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Why ethanol?
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- It is a liquid at room temperature (just like gasoline)
- Can leverage existing infrastructure
- Existing vehicle technology needs little modification to support this cellulose ethanol
- Ethanol can be safely produced, technology has been around for hundreds of years, and we don't need to pump anything from the ground
There are two types of ethanol
- South America from sugarcane
- North America from corn
Producing ethanol requires fermentation of the natural sugar in corn which needs a lot of heat energy.
The third type is cellulosic ethanol.
Cellulosic Ethanol can be created by breaking down cellulose (from plants) into sugars. This is an additional step compared to the corn ethanol. This is then fed to yeast which produces the ethanol. It can be made from anythig which contains cellulose. Waste materials like stalk, leaves, husks, wood chips, switch grass etc. Cellulose cannot be digested by humans and this is making good use of wasted cellulose.