FAST IMPROVEMENTS NEEDED AND EXPECTED IN TWO MAJOR INDUSTRIES

“Wood” must be the first fuel to fulfill the need of energy at the beginning of homo sapiens or neanderthals. It contains roughly 3000-4000 kcal/kg  and can be kept for a very long time. Only a tiny transportation and storage effort is needed. Than it comes the discovery of “coal” doubling the energy content within the same amount of substance (4000-7000 Kcal/kg). With the petroleum mankind reach the pinnacle of its discoveries. (10000 Kcal/kg)

Coal and petroleum availability are limited in our world and will be soon exhausted within few centuries. Also have big environmental pollution disadvantage. But sooner or later will be used as ready energy source.

Sunlight is a marvelous energy source. But the cost of the solar panels and limitations of the energy storage, its usage is still small. Its unavailability during nights and cloudy days also a bid disadvan -tage.

In reality one hour of sunlight energy is far enough for whole world annual requirement but we are facing a storage barrier. Battery industry is still struggling hard to improve its capacity limitations. Lithium ion batteries are 21. Century biggest novelty. We started to use even in electric cars already.

We can expect very easily that in the near future we will have a quicker chargeable batteries with increasingly holding capacity. Is there a natural limit of capacity? For sure… At the end we are handling electrons ! But there is still quite long way to go until we reach to the quantum level.

The difficulty is in its nature. There is no any archetype to investigate and work on its reverse engineering .

At the beginning of the industry revolution  the usage of energy required three stage ,while in every step there was important losses . Producing steam from coal and using a steam engine to produce electricity is low yield process. The same applies to petroleum products .

Generators powered by internal combustion engines in cars was a very important breakthrough of the last century. It deleted one stage in converting the energy into power. Jet engines are one step ahead which lowered the ticket prices incredibly. Today with the rocket industry is working on to fasten our air flights. We don't have to forget the history of Concorde failure. Tarvelling from Sydney to New York in two hours is nice but it must be affordable .

Better batteries and better engines are the next challenges of the technological industries..


Avram Aji
26.02.2018