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The quickest way to establish a visible new margin against energy demand is the historic producer serving small industry and gasifying Pennsylvania anthracite. In 2 years many producers could be in operation. The quickest way to obtain significant supplies of "new" gas or oil is to retrofit existing electricity and industrial boilers for power or industrial gas. Important results could be achieved in 6 years. Table 3 identifies development activities deserving high priority to speed the capture of gas and oil now burned in boilers, and to speed realization the advantages of combined-cycle equipment running on coal (8). Obviously, these activities are not enough. Many exciting and worthwhile concepts at various stages of development can furnish improved techniques for converting coal to pipeline gas and liquid fuels for the long run. Reviews of these concepts are available (6, 32, 35). I have neglected them in this article not to deny their importance but to stress the earlier opportunities from technology that is ready now, or nearly ready. The oil and gas industries might well consider the historical progression from Wells Fargo to Western Union to American Telephone and Telegraph to Radio Corporation of America. These industries will miss the boat if they regard themselves simply as purveyors of their historical fuels and not as purveyors of clean energy. The gas industry especially will be in trouble if it lets its major industrial customers, such as steel and electricity, provide their own supplies of power and industrial gas.
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Nuclear engineers have a vision whose fulfillment will make plutonium-239 and uranium-233 the "dirty, cheap" fuels and will make coal the fuel of esteem. It will be valued for derivative chemicals and clean fuels and for metallurgical and electrochemical uses of its fixed carbon. In a coal technology devised to exploit these values, the recovery of sulfur will be a mere incidental. An immediate, properly financed effort to develop means for coping with sulfur can give us clean air with profit, help to conserve our limited supply of vital uranium-235, and take us a large step toward a coal technology for the 21st century.
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Flash heating of Illinois coal (to 700 degrees C in 1 second) in flowing hydrogen at 100 atmospheres, limiting the vapor residence time at 700 degrees C to 3 seconds, converts 14 percent of the coal's carbon to methane, 7 percent to ethane, and 10 percent to benzene, toluene, and xylenes. The remainder is coke; the carbon balance shows that heavy tar, if any exists, is less than 3 percent.
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Originating in the 1920' s and 1930's, two distinct fluidization arts have emerged, one for treating coarse solids and the other for fine powders. Fluidization research has tended to focus on bubbling beds of coarse solids, but designers of such beds for burning coal have learned to appreciate the importance of combustion of fine char particles in the freeboard. Designers of successful processes for powders have focused on bubble suppression. Since about 1980, combustion fluid beds of both types are challenging the conventional pulverized-coal boiler; they provide better means for controlling emissions from the combustion of high-sulfur fuels. Progress in the "bubbleless" fluidization of fine powders is increasing the fluid bed's competitiveness with the fixed-bed catalytic reactor. Efforts to advance the fluid bed for catalysis, besides increasing gas velocities beyond levels that most researchers have used in the past, must include systematic study of the level of fine particles smaller than 40 micrometers.
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Fractions of a solvent-refined coal that contain organically bound species of magnesium, calcium, titanium, iron, copper, or zinc have been isolated. The fractions represent a wide range of chemical types and molecular size. Their isolation is a step toward speciation.
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In a bed of anthracite or bituminous coke fluidized by air at 10 to 15 meters per second at 1200 degrees to 1400 degrees C, molten ash forms beads on the surface of a coke particle, some exuding from its interior. The beads merge and detach them-selves to grow further as loose fluidized ash agglomerates of low carbon content.
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In this paper, we monitor the real-time growth of mesoporous platinum during electrodeposition using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). Previously, we have demonstrated that platinum films featuring the 'single diamond' (Fd3m) morphology can be produced from 'double diamond' (Pn3m) lipid cubic phase templates; the difference in symmetry provides additional scattering signals unique to the metal. Taking advantage of this, we present simultaneous in situ SAXS/electrochemical measurement as the platinum nanostructures grow within the lipid template. This measurement allows us to correlate the nanostructure appearance with the deposition current density and to monitor the evolution of the orientational and lateral ordering of the lipid and platinum during deposition and after template removal. In other periodic metal nanomaterials deposited within any of the normal topology liquid crystal, mesoporous silica or block copolymer templates previously published, the template and emerging metal have the same symmetry, so such a study has not been possible previously.
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Aerosols are significant to the Earth's climate, with nearly all atmospheric aerosols containing organic compounds that often contain both hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts. However, the nature of how these compounds are arranged within an aerosol droplet remains unknown. Here we demonstrate that fatty acids in proxies for atmospheric aerosols self-assemble into highly ordered three-dimensional nanostructures that may have implications for environmentally important processes. Acoustically trapped droplets of oleic acid/sodium oleate mixtures in sodium chloride solution are analysed by simultaneous synchrotron small-angle X-ray scattering and Raman spectroscopy in a controlled gas-phase environment. We demonstrate that the droplets contained crystal-like lyotropic phases including hexagonal and cubic close-packed arrangements of spherical and cylindrical micelles, and stacks of bilayers, whose structures responded to atmospherically relevant humidity changes and chemical reactions. Further experiments show that self-assembly reduces the rate of the reaction of the fatty acid with ozone, and that lyotropic-phase formation also occurs in more complex mixtures more closely resembling compositions of atmospheric aerosols. We suggest that lyotropic-phase formation likely occurs in the atmosphere, with potential implications for radiative forcing, residence times and other aerosol characteristics.
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Well-ordered and highly interconnected 3D semiconducting nanostructures of bismuth sulphide were prepared from inverse cubic lipid mesophases. This route offers significant advantages in terms of mild conditions, ease of use and electrode architecture over other routes to nanomaterials synthesis for device applications. The resulting 3D bicontinous nanowire network films exhibited a single diamond topology of symmetry Fd3m (Q227) which was verified by Small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and holds great promise for potential applications in optoelectronics, photovoltaics and thermoelectrics.
RESUMEN
Mesoporous metal structures featuring a bicontinuous cubic morphology have a wide range of potential applications and novel opto-electronic properties, often orientation-dependent. We describe the production of nanostructured metal films 1-2 microns thick featuring 3D-periodic 'single diamond' morphology that show high out-of-plane alignment, with the (111) plane oriented parallel to the substrate. These are produced by electrodeposition of platinum through a lipid cubic phase (Q(II)) template. Further investigation into the mechanism for the orientation revealed the surprising result that the Q(II) template, which is tens of microns thick, is polydomain with no overall orientation. When thicker platinum films are grown, they also show increased orientational disorder. These results suggest that polydomain Q(II) samples display a region of uniaxial orientation at the lipid/substrate interface up to approximately 2.8 ± 0.3 µm away from the solid surface. Our approach gives previously unavailable information on the arrangement of cubic phases at solid interfaces, which is important for many applications of Q(II) phases. Most significantly, we have produced a previously unreported class of oriented nanomaterial, with potential applications including metamaterials and lithographic masks.
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Lipid cubic phase samples dry out and undergo phase transitions when exposed to air. We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that adding glycerol controllably lowers the humidity at which cubic phases form. These results broaden the potential applications of cubic phases and open up the potential of a new humidity-responsive nanomaterial.