What shape does gas actually have?
Decide yourself about your own funeral or cremation
At school we learned that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. But instead of dealing with the resulting question: and what form does the gas have then? or the missing plasma, we want to take a break at this point and assume, as we did in business studies lessons almost as long ago, because VAT is 10% so that it is easier to calculate, that there are still three clearly defined states for chemical elements.
Because until the penetration of technical achievements into our daily lives - what were the times when we were driven to the field on horse trailers to cut and thresh wheat for 16 hours before sharing a wooden bowl of body-warm soup with our comrades in the dark barn after the return journey - that was perfectly adequate. It is not for nothing that the classification of temperatures by Anders Celsius is still valid today, who specified the three observable states of water - as ice, liquid and vaporised gas - in his scale of 0 - 100, although we know today that water already boils below 100° and does not freeze at 0° C under many conditions. Glass, for example, is a liquid that only flows very slowly. We see this in large old church windows that are wafer-thin at the top and as thick as an arm at the bottom.
Of course, the waste of energy - excuse me, officially it's called the energy turnaround (we turn to go back to the Middle Ages) - is to blame for this, because everywhere there is talk of alternative drives for the automobile. The fact that
- heavy industry alone requires more fossil energy than all the cars put together,
- the plastics industry does not pay taxes on the oil it uses because it consumes so much, and
- paraffin is also tax-free so that foreign airlines can land here,
are just little sacrifices that the government makes to make citizens aware of their responsibility, that everyone can do something about it - except the government, of course.
For example, colourful banners with the inscription 'Get off the gas' hang on many bridges. These banners, made of oil, are directed at drivers who use the accelerator to propel their horseless carriages. Gasification of the petrol does not take place at all, but small nozzles inject the liquid into the combustion chamber so that it corresponds to the air-fuel ratio.
Now we are back to the point of asking ourselves, does this call also apply to motorists who already drive vehicles with electric instead of internal combustion engines without any common sense? And what about the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) engines, which are mainly used in northern Germany, or the poor fuel cell cars, for which the hydrogen, first separated from the oxygen in a complex process, is converted back into water? Of course, water is not simply boiled and the rising water vapour (that is hydrogen) is used for this, but industrially it is obtained in petrochemical processes. Petrochemical means: consumption of oil, a known renewable raw material. It only needs pressure and time - pressure of the earth's crust and only a few million years - that is sustainability thought further, much further.
How does the fuel cell work?
The principle is far older than the internal combustion engine. But of course it was much easier to develop an explosion of gas in a container moving heavy metal parts than to generate electric current by galvanic reaction of unlimited elements. The trick is that an electrolyte only allows the protons of hydrogen to pass through, while its electrons have to take the circuitous route through conductors, thus doing what we call 'electricity flows' to be combined with oxygen to form water.
It turns out that this is far too effective to be considered as propulsion. Something that makes no noise and only generates energy instead of heat simply cannot be marketed. I'd rather wait for nuclear fusion, whose reactors are powered by sunflower and wind energy.
Next time, dear readers, we will deal with the questions:
Why is gas first liquefied at great expense to end up as exhaust gas in the air? or hydrogen extracted from petrol to be made into an environmentally friendly alternative as a fuel?
What is the role of nuclear power plants, which are huge steam engines and are therefore considered bio-energy (see also Sustainable Nuclear Power)?
Why is 'converting coal to electricity' an evil term, electricity is something good, so the coal goes to a good cause, right?
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