Will Electric Vehicles Be Viable? When?

[Tommy Cookers]

eliminating nitrogen is useful where the plan is to collect CO2 on exhausting
because without nitrogen the exhaust is only CO2 only (and water vapour which is easy to separate from CO2)

the engine will burn fuel with oxygen (not air) - the oxygen will be heavily diluted with CO2 or exhaust gas

[FW17]

I did not watch the video but how will they manage removing 80% of the nitrogen from air?

[hollus]

Interesting video. Veeeeeeeery eeeeeaaaaarly development, but the guy sounded quite down to earth. He also said what JAF and TC pointed out.

I guess right now they are limited by a small volumetric flow through the membranes, hence the not even thinking about cars.

Basically, they have a solid ceramic membrane which only works well at 1000C. They want to use the heat in the early escape gases to both run a turbo and heat the membrane. With that pressure and heat, they’d get flow through the membrane.
He did not mention nitrogen free all the time, only enrichment often (only enrichment in O2 from one membrane). I guess one needs to stack too many membranes to get pure enough O2.
He literally mentioned “using the energy that would heat up the 80% nitrogen in a normal escape to run the system”.

The N2 they throw out. The O2 is used for combustion with 75% CO2/H2O from EGR. Thus normal combustion tempetatures.

They suggest capturing that CO2, “For each tank of fuel, you get 3 tanks of CO2”. That they’d like to store temporarily, deliver to a green fuel factory, and to use it for making new fuel from “green” H2.

The CO2 capture (by cooling and pressurization) could cost 10% of the fuel’s energy, but it enables closing the cycle.

But they don’t even have a working prototype yet (nor money to make it).

[Greg Locock]

Nitrogen and hence nitrous oxides are important for smog, but are not an important global issue.

( personal comment removed)

[hollus]

Well, what they suggest, taken to the extreme, comes close to running your car on a fuel cell from green H2, which basically comes close to running on green electricity.

Still, not even a working prototype and no mention of the current flow capacity (from the video, all that sheet membrane had a straw for an O2 outlet, the central one of the 7).

[Just_a_fan]

Nitrogen and hence nitrous oxides are important for smog, but are not an important global issue.

With approx. 55% of the worlds population currently living in urban environments, and that figure projected to rise to 65%+ in the next 30 years, smog / urban air quality is a global issue, at least in terms of global human population. Sure, it's not going to cause sea level rises etc., but it's still a serious issue.

The OECD, back in 2016, reckoned: "Outdoor air pollution could cause 6 to 9 million premature deaths a year by 2060 and cost 1% of global GDP – around USD 2.6 trillion annually – as a result of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural output [...]"

Even if they're seriously over estimating, that's still a decent chunk of lives and cash.

[Tommy Cookers]

... The OECD, back in 2016, reckoned: "Outdoor air pollution could cause 6 to 9 million premature deaths a year by 2060 and cost 1% of global GDP – around USD 2.6 trillion annually – as a result of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural output [...]"
Even if they're seriously over estimating, that's still a decent chunk of lives and cash.

so-called premature death claims denote only weeks or days prematurity (and wrongly ignore other mechanisms)
conveniently the OECD ignores the dominant economic benefit to society (that these notional deaths would bring)

the main NOx exposure comes from cooking (or heating) via open flames
hasn't vehicular NOx been largely eliminated ? - especially at the low torques & cycle temperatures of urban driving

[Andres125sx]

Nitrogen and hence nitrous oxides are important for smog, but are not an important global issue.

You obviously didn´t understand the project.

Once you separate nitrogen from air, you not only prevent NO emisions, but also CO2 as it can be easily collected, so it´s a win-win scenario where both NO (bad for humans) and CO2 (bad for the environement) are eliminatted from exhaust emissions

Obviously it´s a very early project, but none said otherwise and IMO it´s a quite interesting and new approach to reduce emissions

[Billzilla]

Zero emissions ICE under development, the idea is to extract nitrogen from the air before the combustion so only oxigen is burnt, using a ceramic membrane.

I looked at something like that for the FSAE team I was with at the time. I found that a type of zeolite was able to absorb the nitrogen in the air, but it required a process called pressure swing absorption, so it wasn't practical to do unfortunately. The process is used in on-demand oxygen generators, often used privately at home for supplemental oxygen.