High energy density fuels

[Vultur]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

[Darth Wong]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

What a stupid question. You don't seriously think there might be some substance to an idea just because it was in a sci-fi novel, do you?

[Vultur]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

What a stupid question. You don't seriously think there might be some substance to an idea just because it was in a sci-fi novel, do you?

It didn't sound plausible, but I thought it might be based on something real - I don't know much about that stuff.

[Samuel]

No. Anti-matter provides energy due to the annihilation of 100% of its matter (although not all the resulting energy is usable).

There is no way you can get more energy out of a substance than that. Of course, if you have antimatter that is some element other than hydrogen, you could get a bigger bang, but I have no idea how you would produce that.

[Connor MacLeod]

I think you'd have to pretty much rewrite parts of science as we know it for that to be plausible... wouldn't the speed of light have to be higher? (The momentum of photons is its energy divided by the speed of light after all.) and that would change a ton of things...

Generally anytime you hear nonsense that seems to "Exceed" the limits of energy density (chemical, nuclear, whatever) my thoughts is that the fuel acts as some sort of catalyst or booster to tap some sort of other energy source (your magical extradimensional energy source really, which can be pretty abusrd too but oh well.) I tend to throw any sort of device/techique/material that "amplifies" "multiplies" or "boosts" energy outputs too. And there's alot of stuff in sci fi that does all that. in alot of ways its as bad as the gravitowank or the mass lightening nonsense you see cropping up.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

Nope. Anything providing greater energy density than E = mc2 is pure magic . . . better known to sci-fi readers as handwavium.

[Starglider]

Actually this is something I was wondering about, with regard to matter-antimatter annihilation. If I have anti-deuterium and fuse it before allowing the resulting anti-helium to annihilate with matter, or if I have anti-uranium and fission it before annihilating the fission products, is the total energy output identical to simply annihilating the antimatter without first having a nuclear reaction? I would think so, since those reactions release energy by allowing the nuclei to fall into a more stable state, but annihilation of heavy atoms should effectively lose energy (relative to annihilation of free particles) proportional to the atom's binding energy in the process of tearing it apart.

[Ford Prefect]

Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

No; it's ridiculous. When I did more frequent writing with a personal setting, I had a power source which exceeded E=mc2 (it was in fact E=mc3), simply because it was completely silly. Power sources, especially fuels, which put out greater than mass energy conversion are complete nonsense. Like all things this may not necessarily be bad in a story, but it has no scientific basis at all.

[Uraniun235]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

No. Mass is equivalent to energy (E=mc2 is the conversion formula, and matter/antimatter annihilation is the conversion of matter and antimatter to energy), therefore any reaction which outputs more energy than matter/antimatter would be creating additional energy, and would therefore violate the conservation of mass and energy.

[Steel]

If we accelerate a mass m of normal iron filings or something to 0.99c then its going to have kinetic energy equal to gamma*mc^2 = 7mc^2.

So if we stuff that m of iron into a wanktacular magnetic field of obscene power and keep our iron going in a circle then we can extract energy from it by... errr... putting something near it and letting the resulting friction massively heat it and heat water and drive some turbines or something.

So there we circumvent the energy per rest mass issue, but (neglecting horrific angular momentum issues) our iron battery is still effectively going to have a mass increased by the same factor (gamma) as the energy stored in it... so it doesnt actually benefit us from a practical standpoint. If your question is how do I extract more than mc^2 from the atoms that constituted the mass m at rest then that'll do it, otherwise no.

[fusion]

The "best" way to increase the energy of something is to increase the speed of light... which is nonsense also.... So yes have fun doing just that. Get back to me when you have done just that....

[erik_t]

I don't know if this should go here or in Science, but I guess it's speculative enough for here...

Is there any real-world science that would suggest the possibility of fuels with a higher energy density than 100% matter-antimatter conversion? Ringo and Taylor's Dreen books have 'quarkium' that's 3 times more energetic than matter-antimatter conversion; is there any basis to that?

No. Mass is equivalent to energy (E=mc2 is the conversion formula, and matter/antimatter annihilation is the conversion of matter and antimatter to energy), therefore any reaction which outputs more energy than matter/antimatter would be creating additional energy, and would therefore violate the conservation of mass and energy.

This isn't quite true; while you couldn't get fission/fusion products and "double-count" the energy, it would be completely valid to carry fuels which had stored chemical energy. For example, a starship could carry separately oxygen, hydrogen, anti-oxygen and anti-hydrogen, combust the first two and the second two, then do M/AM on the resulting water and anti-water.

Mind, this is not going to be a meaningful amount of energy with any chemicals known or imagined. Supposing hydrogen and oxygen combusting to form water, you'd get on the order of 13kJ/kg out of combustion and 9E13 kJ/kg out of M/AM.

So your new system is (1 + 1.44E-13) times as good as straight M/AM.

Sign me UP!

[Seggybop]

Throwing out some random ideas~
What if you have containment vessel that can allow light in, but not allow it to escape? So the trapped light would bounce around endlessly until you release it, and you could keep pumping more light into it endlessly. The problem would probably be that the tiniest level of inefficiency in the reflection would eventually be enough that the vessel would absorb enough energy to burn out, but if that was taken care of, is there any limit to photon density?

Similarly, assuming you could build some kind of perfect capacitor out of unobtanium, is there an absolute limit to electron density that it could be charged with?

[Lord of the Abyss]

Throwing out some random ideas~
What if you have containment vessel that can allow light in, but not allow it to escape? So the trapped light would bounce around endlessly until you release it, and you could keep pumping more light into it endlessly. The problem would probably be that the tiniest level of inefficiency in the reflection would eventually be enough that the vessel would absorb enough energy to burn out, but if that was taken care of, is there any limit to photon density?

Similarly, assuming you could build some kind of perfect capacitor out of unobtanium, is there an absolute limit to electron density that it could be charged with?

In both cases, one absolute limit is when you pack enough into an area to create a black hole. And yes, enough photons in a small enough area will bend space into a black hole, massless or not.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Throwing out some random ideas~
What if you have containment vessel that can allow light in, but not allow it to escape? So the trapped light would bounce around endlessly until you release it, and you could keep pumping more light into it endlessly. The problem would probably be that the tiniest level of inefficiency in the reflection would eventually be enough that the vessel would absorb enough energy to burn out, but if that was taken care of, is there any limit to photon density?

Adding photons to a system increases the mass of the system by E/c2. You're still stuck with E=mc2 as a limit. Regardless, true one-way mirrors and perfect reflectivity are impossible, so either way this idea won't work.

[Darth Wong]

This isn't quite true; while you couldn't get fission/fusion products and "double-count" the energy, it would be completely valid to carry fuels which had stored chemical energy. For example, a starship could carry separately oxygen, hydrogen, anti-oxygen and anti-hydrogen, combust the first two and the second two, then do M/AM on the resulting water and anti-water.

Mind, this is not going to be a meaningful amount of energy with any chemicals known or imagined. Supposing hydrogen and oxygen combusting to form water, you'd get on the order of 13kJ/kg out of combustion and 9E13 kJ/kg out of M/AM.

So your new system is (1 + 1.44E-13) times as good as straight M/AM.

Sign me UP!

Even that might not necessarily be true. We normally do not assume that chemical potential energy has a mass-equivalent, but I don't see why it wouldn't. I always assumed that we ignored it because it is insignificant relative to rest mass, not because it actually doesn't have any mass equivalence. So I'd imagine that you still can't get past M/AM efficiency.

[erik_t]

I considered this but I can't think of a compelling reason that potential energy, be it chemical or gravitational/magnetic/etc must have mass-equivalence in that sense. Likewise I guess I don't know why they wouldn't.

Such questions are above my pay grade.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I considered this but I can't think of a compelling reason that potential energy, be it chemical or gravitational/magnetic/etc must have mass-equivalence in that sense. Likewise I guess I don't know why they wouldn't.

Such questions are above my pay grade.

Well, Magnetic Energy really is electromagnetic energy by virtue of the coupling of electric and magnetic fields. Gravitational energy is a bit of an icky question because of the debate over Quantum Gravity. Chemical energy is often the energy of molecular bonds. Kinetic energy is manifested as a kind of energy since particles get more energetic as they accelerate.

[Junghalli]

If we accelerate a mass m of normal iron filings or something to 0.99c then its going to have kinetic energy equal to gamma*mc^2 = 7mc^2.

So if we stuff that m of iron into a wanktacular magnetic field of obscene power and keep our iron going in a circle then we can extract energy from it by... errr... putting something near it and letting the resulting friction massively heat it and heat water and drive some turbines or something.

I think you could just convert the kinetic energy into electricity by making the slug conductive and slowing it down magnetically; PERMANENT mentions such a scheme for recovering some energy from a lunar mass driver by slowing down the launch buckets and "recycling" their KE back into electricity (with some inefficiency, of course). This would be similar, but using vastly more energy. I believe this also the principle that regenerative braking works on.

The big problem is if the thing is moving at a high fraction of c you'll need one ridiculously long decellerator. Since this thing would be essentially a giant glorified battery just like antimatter (i.e. you'd need to put more energy into it than you get out) I'm hard-pressed to see any conceivable practical application.

[Lord of the Abyss]

If we accelerate a mass m of normal iron filings or something to 0.99c then its going to have kinetic energy equal to gamma*mc^2 = 7mc^2.

So if we stuff that m of iron into a wanktacular magnetic field of obscene power and keep our iron going in a circle then we can extract energy from it by... errr... putting something near it and letting the resulting friction massively heat it and heat water and drive some turbines or something.

I think you could just convert the kinetic energy into electricity by making the slug conductive and slowing it down magnetically; PERMANENT mentions such a scheme for recovering some energy from a lunar mass driver by slowing down the launch buckets and "recycling" their KE back into electricity (with some inefficiency, of course). This would be similar, but using vastly more energy. I believe this also the principle that regenerative braking works on.

The big problem is if the thing is moving at a high fraction of c you'll need one ridiculously long decellerator. Since this thing would be essentially a giant glorified battery just like antimatter (i.e. you'd need to put more energy into it than you get out) I'm hard-pressed to see any conceivable practical application.

Perhaps the culture in question wants a big battery, can't handle antimatter very well but CAN build big ? Or perhaps it IS an extension of the lunar mass driver that you mention, and it's function is to launch and recover spacecraft, starships, or probes; absorbing the energy of incoming craft by decelerating them, and using that recovered energy to launch outgoing craft. Or, you might have some scientific/industrial reason to want to throw large objects at something near the speed of light on demand.

What I've not sure of is if it would work at all for energy storage; as I understand it, the particles in a circular accelerator continuously lose energy by emitting something called "synchrotron radiation", caused by forcing relativistic particles to curve with an electromagnetic field. I really don't know if anything analogous would happen with a good sized object instead of a particle. But since they are composed of particles, it seems quite possible it would.

[Modax]

You could use neutron degenerate matter (neutronium) and its antimatter counterpart as fuel, vastly increasing energy density in the volumetric sense, but you can't get past E = mc2 . Unless you have "mass-lightening" treknology, which would let you carry sufficient neutronium to blow up the earth inside a milk jug.

[Starglider]

How about spinning black holes? You can store a huge amount of energy (up to G(M^2)/c) in the angular momentum of a rotating black hole. Does this energy have mass equivalence? Of course even if it didn't you'd have a problem using that to exceed E=MC^2 energy density, since once the hole has been spun down you'd have to wait for it to evaporate to get the rest of the energy out.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

How about spinning black holes? You can store a huge amount of energy (up to G(M^2)/c) in the angular momentum of a rotating black hole. Does this energy have mass equivalence? Of course even if it didn't you'd have a problem using that to exceed E=MC^2 energy density, since once the hole has been spun down you'd have to wait for it to evaporate to get the rest of the energy out.

In relativistic terms, energy is calculated as thus: E = Sqrt( (m c^2)^2 + (p c)^2) where p is moment, m is mass, c is speed of light.

I think a lot of people in this thread somehow missed out this. This is the basis behind all particle accelerator experiments, and without this equation, quite frankly, there isn't any point in accelerating any particles and anti-particles to relativistic speeds and then smack them together.

[Starglider]

How about spinning black holes?

In relativistic terms, energy is calculated as thus: E = Sqrt( (m c^2)^2 + (p c)^2) where p is moment, m is mass, c is speed of light.

Spinning black holes are a special case, because (assuming the singularity model is correct) nothing is actually moving. Angular momentum in normal matter is just the net effect of conventional linear momentum in the object's constituent particles. I only have a very limited understanding of this, but AFAIK spin on a black hole is modeled the same way as particle spin, i.e. as an intrinsic property of a zero-dimensional object.

[Steel]

How about spinning black holes? You can store a huge amount of energy (up to G(M^2)/c) in the angular momentum of a rotating black hole. Does this energy have mass equivalence? Of course even if it didn't you'd have a problem using that to exceed E=MC^2 energy density, since once the hole has been spun down you'd have to wait for it to evaporate to get the rest of the energy out.

In relativistic terms, energy is calculated as thus: E = Sqrt( (m c^2)^2 + (p c)^2) where p is moment, m is mass, c is speed of light.

I think a lot of people in this thread somehow missed out this. This is the basis behind all particle accelerator experiments, and without this equation, quite frankly, there isn't any point in accelerating any particles and anti-particles to relativistic speeds and then smack them together.

I did mention this earlier. What you have there is equivalent to E= gamma(v)*mc^2.

As you accelerate your object the energy in it increases by a factor of gamma, but so does the effective mass, so you now have energy gamma*mc^2 in an object of mass gamma*m, which in no way helps your efficiency.