Sunday, November 30, 2014

HYDROGEN POWERED CARS

As a career rocket engineer with experience in handling hydrogen, a common rocket fuel, a New York Times editorial, November 30, titled "Hydrogen Cars, Coming Down the Pike," sparked my interest, due to inherent danger of explosion. The editorial spoke of
hydrogen car development by several manufacturers.

A brief note: We often hear of delay of a rocket launch due to a hydrogen leak. Who is going to guarantee that leaks will not occur in  cars, which are subject to all kinds of road vibrations and even impacts? If rockets can leak, will not some cars?

Another brief note: Insurance companies do not allow presence of volatile fuels in garages, even if contained in ASME code tanks. Will they allow cars, of many designs, fueled by hydrogen?

I can visualize a future New York Times headline: "Entire Condominium Destroyed due to Hydrogen Explosion in Basement Parking Lot.

If I were a resident, I would not sleep well knowing that another resident parked his hydrogen fueled car under me. If I were the owner of a parking lot structure, I would also be concerned. 
 

Thursday, November 27, 2014

NEW REALITY

A friend recently e-mailed to me a short article about the Leakey family discoveries of skeletons of primitive man. My reply follows: 

Interesting, but small stuff in the grand scheme of things because it has little perceivable affect on contemporary times.
A couple of ideas  follow which are unsettling, if not downright scary though, and I offer these to your circulation list, a convenient, bright audience.
Evolution of technology has far outpaced biological evolution. The latter is slow, responding to environmental  effects and occasional mutations accidents of nature. But technology is advancing asymptotically, and can be observed, year to year. It diminishes, at the same time, the importance of biological evolution. Not only  is the change accelerating, but the rate of change  is too. One manifestation of this is future multiplication of the capability of the human brain, perhaps trillions of times.
It's part of the theme of Ray Kurtzweil's book:  "The Singularity is Here," in which he defines a future that has computers linked to the human brain.
He's right. It is already happening on a primitive scale. The reader of this, attentive to screen, is already a rapidly evolving being, seated with a virtual umbilical connected to an external brain - the PC. It's addictive nature guarantees that the trend is unstoppable, and with time the external brain will provide more and more of humanity's demands. Fascinating, scary stuff.

Even more scary - we are very much alone in the universe. Astronomers, theorizing and using the most advanced telescopy -  Atacama, Keck, Hubble, etc, can't tell us anything about the universe as it currently exists. Step outside and view the stars. except for a planet or two and the moon, everything you see is as it was - years, tens of years, thousands millions, billions of years ago. Nearly everything is unreal.
Suppose an advanced telescope were to discover a planet bustling with signs of an advanced civilization as near as three thousand light years, just a short distance away as the universe goes. A message from them to explore for other beings might not have arrived yet. Any attempted communication by us would not see a response for six thousand years. Civilizations come and go in that time frame.
Assuredly, we are very much alone in the universe.  

Friday, November 21, 2014

HOW DID THE PLANETS FORM?


HOW DID THE PLANETS FORM?
By Edward Hujsak
( What follows seems obvious, but there are theories and theories, all supported by their own sets of conjectures.)



A common theory about the moon, generally accepted, is that it was scarfed out of Earth when a huge asteroid passed close by. Another theory is that it was somehow handed off from Venus. But evidence to the contrary is in plain sight. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.....all have multiple moons....as many as sixty-seven in orbits around Jupiter.

What is uncontested is that the planets' beginnings were in the form of gas blobs. Uncontested because the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune still exist in that state. It is likely, from observation of other planets, that surrounding the gas blobs were lots of rocks which were gradually drawn into the gaseous spheres through loss of momentum caused by collisions, and gravity, ending up as solid planets with a surrounding atmosphere.Some of the rocks were too big to be drawn in. Our moon is one of them.

How the planets evolved after that is apparently dependent on the strength of their gravitational fields. Mercury, for example was too small to hold on to its atmosphere. Closest to the sun, it was simply blown away by solar pressure. Venus, next closest to the sun, with a gravity like Earth's, has an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and its nearness to the sun resulted in runaway global warming.... a window into a possible fate for Earth if carbon dioxide concentration reaches a tipping point. We do not have any idea what that tipping point is.

Earth, occupying an orbit averaging about ninety-four million miles from the sun, had a strong carbon dioxide component component. When it cooled, plant life became possible, out of which the atmosphere acquired a strong oxygen component. That, in turn, made animal life possible.
Mars, unfortunately, with a gravity only thirty-eight percent that of Earth, suffered the same fate as Mercury. Its atmosphere was blown away. Some life may have formed there, and possibly still exists in underground caverns but so far no evidence has been uncovered. A visitor to Mars might survive in a deep cavern. But had better like to eat mushrooms, as they would likely thrive in a damp. warm enclosure.

The outer gas planets will probably never reach a state like Earth- a large body of merged rock with a surrounding thin atmosphere, though they have all accumulated some rocks, as shown by evidence of solid cores. Also, the gas blobs are just too big. There simply aren't enough rocks. Saturn, maybe, if collisions cause enough loss of momentum to cause the ring matter to be drawn in. But Saturn is pretty far out. Solar pressure, the only known significant disturbing influence is small at Saturn's distance from the sun.

In any case, none of the giant gas planets could support life as we know it.
Planet forming – a big show- and right before our eyes! Slow, though. A lifetime is too short to see any action.

Friday, November 14, 2014

KAROL THE ENGINEER


KAROL THE ENGINEER by Edward Hujsak

He was head and shoulders above most engineers; hands on, analytical, inventive, possessing an innate ability to evaluate and tackle any task. Karol was next to the oldest in a family of twelve, born in New Hampshire to Polish Immigrants. He attended the University of New Hampshire and received a Masters Degree in chemical engineering there, along with a military commission through the ROTC. He served on General Bradley's staff during World War II. After the war he earned a second degree in chemical engineering at MIT, on the G.I. Bill.

Tall, brawny, and tanned, he excelled as a swimmer and pole vaulter. He was active in the 4-H club and the Grange and secured a seventy-five dollar scholarship from that organization to pay for his first year's tuition at the University. Summers he worked in the machine shop adjoining Frank Hazeltine's excelsior factory, an experience that would serve him well in his later years. He also worked as an ice man for Hazeltine, delivering ice from a dump truck to the locals.

His first and only professional job was with Stanolind, an independent oil and gas company with offices in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa remained his lifelong base, where he raised three adoring children with Dorothy, his wife for more than fifty years.
Early on, his assignments centered on exploration. Oil companies are constantly on the prowl, worldwide, for potential oil deposits. One of his exploratory trips took him far up the Orinoco River to assess development of a large bitumen deposit in Venezuela. Frequent trips were made to petroleum deposits in Canada.

North and East of Edmonton, Canada, a cold and uninhabited region spotted with diamond willows, is an immense deposit of bitumen, stretching over roughly a square, four hundred miles on a side. Stanolind had an interest in this deposit. The ore is commonly known as tar sand, consisting of sandstone that is saturated with a low grade oil, a black, viscous, tarry substance. Extensive tar sand deposits occur in several other places around the world, notably in Russia, Siberia and Venezuela. The ore can be processed by applying heat, to release a low grade oil that can be piped to refineries and converted into a variety of petroleum products. In a time of high oil prices, it became profitable for the first time to exploit this resource. It is this product that is the reason for the infamous Keystone pipeline. If the truth be known, the pipeline is unlikely to benefit the U.S. market. Rather, it is a pipeline for Canada to Texas oil refineries, and thence to world markets for refined petroleum, as well as the highly toxic “coke” that is a byproduct.

In the first weeks at Stanolind, Karol was sent to Texas with a senior companion to examine a synthetic gasoline production facility. Stanolind had purchased it for a few cents on the dollar when the original owners were unable to make it work after spending millions of dollars to build it. The two men spent a few days days looking it over. Then Karol said, “Let's see if we can get this thing to work.” They were successful, much to delight of managers at Stanolind.

A budding idea drew his full attention to promoting a scheme for exploiting the
tar sand deposits. In a short time, Stanolind management was convinced and prepared to spend millions of dollars to develop it in the Canadian deposit.
His idea was to build controlled underground fires to melt the tar sands. The oil would puddle and would be brought to the surface by conventional pumping methods. There were, as expected, many skeptics in other participating companies, who predicted a black, smokey environment, impossible to work in, and eventually prevailed in championing a system that employed huge shovels for surface mining, crushing the material and transporting it on giant dump trucks to miles-long moving belts that terminated at a processing facility. That method, however, is producing a vast wasteland, dotted with mountains of tailings which encircle ponds of toxic water. A consequence was death to countless unfortunate birds that alit there.

The experiment proceeded over many months, night and day, winter and summer, in the course of which he hoped to establish the drilling protocols and methods for setting and controlling the underground fires. As time went by, although oil was successfully pumped from the underground melt, it was concluded that the process was too complex to be trusted to everyday workmen.

There were two main camps established to carry out the experiment, located fifty miles apart and serviced by a supply line out of Edmonton. The road between was a seasonal hazard, but best in the winter months when it became a regularly plowed, packed snow road. The safety of personnel, especially in winter, led to a “Buddy” policy, to avoid the dangers of going out alone into frigid weather. They had no mobile telephones then, and relied mainly on radio.

Nevertheless, there was an occasion during the dark winter months that Karol had need to travel from one camp to the other. There was no “buddy” available so he set off on the fifty mile journey in a company Jeep by himself. Half way there on the frigid white highway a rear wheel came off the Jeep.

Often, when caught in a panic situation, human beings are prone to make quick and rash decisions that they would not normally make, that could, in many cases, be fatal. Such events are commonly attributed to a catch-all phrase: human error. In this case, it could have been fatal. Stranded in the frigid wilderness, miles from help, no communication.

Flashlight in hand, Karol backtracked on foot, hoping to find at least three of the missing lug nuts that held the wheel in place. He found one a short distance away, another about a half mile down the snow highway, and another a similar distance beyond. Three was enough, They would hold the wheel in place. He trotted back to the Jeep, hastily emplaced the wheel on a jacked-up Jeep, and secured it in place. He then jumped into the warm cabin and continued on his journey.

In retrospect, absent the panic situation, a calmer mind would have seen that a
lug nut could have been “borrowed” from each of the other three wheels, but he realized that with chagrin only later.


Karol sensed that the underground fire concept would soon taper off, as the above ground operations progressed under the ownership of the several companies now involved in the tar sands. At the extremity of his back yard he built a small machine shop where he aimed to develop a product that he could manufacture during his retirement years. An opportunity turned up to make small oil filters for an oil company. It opened a window into a possible niche business.

Karol took early retirement to manufacture high capacity oil filters to service the petroleum industry. He moved into a larger industrial manufacturing building, and soon was delivering massive filters of his own design to customers all over the world. Wary of excessive growth, however, he kept the operation small, with only one welder helping him. At age 89, when his certification as a welder came up for renewal, he quietly closed the doors on his enterprise.
Karol was my brother. He died at the age of 90 in 2005.