Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Syngas is awesome

The best thing you can do with your plastic waste is reuse it - especially if plastic is expensive. Venus, short on hydrogen, will find plastic expensive. But sometimes it is not feasible to reuse the plastic. A plastic item might tear or, if in oxygen and sunlight for too long, degrade.

Via hbdchick comes a means to accelerate the degradation: microwave. We're all here to retrieve the hydrogen. But looking into all this, I'm not minding the Old And Busted way.

The usual process does this at 1025 K but that is too hot even for Venus' surface; it also gets syngas back, which mixes the hydrogen with carbon-monoxide. Luckily hot syngas at least will not explode outside a zinc-oxide catalyst and 30 MPa which is, what, five times the surface pressure. (Unless you add oxygen, which in free gaseous form isn't natural to Venus.) Unluckily it takes a second step to separate the gases.

... if we cared to do that.

The CO, as Robert Zubrin teaches us, grants a wide array of useful chemistry (or is that "chemody"?). Mixed with hydrogen it should reduce our rusty metals better - and syngas is so used in sponge iron production. Syngas also makes alcohols starting with methanol at 575 K with those catalysts. It's good for all sorts of stuff. Waste products are carbon dioxide, which we vent out; and water, which we also love. Might be a bit fizzy.

Further: CO's molecular mass is 28 like nitrogen gas. Given that Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, our poison waste is a lifting gas even better than the breathable-air mix which will be 20% oxygen gas (at 32). Especially if it is mixed with hydrogen instead.

How do we get 1025 K over Venus' surface? Float a BIG transparent balloon with your plastic trash and a few focusing mirrors in it. Let it break the clouds, above. As mentioned this process will only lighten the load.

AMMONIA 12/15: We can also talk fertiliser from urea.

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