Governmental policies and international treaties that aim at curbing the emissions of greenhouse gases and local pollutants can be expected. These regulations will increase the competitiveness of CO2-neutral energy sources, i.e., renewables, nuclear or fossil fuels with CO2-sequestration. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative competitiveness of methanol and hydrogen as fuels in th...

Alternative energy sources, such as various fuel cell technologies, have attracted intense attention due to their high efficiency and low emissions of pollutants. Methanol, with its high hydrogen/carbon ratio, low sulfur content and the absence of carbon–carbon bonds, has been identified as a highly suitable source for onboard production of hydrogen [1]. Among several reactions for converting m...

Methanol is a hydrogen carrier for fuel cells and its chemical transformations are of great current interest. Methanol oxidation by vanadium oxides is well studied, hence, serves as a good measure for catalytic activity. Arrays of VO2 nanowires grown on r-cut sapphire prove to be unique for the in situ catalytic activity tests. Here, we present size and morphology dependent activity of Platinum...

This paper presents a wind-methanol-fuel cell system with hydrogen storage. It can manage various energy flow to provide stable wind power supply, produce constant methanol, and reduce CO2 emissions. Firstly, this study establishes the theoretical basis and formulation algorithms. And then, computational experiments are developed with MATLAB/Simulink (R2016a, MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA). Real d...

Rarely-observed polycrystalline twinned Pt nanoparticles (NPs) and length-controlled Pt nanorods (NRs) with exposed high index facets were prepared through an unexpectedly catalytic growth approach from low-cost Mn(3)O(4) NPs. The as-prepared Pt NRs exhibit higher catalytic activity and better stability for the oxidization of methanol than commercial Pt/C catalysts, indicating the promise of th...

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) conducted an evaluation of the potential for methanol to cause adverse effects on reproduction and development in humans. Methanol was selected for evaluation because it is a high production volume chemical with high potential for occupational, consumer, and environmental exposure. Methanol is...

Polymer electrolyte membranes (PEM) and Pt-based catalysts are two crucial components which determine the properties and price of fuel cells. Even though, PEM faces problem of fuel crossover in liquid fuel cells such as direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) and direct borohydride fuel cell (DBFC), which lowers power output greatly. Here, we report a DBFC in which a polymer fiber membrane (PFM) was u...

Dual-fuel (DF) operation with methanol-diesel allows to reduce CO2 emissions, increase efficiency and decrease NOx soot. This paper describes the experimental results methanol-water (MeOH-W) blends as a fuel, has three objectives: (1) whether water acts knock suppressant, enabling higher diesel substitution ratios, (2) if can be measure control engine-out emissions given its cooling effect, (3)...