Chicken Feathers?

[dewline]

Stumbled across this one thanks to another discussion over at james_nicoll's LJ. Chicken feathers for hydrogen fuel storage tech.

How seriously should we all take this particular item?

Comments

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Well, assuming it wouldn't cost too much to genetically engineer the chickens to produce some kind of super-efficient nanotech feathers, maybe. You could consider it biofuel...


wait, Bruce Cockburn?

I see what you did there.

Anyway, the key is to get the chickens to burn themselves, and thus carmelize their own feathers and store their own hydrogen in a process contained in their life cycle, perhaps some sort of harnessing of the Casimir effect or plasma-type thing. I don't know, I'm neither a chicken farmer or a plasma physicist.

But I bet they'd be delicious.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

That man's an actual musician. (http://brucecockburn.com/) You may have heard some of his stuff on Canadian pop radio already over the last thirty or forty years. (Although I will admit that "All Our Dark Tomorrows" is a throwback to 2003, and the early days of the Bush II Administration just after we saw which way his crew was taking the USA.)

And this thing with the feather tubing would be a bit of salvation for the chicken farming trade, wouldn't it? You wouldn't even have to kill the birds for this to work...but I'd hate to lose KFC.

Chicken of the Sea!

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Part of me wonders, though, whether if one were to take this seriously, one wouldn't want a way to grow the feathers without the chicken. Also, for maximum benefit, you'd want the structure to store as much free hydrogen as possible. With a chicken, I guess this comes down to the animal's own metabolism, maybe pulling the hydrogen from the water in its cells or something. But if you're burning the stuff anyway, it makes sense for it to be as simple as possible, and the part that eats and takes up coop space is just costing you money, so I'm thinking hybridize tanks of kelp to grow the feathers themselves, and process the water and the sunlight.

Re: Chicken of the Sea!

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...well, this seems to be the next step in the info-sourcing chain after that Corpus Callosum blog:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/hydrogen-helper

And that page points to the U of Delaware in turn. They'd be using the feather tubing as a storage medium for the hydrogen if I understand this correctly. Right?

Oh, and here's the profile for the guy making the claim. (http://www.che.udel.edu/directory/facultyprofile.html?id=471)

(IEEE is a Big Acronym in engineering circles, right?)