Nexus - 0304 - New Times Magazine-pages

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NEWSCIENCENEWSCIENCENEWSCIENCE explaining that the action works best on cold liquids and gases, with the liquids being dense in nature. This obviously meant that my system, if used in North America, Canada, England, Sweden, Russia and Japan, would do its best job on cold-start on winter days at -20°C, when the catalytic converter cannot work at all until it reaches 400°C. My device could shut down when the liquid was hot. The reason that sonochemistry works is because collapsing bubbles cause nanosec- ond bursts of energy in the order of 3,000°C and pressures of 10,000 atmos- pheres and such. There would not be any catalytic con- verters on today's cars if they had not been made Jaw in America—thus it has to be made law for a chemical liquid scrubbing system to be fitted. Corporations like Ford, GM, Chrysler and Cummins Diesel in America, SAAB and Volvo in Sweden, and Peugeot in France have all written to me to say they have no interest in trying my device. Neither have Dow Chemical and Du Pont in America, BASF in Germany and ICI in England shown any interest at all in devel- oping the special chemical that would be required, even though the sale of the chemical and extra money made in recy- cling it when cleaned would have to be astronomical for profits. In Australia, the federal government has no interest at all in seeing my prototype nozzles tried in any sort of test to do with the environment. BHP and CRA were not recently an extraordinary law had been passed here and this forbad any govern- ment research establishment from doing any tests to assist private inventors with prototypes. This, of course, is just com- plete and utter madness, as, overseas, a move is going forward to have more pri- vate inventors assisted by governments in having their trials of prototypes done. We are in reverse to the rest of the world in this regard, and the private inventor here is seen as a lower life-form. It is just possible that mention of my work (and failure!) may attract some inter- est somewhere, perhaps even in another country, to see my sonic nozzle prototypes tried further. Just for passing interest, the pulp mill trial on black liquor showed instant chemi- cal conversion, with one pass through the device, of NaHS at 13.3 g/l to NaHS at 3.9 g/l. The prototype is far heavier and larger than necessary for pulp mill trials; but for a car exhaust pipe, the muffler/silencer would need to be replaced and the plates would need to be of pressed metal. My present device has a larger chamber below so as to distribute such low-pressure gas evenly around the inner slots. Yours sincerely, Alistair K. Bodycomb 30/110 Wattletree Road Malvern, Victoria 3144, Australia Phone: +6] (0)3 9500 9253 4 August 1995 interested, CSIRO the same, and technical colleges like RMIT and various university groups gave the same answer. A week or so ago I received a letter from the NRMA in Sydney to say that they thought the cat- alytic converter was just wonderful and solved all our problems and that they did not want to run any trials of my device. The RACV here had once said the same thing. There appears to be one extra problem that has cropped up in using a system such as mine. The use of exhaust-driven turbo- blowers on some types of high-perfor- mance cars means that the exhaust pipe is opened way up to drop back pressure to around |.5 psi, which appears at the moment to be too low a pressure to run my nozzle. Many large diesel engines use these exhaust-driven turbo-blowers, so they may also have the same problem. Other types of sonic devices used in industry around the world are air/liquid types using very high pressure of 80 psi to 100 psi to operate to achieve fine atomisa- tion, and they have low throughput. The electric-type sonic devices are mainly used to drop into baths of fluid—but it was this type tried out by the mining industry in Australia that caused such a great blow to researching with sonics in this country and caused the ANU professor to advise the federal government to do no further work in this field of using any device incorporat- ing sonics for chemical conversion. Around 1987, a letter I received from AusIndustry in Canberra stated that only About the Author: Alistair Bodycomb was born in Sydney and educated in Melbourne. Working in equipment development, he spent four years with the Australian Department of Agriculture and three years in England, In Canada, he spent four years on the scien- tific staff at the University of Toronto, working on lake pollution equipment development. Mr Bodycomb spent 10 years in Engineering and Development Central Research of a large Canadian cor- poration, doing research and production- line work as an inventor/designer (with 16 corporate patents in his name) on com- bined government/environmental pollution projects. The foremost of these inven- tions, now used in over one-third of cars produced (including GM and Toyota), was dry fibre-compacted auto door-trim panels (wrongly called the Hirotani process of Japan) where he had wet fibre scrap dies of Fibrit-process door-trim panels brought from Italy to Canada for his trials. JUNE-JULY 1996 46 * NEXUS