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Fuel Cell Powered Backup System
bassrat writes "Coleman just announced the world's first backup power system with Fuel Cells. Like any new technology, it's a bit pricey at $6K but the rest of the specs are pretty decent. Info at http://www.airgen.com/"
Seems great, a quiet generator. I used to set up carnival equipment, and this would be great to have. But how will I get the hydrogen? For industrial use, as the site says, there are only 3 places in the city I live in to get the fuel. And it's a big city! Plus, for residential and commercial use, it'll be pretty difficult to get a hold of the H. T he site says it will soon be availaible in exchangeable canisters, but I don't think it'll catch on until it's availble at grocery stores, like propane.
from their "benefits" page:
> Quiet Very low noise operation
so is a battery backup - Okay maybe it's a little more noisy but I have been next to huge APCs and they are completely drowned out by server hum and cannot be heard anyhow. My personal UPS does not make a single sound.
> Air Pollution-Free Operation By-products are heat and water vapor Renewable Energy Powered by two of the most abundant elements -- hydrogen and oxygen -- in the universe
No arguing, but soooo? (more later)
> Clean Energy Perfect sine wave electricity to protect sensitive electronics
okay, so is a UPS, again.
> Indoor Use No carbon monoxide emissions
I am tired of typing "okay so is UPS"
> Non-Stop Power Continuous electricity generated as long as hydrogen is supplied.
I should hope!
now onto the blab:
Yes yes I know for a lot of trouble, this makes a good portable generator (maybe). But they are saying this will be a good power-backup too? my ass.
1) UPS has battery that runs out. This has hydrogen that runs out. same deal.
2) UPS can be re-charged when the power comes back - this I have to buy more hydrogen tube thingys
3) I am guessing that this uses the ROOM oxygen? like, the one we need to breath with?
4) where exactly is the water (byproduct) going? I remember that fuel cells has a high temperature - I assume vapor? as in bumping up the humidity to some insane levels in the server room? Even if it does not - I would think there need to be new pipework / whatever to carry away the condensation.
Let's not forget that it probabbly cost a bundle starting off / maintain too.
Now with that vented - it would be pretty cool to get one to replace one of those noisy generators for a motor-home or something - but THEN, it's designed for indoor use (i think)? wtf? and i have to either carry AirGen cylinders (low pressure) (read: does not last long), or hydrogen cylinders (read: really dangerous) around instead of just getting some gasoline at the station?
erm... I will stick with a portable generator (for power generation) and UPS (for backup) thank you.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
One thing is for sure though: You may take comfort in the fact that there are hordes of lawyers looking to represent you or anyone else in court to sue Coleman for making this stuff if it blows up and hurts you. Why? because they get a cut of it. Imagine if you could have a 'cut' of that 2.6*USdollars*10^10 from that tobacco settlement.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Ok, do you realize how much more dangerous than a simple propane tank a hydrogen tank is? I'm lazy, and it's late at night, so I won't search and caugh you up numbers, but Hyrdrogen is one of the elements with the highest combustion energy release to weight ratio...
In fact, one of the reasons why hydrogen powered engines weren't a reality fifty years ago is because of how extremely hot they get.
Now, I wouldn't worry about having my scuba gear fail. I don't worry about my propane tanks in a kitchen... But I am still pretty damn careful about propane.
Hydrogen. No sir... that's a bit too much for me to handle.
Ok, do you realize how much more dangerous than a simple propane tank a hydrogen tank is?
The danger of hydrogen vs hydrocarbon fuels is a hotly debated issue. Don't write it off as fact.
In fact, the Rocky Mountain Institute (who has been playing with Fuel Cells for more then a decade), says that Hydrogen is about as dangerous as Propane.
Specifically:
Tests conducted at the College of Engineering at Miami University aimed to find this out. 3000 cubic feet per minute of hydrogen was leaked from a vehicle tank and set alight. Over the course of the burn, temperature sensors inside the vehicle did not measure a raise of more than 1 or 2 degrees centigrade anywhere inside the vehicle. The temperature of the surface of the outside of the vehicle did not climb above that of a vehicle sitting in the sunshine!
This might sound unintuitive. But when a carbon-based fuel like gasoline burns, glowing hot soot particles transfer the heat to its surroundings--potentially including you. But because hydrogen contains no carbon, it burns cleanly without a residue of hot soot, producing little radiant energy. This means that a victim would have to be practically in the flame in order to get burned.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The goodyear blimp is only a flying billboard, whereas the hindenberg was more like an ocean liner.
They were called airships because they were originally intended to do everything a ship could do, only from the air. The germans used airships to attack britain in the first world war and there were plans for airborne freight for go-anywhere delivery of parcels at a fraction of the cost of other courier systems.
I suppose that if engineers really wanted to work at it and spend a lot of money, we might have nuclear powered, hydrogen lofted aircraft carrier blimps defending america today - stealth airbases that could suddenly appear deep behind enemy lines and move around at will.
alternatively you could have a solar powered blimp-yacht for recreation: solar cells on the top of the air bag generate electricty, a scoop on the front collects h2o. electricity splits the h2o into hydrogen for loft and propulsion and oxygen. Fuel cells turn the hydrogen back into electricity on demand and drive the electric motors connected to the propellers.
What's not typically known is using electricity you can reletively easily seperate water in to Oxygen and Hydrogen. Both of which could be stored to later go through a fuel cell and turned back into water and electricity. These conversions are very near to 100% perfect in terms of energy transfer. I've seen it demostrated at an alternative-fuel car show. It was very interesting, and got me interested in Hydrogen as a possible fuel for cars (and other things).
Since this thing is supposed to be plugged into the wall anyways when it functions as a UPS, why can't it use the house voltage to generate the Hydrogen, rather then forcing you to buy bottles of the stuff. Granted, you may not be able to store it at the same preassures manufactures can, but I bet you could at least store enough in low pressures to keep you running for an hour or more, I mean how long does the average power-outage last? Last one I expiranced was only about 10 seconds.
As for the safety of Hydrogen, from what I undersand, a fiber-wrapped steel bottle would be quite safe, but since hydrogen is so very light, any and all flame would just go straight up. All the combustable gass would burn in a second or less.
Does anyone know how easy it is to run a carberated car off Hydrogen? Remove the carborator, insert metered hydrogen pipe, start engine. Because the fuel is not carbon-based, you don't even have to change your oil for litterally years (add some additives maybe...). The emissions are clean water, and it develops nearly the same ammount of power as regular Gasoline does. They only down sides are getting hydrogen in quantity, and the price (equivalent of about $3/gal).
"Power out of Thin Air." And, um, also hydrogen. These fuel cells are neat, but Coleman (according to the website) maintains that they're only meant for industrial applications at the present. Looking at the hydrogen canisters they currently have available, they are industrial-size jobs, several feet tall, filled with H2 gas at 2000 psi, and can provide hours of power. These types of cylinders are pretty dangerous no matter what is stored in them. I work at my university's physics department helium/nitrogen facility, and I'd consider the pressurized helium gas cylinders at room temp to be far more dangerous than the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium we also vend, because a damaged 2000 psi gas cylinder is essentially a 150 lb. steel missile. Still, if properly handled and stored, they aren't too much of a worry. The types of customers who would use the AirGen in its current state are the types who probably have some high-pressure cylinders of various gases in use at the worksite anyway- the hydrogen cylinders are certainly no more dangerous than the oxygen canisters used all the time in oxyacetylene welding.
What seems to be lost in all of the bickering over the explosiveness of hydrogen is the recognition of the real potential breakthrough of this product- the AirGen canister, the one that stores hydrogen as metal hydride. If it is as good as it sounds, it's a major step towards solving the fuel storage problems that have held fuel cells back for so long. Unfortunately, they don't give much in the way of specs- I'd be very interested to know how much uptime that 15 lb. canister produces in comparison to the pressurized cylinders, and what the uptime/price ratio is. (It generally costs about 20-30 bucks to fill one of the large hydrogen cylinders, which suggests that it'd only cost about 2-3 dollars an hour to provide clean emergency power. I can see why people are interested.) I'd also like to know more about the metal hydride it uses- lithium, or is it something else, like nickel or palladium? Storing hydrogen as a metal hydride is a good way to make it a lot safer and more convenient, but most metal hydrides are still extraordinarily reactive- I can remember all the reactions from organic chemistry that used lithium aluminum hydride to carry out heavy-duty reductions. Eschewing the huge steel cylinder/bomb to provide hydrogen fuel is a great idea, but I'd rather not have to keep a Type D fire extinguisher handy near my computer. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that specs are minimal because the AirGen canister is not quite ready for prime time- which is a familiar story for fuel cells.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Somebody explain to me how a $6K fuel-cell backup power system is better than...oh, I dunno....three $250 APC's hooked up in series?
I know this is a tangent, but it's sort of interesting, and I just can't keep my mouth shut. You're not supposed to plug a UPS into another UPS (at least the consumer models). A friend at work found this out the hard way. He ran a UPS off of another similar UPS, and one of them (not sure which) overheated to the point that it melted.
Of course, for every story like this, there's a counterexample where somebody gets away with it, and I'm sure someone here will post such a story :) In any case, my friend was officially told by tech support that he had done a bad thing, and they refused to ship a replacement unit.
65 dba (a bit louder than a normal conversation) doesn't seem like a "pretty decent" spec to me. My UPS is a heck of a lot quieter seeing as I can't even hear it.