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Building Longer-Lived Fuel-Cell Stacks
An anonymous reader writes "Ballard Power Systems tells Wired that they have built a hydrogen fuel-cell stack that runs uninterrupted for 20,000 hours straight. But DuPont's Nafion membranes are very delicate, which makes the roadworthiness of fuel cells an issue."
But DuPont's Nafion membranes are very delicate, which makes the roadworthiness of fuel cells an issue."
Delicate now. Future membranes may not be so fragile. It's still a step forward.
Trolling is a art,
The article mentions how getting hydrogen to the fueling stations is a problem. How is that? The fueling station probably has both tap water and electricity coming in, so if the hydrogen is going to be made using electricity in the first place, why don't they just do it at the station instead of hauling it across the country?
They're not dumping all their research into just making them last longer, they're working on everything about them, including stability and cost to produce.
It's a new field and this is just one announcement about a big jump from their last models. They are also more stable and manufacturing costs are coming down. Also, advertising something is more stable makes people think the last model was unstable and there's enough FUD about hydrogen that they don't want to suggest anything like that.
Simply making them available would be a good start. GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale. If fuel cell technologies don't make it into production-run, we won't really know how they'll behave. They might be considered fragile, but a real test could show that for 80% of electric car operators they'll be acceptable. This would lead to figuring out how to make them function for another fifteen to twenty percent, which would be enough for the market to bear.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Fair point, but for what it's worth Nafion isn't an immature technology - it's been the proton-transfer membrane of choice in the fuel cell crowd for some time now. Point is, I wouldn't expect any sort of massive improvement from it alone.
Only possibility I can think of directly is some sort of support matrix, which would lessen the amount of membrane which is Nafion, tanking the current of hte cell.
As it happens, the transfer-membrane is generally the weak point of the cell, both from a chemistry as well as mechanical standpoint, so I don't find this incredibly surprising. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I don't think the free market will fail, it would happen eventually, it would just take a lot longer.
If government steps in and props it up for a bit, it would happen a lot quicker, and I see that as a good thing. This is just one of those cases where government subsidiaries would cause things to happen faster, like building the telephone system (all areas connected, even bf idaho).
I'm all for fuel cells, and I'd love to see them put in every car, but they're just way to expensive for them to catch on soon. It's common knowledge that hydrogen is four times more expensive to make as opposed to gasoline. In addition, the fuel cells themselves are 10 times more expensive to build than a conventional automobile engine. Hopefully we'll see some healthy competition that will drive the cost down, but I predict it will be a while before it's as affordable as conventionally powered vehicles.
And not to mention those oil companies...
transporting large amounts of electric energy is inefficient over long distances. electric production of hydrogen is too slow for a decent sized gas station. you don't want hydrogen, excess oxygen and fossil fuels all available at one station. believe me :) - and of course: nothing beats solar cells in the desert when it comes to produce hydrogen :)
most important: hydrogen will probably not be used in pure form, as it evaporates slowly even through solid steel. some research is going into a more storable form, methanol (or whatever this stuff is called in english, methane+water) - co2+water+electricity --> methanol --> co2+water+electricity. very simple to store while being clean like the original hydrogen-only type.
So, it runs for 20,000 hours.
Let's see... that's 20,000 / 24 = ~833 days
833 / 365 = 2.28 years
So, they've had one up and running uniterrupted since early 2001, huh? I call bullshit.
Water is the easy part -- to make hydrogen from water, you also need to add large amounts of energy. That's the hard part.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Wow, Diesel isn't flammable at all?
Um, the Hindenburg disaster was caused by the fact that Hydrogen and Oxygen undergo an extremely hot chemical reaction when combined in the presence of either a spark, or a nifty catalyst like Platinum.
Gasoline is non-flammable in its liquid state. It's the vapor that burn. You can thrust a lit match into a pool of gasoline and it will go out, providing you can get it through the vapor layer quickly enough. (Note: This is a STUPID teenager trick. I survived. You may not.)
SOME military vehicles use diesel. Others use gasoline. Still others use Kerosene.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
The Hindenberg fire was spectacular, but most of it came from the skin, which was varnished celluloid = one of the most flammable solids known. And approximately half the people on board it survived - which would be regarded as pretty good for an aviation accident resulting in fire and total hull loss for modern aircraft. It would be officially rated "survivable" today.
Hydrogen fuel has its dangers, but they are not necessarily greater than gasoline, just different. For example, gasoline spills and runs along the ground - hydrogen goes straight up. So with hydrogen you are much less likely to be surrounded by a pool of flames. Bacause it is lighter than air, it will dissipate quickly if there is any ventilation at all, making an explosive build up less likely (but not impossible, expecially under a roof. On the other end of the scales, a hydrogen flame is totally invisible, so that there is no indicator where a burning leak is except for when other things are destroyed. Gasoline advertises itself with a cheery glow of incandescent carbon particls on their way from gasoline to CO2.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Why don't they combine Hydrogen with Carbon to make fuel, like nature does?
Hydrogen would come from water and the Carbon from the CO2 of the air, which would be reversed in the car, resulting in a net zero emission, again like nature does.
Dealing with fuel instead of the elemental hydrogen would solve so many problems, including the transport, storage, motors, ozone layer, etc.
"GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale."
First the EV1 was sold as the GM EV1, the first and only car to carry the GM name. The program was a huge failure. GM spent 1 billion dollars on it. They built 1 thousand cars. So think about how much each car cost them, then that they were leasing them for almost normal lease prices. GM lost a crap load of money on it just to come to the same conclusion everyone knew before hand, EV's are a waste.There was never a market for them, the range was only acceptable to a few people.
" Simply making them available would be a good start."
No it would not. When fuel cells come to market if they do which i don't see for the forseeable future (IE a decade) they have to come out and work perfect and be there for everyone. If 1 company comes out before everyone else with them and their cars have proplems or are simply not something people want the whole market is shot. It would be like GM's half ass attempts at bring Diesel cars out in the 70's the cars sucked so bad the market in the US was destroyed from there after. When hybrids started coming everyone new they had to suceed. Thats why their developement took so long. The prius is said to be way over built cause they couldn't chance it breaking. Ford is spending years upon years tuning the Hybrid escape to ensure no problems. Imaging if the Honda insight made it to market first, the image of hybrids would have been ruined. People would think a small impractical ugly car every time someone said hybrid and wouldn't like the idea of hybrids. Worse yet imagine if the insight had problems and needed repair all the time, the market would be destroyed. Thats why automakers when it comes to a big switch make such switches on cars people want, and make sure as heck it aint going to fail. You don't ever see to much new tech introduced on econbox/cheap cars do you. If they did people wouldn't want it becuase it would be seen as crap.
The fuel cell industry can't handle someone trying to just get fuel celled cars to market and hoping to work the bugs out later. If someone does that they will probably fail. As is the fuel cell car industry is seeing their odds for happening twindle, hybrids using IC engines, and or Hyrdrogen powered IC engine cars are looking better and better as the realities of the fuel cell cars come more aparent
who cares if they cost 10 grand a pop?
you can make the cars extreamly cheap to put together, say the materials and process costs 10 grand total, so your fuel cell cars cost 25 grand MSRP.
GM thought that one up and tehy even have a design that will get a fuel cell car to be available at around 18 grand.
attack the traditional design
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Essentially anything with hydrogen or carbon in it
is flammable in a sufficiently oxygen-rich
atmosphere at sufficiently high temperature.
In air, pretty much everything you are wearing
is considerably more flammable than diesel.
You are simply wrong about the Hindenburg.
Hydrogen-oxygen flames are essentially invisible.
Look at photos of the Hindenberg disaster. Those
blinding yellow-orange flames are aluminum oxide
in the paint covering the canvas burning like,
well, an incindiary -- since that's what it is.
Hell, the damn thing was dipped in rocket fuel.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The EPA has been doing research for years on passive Methane harvesting. The holistic approach to living shows that one thing (like cattle farming) can have many byproducts that feed other non-related industries.
Likewise desalination plants may also be a hydrogen yielding technology. Living in the high desert, I like to think that someday soon (the next 50 years) we will be converting many of our oil pipelines to salt-water pipelines running into large desalination plants. Anyone know if there could be synergy here?
It sounds like this might be a good application for a co-generation setup. Simply put, you use not only the electricity created by the generator, but also the waste heat for heating the structure, or domestic hot water, or other uses. In a liquid-cooled engine / generator setup, you can blow air through the radiator of the engine, within a duct, and use the heat from that to help heat the house, for instance.
Getting a bit more exotic (and silly? I dunno...), one could use a Stirling engine to power (something?); needs a hot side and a cold side. Put the "cold" side outside the enclosure, and presto, you have a temperature differential to work with.
Initially, I can see fuel cells as stationary power generation units - get some installed base & learning time in, as they work on making it more portable and physically robust. I'd buy one today if it was anywhere near cost-effective.