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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'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...
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.
"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