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Fuel Cell Powered Scooter
!Freeky2BGeeky writes "In an article by Fuel Cell Works, Samsung Engineering announced that they've developed a Hydrogen-based scooter which can go 140Km on 6 liters of hydrogen. The downside? The process that produces the hydrogen uses a component in short supply."
The primary feat of this machine is the way the hydrogen is stored on board. For that they use sodium borohydride, which is in short supply.
Text:
Samsung Engineering Develops Hydrogen Scooter
Publication Date:18-November-2004
Source:Asia Pulse
SEOUL- Samsung Engineering Co. (KSE:028050) said Thursday it has conducted a successful test-ride of a hydrogen-powered motorcycle.
The scooter, the result of a project sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, can run up to 140 kilometers on 6 liters of hydrogen fuel, it said.
The newly-developed technology uses a water-based solution of sodium borohydride, made from sodium borate, to produce hydrogen gas.
The company explained that on 6 liters of hydrogen fuel, the vehicle can travel three times farther than a scooter powered by a nickel-cadmium cell, saying that the technology can also be applied in automobiles, laptop computers and mobile phones.
The downside is that there are only about 300 million tons of sodium borate worldwide, located mostly in Tibet, and that annual global production of sodium borohydride stands at 10,000 tons, it added.
"The development and testing of the hydrogen-powered scooter shows that South Korea's technology is on a par with that of the world," said Yu Yong-ho, president of Samsung Engineering's R&D center.
The Shell station by my house already sells hydrogen at the pumps.
e at ure_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000717936
http://www.csnews.com/csnews/reports_analysis/f
Where do I order one of these again?
Bicycles are the most beautiful machines on the face of the earth. Ride one today!
Yes
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
I'm not a chemistry buff, but this lecture from a Perdue chemistry prof describes the discovery of sodium borohydride, the compound used to generate hydrogen for this thing.
Just for clarification. Quote: The newly-developed technology uses a water-based solution of sodium borohydride, made from sodium borate, to produce hydrogen gas.
That means they put the hydrogen "into" sodium borate, creating sodium borohydride. A catalytic reaction on board the vehicle then "produces" the hydrogen. Stanford has a nice PDF on using sodium borohydride for hydrogen storage.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
From my organic chemistry lectures I remember that acetylene (more properly "ethyne") is unstable. Kick it (or make an accident with a car running on it) strong enough, and it will dissociate into gaseous hydrogen (whose pressure will probably breach any tank), and carbon, liberating a whopping 211 kJ/mol in Gibbs free energy; hydrogen combustion with oxygen, as a comparison, is 237 (and it comes in cascade with the previous).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The question is not that important. Sodium borohydride (NaBH4) is made up of sodium (quite common, as in sodium chloride), hydrogen (common too) and boron is fairly common too, according to this link. The fact you don't find steel, carbon fiber or many modern materials in nature does not mean it is a problem. NaBH4 is supposed to be a carrier of energy, not a source: it is converted to sodium borate during use, and this is later regenerated to sodium borohydride.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"Probably the best is to electrolyze it from water using electricity provided by solar power or another clean means of power"
That method requires allot of power to produce a decent useable amount of hydrogen, plus you have to have a collection system that can bottle the gas under high pressure. That would require an interesting compressor setup.
It looks like the sodium borohydride mixture is onboard the scooter and produces the hydrogen on the spot. The only thing is that sodium borohydride is nasty shit; here is what google pulls up on the first hit: http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s3146.htm
I like the warning: DANGER! CORROSIVE. CAUSES BURNS TO ANY AREA OF CONTACT. HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED, INHALED OR ABSORBED THROUGH SKIN. FLAMMABLE SOLID. DANGEROUS WHEN WET.
On a whole it sounds cool though.
From what I could gather, the regeneration process involves electrolyzing the molten salts. This is not an easy or convenient process and has tons of problems, but it is doable on an industrial basis.
This chemical, Sodium Borohyrdate, is right up there with Sodium Hydride and Lithium Aluminum Hydride insamuch as it is a tremendously powerfull base. This stuff makes industrial strength liquid Drano look like water, and the only nice thing about the Boron compound is that it "supposedly" requires the presence of a catalyst before it explodes, ostensibly making it much more friendly to use. NaH and LiAlH are extremely dangerous and are used in organic synthesis, for example to turn something like vegetable oil directly into something like octane. Reactions are carried out in an ice water bath and in very small amounts.
In all practicality, this chemical is probably a bit too dangerous for public energy storage and transmission. Consider if your car ran on concentrated Nitric Acid instead of gasoline... its a similar scenario. Calcuim Carbide (produces Acetylene) is probably a lot safer than this stuff IMO.
Just like Hydrazine and Dinitrogen Pentoxide, theoretically they make an awesome medium for energy storage; however, untrained people really shouldn't be allowed in the same building as that stuff.
Clickety Click
Mod or teach the world some chemistry. hmmm teach some chemistry I think.
When it comes to chemicals please please please don't think have a knee jerk reaction and claim that all chemicals are evil and sent by satan himself.
Everything around you is a chemical so to say you are scared of chemicals is pretty stupid. Further more to say a chemical is bad or nasty is pretty silly as you are attributing a bunch of atoms a human personality.
Sodium Borohydride is a faily commonly used chemical and for the most part it is completely safe. There are no really special handling requirements (for lab scale use) although if memory serves it's generally best not to get it wet but even then it's generally only a fairly quck reaction. I'm not saying that you can eat the stuff just correctly managed it's safe.
There are a few really dangerous chemicals such as nerve gasses that require very special treatment and you really don't want to be messing with them but most chemicals are quite inert.
To give you some perspective have a look at the MSDS data for cadmium. You no doubt use NiCad batteries and I think you will be somewaht shocked. Do you have a mercury thermometer. That mercury is dangerous stuff. How about metholated spirit. If it was a toss up between eating 1g of sodium borohydride or drinking 1ml of meths I would probably go with the sodium borohydride and yet you probably splash meths about.
Ok that's enough chemistry for one day.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Electrical Storage:
e s_technologies_pumpedhydro.htm
e s_technologies_flywheels.htm
4 /marine/tech_storage.htm
4 /wind/content/storage%20available.html
Hydrogen conversion is at presenly only 65% efficent versus 85% for a hydro storage system
http://www.electricitystorage.org/tech/technologi
and
http://www.electricitystorage.org/tech/technologi
http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/03-0
http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/focus/004power/
http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/03-0
http://www.geocities.com/dfradella/homepage.htm
Finnish compnay Hydrocell, (their web site is not very informative, unfortunately) has an elecrtic scooter for sale. They sell nickle based fuel cells, and metal-hydide hydrogen tanks, which, they claim, upon agreement, can be refilled almost on any gas station. Fuel cell plus the tank weigh about 20 kilos, and give their scooter a range of about 200 km. They sell the fuel cells separtely as well, at about 1K eur. (same as in the scooter)
Hmm, IIRC the Hindenberg fire wasnt originally related to the hydrogen lift-gas at all, but rather to the aluminium powder coating on the outer hull. The hydrogen fire wasn't good news, but all the burning related to that was up above the ship (heat an hydrogen both rise, y'know). The bad stuff on the ground was mainly falling debris and burning bits of hull.
References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster http://www.clean-air.org/hindenberg.htm
:D > £/$
There are lots of clean methods of creating power for electrolysis, but each have scalability problems. For example, I remember reading a while back that the global electricity load was around 64 Terawatts. To generate that load using alternative energy sources, here are the implications:
-Biomass requires using 85% of the world's arable land to grow crops to burn (not to eat).
-Solar, at current efficiencies requires covering almost all of the world's landmasses with solar panels (so much for growing crops).
-There's not enough suitable land on the planet to generate this much power using Wind turbines.
The list goes on and on. So until we can find more scalable clean energy, we'll just be living with oil, coal, and nuclear. Not pretty, but practical for the short term (which is all most humans care about anyway!).
If cars could eat big macs, it would take about 2.46 to go a mile.
A human on a bicycle is the most efficient means of active transportation in existence, including machines and animals. The only way to get more efficient is to float and let water or air currents take you where they will.
The spent fuel can be re-hydrated. Cost is the question.
It's more efficient to use a fuel cell to turn hydrogen directly into electricity than to burn it.
Man if you covered the dessert in East California with solar panels, it would be bad news. Think about the rattle snakes, spiders cacti that would not be able to survive due to all the shade. The dessert gives up it's heat rapidly now but even faster when only the panels are getting solar heated (yes they get heated by the sun too!). Heck the weather would change. For all I know it might become more cloudy (just a wild guess as another example result).
Wait...a low flashpoint isn't dangerous is it? And worrying about exposure to benzene, toluene, and various additives would just be silly....
We only think of gasoline as 'safe' because we've been handling it for so long. Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess. If you go behind the scenes, there's actually a tremendous amount of effort expended in terms of regulation and engineering that protects us from the hazards (mostly flammability, but also ground contamination) of storing and using gasoline.
~Idarubicin