Wippies in Finland (http://www.wippies.com/) is doing a similar thing. They give a free WiFi box (among other things) to users who operate an access point and share their broadband connection with other Wippies members.
Fuel cell cars usually have some buffer batteries to shave the peak demand on the fuel cell stacks. I would guess that this car is no different - The motor draws juice from both the fuel cells and the batteries.
The press release, which is phenomenally uninformative, fails to mention that the researches are most probably talking about solid oxide fuel cells. SOFCs use yttria stabilized zirconia as their electrolyte, and it conducts oxygen ions only at a high temperature, 800 to 1000 C. That kind of temperature sets severe limits on fuel cell materials, and therefore researcher strive to drive down the operating temperature of SOFCs. Few hundred degrees down and the range of suitable materials grows much larger.
At the moment, the most common fuel cell type in vehicle applications is the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell, which operates usually at ca. 80 C. The scientists are trying to develop PEMFCs that would operate at an elevated temperature, ca. 140 to 160 C. There are three main reasons: Higher carbon monoxide tolerance of the Pt catalyst, easier water management (no liquid water) and easier heat management.
Carbon monoxide is present at least in trace amounts in most fuel feed made by reforming hydrocarbons. Elevating the operating temperature to 160 C increases the CO tolerance from some ppm to few per cent. Conventional PEMFCs need liquid water to remain operational, but excess water obstructs reactant transfer and decreases performance. If liquid water is present in the cell, good water management is both paramount to high performance and pretty tricky.
An average fuel cell power source in a passenger car will probably have an electric power of 30-70 kW, and produce the same amount of power in heat. If the fuel cell stack operates at 80 C and you are driving in, say Death Valley, ambient temperature 45 C, you'd need a radiator size of a refridgerator to expulse that amount of heat. Operating the fuel cell stack at 160 C would alleviate that problem in a notable way.
A friend of mine built this to get into christmas spirit.
A quick summary for those few who don't read Finnish: It's not a neon tube, but a electroluminescent element they use for pimping out computer cases. The picture was taken in a dark room with a Canon Ixus 500, 1 s exposure and ISO 50 sensitivity.
What I was trying to say was that with the same energy stored in the fuel, a fuel cell electric vehicle travels maybe two-three times farther due to superior efficiency.
The efficiency of Otto (gasoline) engines is between 20 and 30 per cent at maximum power, and drops to ~10% on partial load. If you take a look at the average drive cycle, you can see that a vehicle engine is seldom operated at full power.
On the other hand, a hydrogen fuel cell system can reach an overall efficiency of 50 %, without any losses at partial load. Actually, the efficiency of a fuel cell improves when you move down from the maximum power point.
The downside of hydrogen fueled vehicles all derive from the properties of hydrogen. Low density makes efficient storage difficult, and hydrogen is more expensive to produce than gasoline. The cheapest way is to reform natural gas, but that method produces carbon dioxide emissions. Environmentally thinking, the cleanest method is electrolysis of water, but that consumes a lot of electricity, and that electricity should come from renewable sources. There are also other ways to produce hydrogen, but they are in their infancy.
Using a liquid fuel would solve the storage problem easily, but at the moment direct methanol/ethanol fuel cells are not ready for commercialization. Reforming methanol on-board was considered for some time, but building a small, reliable and cheap reformed has turned out to be very difficult.
That 10 liters per 100 km (23.5 MPG) is gasoline talk. US DOE wants to store hydrogen into a 50 liter (13.2 gal) tank and be able to drive 500 km (310.7 mi). What makes that challenging is the low density of hydrogen, only about 89 g/m3 (0.089 oz/ft3). High pressure tanks are either very heavy or very expensive, and chemical storage solutions always include reforming equipment or other processing steps to get hydrogen out.
Therefore, we should look at the energy content of the hydrogen stored into that 50 liter tank. With what Amminex claims, they can reach an energy content of 486 MJ (461 kBTU), versus 2150 MJ (2.0 MBTU) of 50 liters of gasoline. 486 MJ equals to 11.3 liters (3.0 gal) of gasoline equivalent. That makes 2.3 liters per 100 km (104.1 MPG!)
How is that possible? Fuel cells, electrical engines and braking energy harvesting. Fuel cells are electrochemical energy conversion devices that are free from the Carnot engine efficiency limitations, and furthermore, their efficiency increases on partial load. Operating a heat engine on partial load is detrimental to efficiency.
the article lists the size of 120 watt panel as 14 feet by 10 feet
Actually, TFA says: "Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."
Better take that article with a grain of salt size of Uluru.
120 W per square inch is about 186 kW per square meter. This is pretty high, considering the solar constant is 1367 watts per square meter. Maybe the guys at Nanosolar illuminated their panel with one of these instead of plain old sunlight.
Even if N.N. Sachitanand confused square inches with square feet, that would still be almost 1.3 kW/m^2.
For car usage, you also have to deal with the efficiency of the engine or fuel cell you're using. Either way you're limited to the Carnot efficiencies of the temperature differences utilizied. 50% efficiency may be an optimistic figure.
This is exactly the point with fuel cells - They are not limited by the Carnot efficiency. Fuel cells are not thermal power devices; the process is electrochemical. That 50% figure is about right for overall total system efficiency for a fuel cell vehicle. That's about double the efficiency of a gasoline or diesel powered internal combustion engine vehicle.
The Finnish copyright law allows making personal copies of published works. Computer programs are an exception, covered by a later addition to the law. This makes downloading movies and music legal, since it is considered equal to copying library CDs or taping radio broadcasts.
However, providing copies of copyrighted works is generally prohibited without permission from the owner of copyright. This makes sharing music and movies illegal. It it admitted that using BitTorrent to download material is in the gray zone, since you are (most probably) also uploading material at the same time. As far as I know, no court has taken a stand concerning BitTorrent downloads, but I guess we'll have one soon.
Explosions are not a real hazard. Methanol is a liquid and the container is not pressurized. Making lightweight liquid-proof containers is not extremely challenging and furthermore, the amount of methanol can't be very large in a device that small. The worst-case scenario I can think of is that you might be able to break the methanol container and start a small fire.
Yes, reversible fuel cells have not been left without attention, but there are some problems, both electrochemical and mechanical. First, the catalyst used for the cell can't be carbon supported platinum, which is the best for hydrogen fuel cells, since electrolysis happens in a potential region(*) where carbon is oxidized. Therefore, a non-carbon supported catalyst or a non-supported catalyst is needed and the search is still on.
Second, storing the hydrogen might be a problem. Pressurized container are bulky and require additional components, e.g. compressors, and chemical storage systems, for example metal hydride containers are heavy and expensive.
For most uses, there is no need to store oxygen. There's enough oxygen in air, and air is readily available in most use environments.
* Yes, you can split water at a potential, which is under the oxidation potential of carbon, but reaction kinetics at that potential are not favorable, i.e. too slow. Therefore, practical electrolysis requires a higher potential.
So much for trusting Maxtor support.:) As you said, in my case it made no difference whether the play-nice limit was 32 or 128 GB. Anyway, thanks for setting me straight on this.
BTW, I looked up that 48-bit LBA batch, and it seems to be a part of SP3. No need to worry about that, then - SP3 was installed long before I got my external drive.
That is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Something very similar happened to me when I bought an external hard drive for my laptop. The drive was pre-partitioned and formatted as one 160 GB FAT32-drive. Stupid me, but didn't know at that time that W2k can't play nice with FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB.
Everything worked fine for some weeks, until one day I booted up W2k to play some BGII and noticed that the external drive was missing from the Explorer view. The drive was so messed up that I couldn't even re-format it.
I bought a drive recovery program and was able to save most of the data I had on the drive. Fortunately I didn't lose any important stuff, since I used that drive to store music and movies. Still, paying $75 for recovery software sounded a far better idea than re-ripping most of my CD collection.
The funny thing is that the manual of the drive doesn't give any reasons why partitions larger than 32 GB are a bad idea with FAT32. It just recommends using NTFS for large partitions.
I also consider the battery life. I don't have use for a music collection n^y (y big) times larger than the available play time. I usually recharge my player in a place where I can transfer new tracks onto my player, ie. at home or at work. For my purposes 4 GB has been enough, but I admit I don't haul backups or other data on my mp3 player.
I have lived most of my life in Scandinavia and used online banking with one-time passwords since 1994, but I moved to the States about a year ago. Honestly, I was scared when I learned that my local bank uses a permanent username-password combination for online access - transfers, loan applications and everything! One-time passwords shouldn't be too difficult, since even the smallest Scandinavian banks have been using them for years.
If we stop being pedantic Tolkien-readers for a while and consider Jackson's omissions, changes and additions as such, has anyone found anything positive about these changes? Has anyone liked the scenes Jackson added to the story? Which of these scenes would you definitely want to see removed from the extended DVD version?
I know in DoD these are taken seriously. In other departments? I think things are more slack at the Dept of Agriculture, for instance.:-)
Also Department of Energy takes things seriously, at least the National Nuclear Security Administration part of it. As HBI said, there are clear standards for "unclassified sensitive" systems.
You're right, fuel cells won't replace oil. Fuel cells are energy conversion devices, and crude oil is a primary energy source. Saying that is like saying 'Internal combustion engines will replace uranium.'
However, hydrogen may eventually replace gasoline, which is an energy carrier. Just like hydrogen, gasoline has to be manifactured from a raw material. The cool thing with hydrogen and fuel cells is high efficiency. A fuel cell car will get double the mileage per energy content of the fuel, compared to an internal combustion engine car.
It is true that producing hydrogen from eg. natural gas is not emission free, but due to better efficiency of fuel cells the total emissions are smaller than when burning the fuel in the conventional way.
--
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. - Dalai Lama
Slashdot Mirror
Wippies in Finland (http://www.wippies.com/) is doing a similar thing. They give a free WiFi box (among other things) to users who operate an access point and share their broadband connection with other Wippies members.
Fuel cell cars usually have some buffer batteries to shave the peak demand on the fuel cell stacks. I would guess that this car is no different - The motor draws juice from both the fuel cells and the batteries.
The press release, which is phenomenally uninformative, fails to mention that the researches are most probably talking about solid oxide fuel cells. SOFCs use yttria stabilized zirconia as their electrolyte, and it conducts oxygen ions only at a high temperature, 800 to 1000 C. That kind of temperature sets severe limits on fuel cell materials, and therefore researcher strive to drive down the operating temperature of SOFCs. Few hundred degrees down and the range of suitable materials grows much larger.
At the moment, the most common fuel cell type in vehicle applications is the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell, which operates usually at ca. 80 C. The scientists are trying to develop PEMFCs that would operate at an elevated temperature, ca. 140 to 160 C. There are three main reasons: Higher carbon monoxide tolerance of the Pt catalyst, easier water management (no liquid water) and easier heat management.
Carbon monoxide is present at least in trace amounts in most fuel feed made by reforming hydrocarbons. Elevating the operating temperature to 160 C increases the CO tolerance from some ppm to few per cent. Conventional PEMFCs need liquid water to remain operational, but excess water obstructs reactant transfer and decreases performance. If liquid water is present in the cell, good water management is both paramount to high performance and pretty tricky.
An average fuel cell power source in a passenger car will probably have an electric power of 30-70 kW, and produce the same amount of power in heat. If the fuel cell stack operates at 80 C and you are driving in, say Death Valley, ambient temperature 45 C, you'd need a radiator size of a refridgerator to expulse that amount of heat. Operating the fuel cell stack at 160 C would alleviate that problem in a notable way.
Santa doesn't live on any pole, silly. Santa lives in Finland. :)
A friend of mine built this to get into christmas spirit.
A quick summary for those few who don't read Finnish: It's not a neon tube, but a electroluminescent element they use for pimping out computer cases. The picture was taken in a dark room with a Canon Ixus 500, 1 s exposure and ISO 50 sensitivity.
Just a minor correction to the linked article: Mika Sillanpää worked at the Helsinki University of Technology, not at the Helsinki University when he wrote the paper in question.
What I was trying to say was that with the same energy stored in the fuel, a fuel cell electric vehicle travels maybe two-three times farther due to superior efficiency.
The efficiency of Otto (gasoline) engines is between 20 and 30 per cent at maximum power, and drops to ~10% on partial load. If you take a look at the average drive cycle, you can see that a vehicle engine is seldom operated at full power.
On the other hand, a hydrogen fuel cell system can reach an overall efficiency of 50 %, without any losses at partial load. Actually, the efficiency of a fuel cell improves when you move down from the maximum power point.
The downside of hydrogen fueled vehicles all derive from the properties of hydrogen. Low density makes efficient storage difficult, and hydrogen is more expensive to produce than gasoline. The cheapest way is to reform natural gas, but that method produces carbon dioxide emissions. Environmentally thinking, the cleanest method is electrolysis of water, but that consumes a lot of electricity, and that electricity should come from renewable sources. There are also other ways to produce hydrogen, but they are in their infancy.
Using a liquid fuel would solve the storage problem easily, but at the moment direct methanol/ethanol fuel cells are not ready for commercialization. Reforming methanol on-board was considered for some time, but building a small, reliable and cheap reformed has turned out to be very difficult.
That 10 liters per 100 km (23.5 MPG) is gasoline talk. US DOE wants to store hydrogen into a 50 liter (13.2 gal) tank and be able to drive 500 km (310.7 mi). What makes that challenging is the low density of hydrogen, only about 89 g/m3 (0.089 oz/ft3). High pressure tanks are either very heavy or very expensive, and chemical storage solutions always include reforming equipment or other processing steps to get hydrogen out.
Therefore, we should look at the energy content of the hydrogen stored into that 50 liter tank. With what Amminex claims, they can reach an energy content of 486 MJ (461 kBTU), versus 2150 MJ (2.0 MBTU) of 50 liters of gasoline. 486 MJ equals to 11.3 liters (3.0 gal) of gasoline equivalent. That makes 2.3 liters per 100 km (104.1 MPG!)
How is that possible? Fuel cells, electrical engines and braking energy harvesting. Fuel cells are electrochemical energy conversion devices that are free from the Carnot engine efficiency limitations, and furthermore, their efficiency increases on partial load. Operating a heat engine on partial load is detrimental to efficiency.
Star Wreck series must be among the best movies ever come out of Finland. These guys have really worked hard on the latest. My hat is off to them.
Master of Teras Kasi? Any relation to Teräs Käsi? ("hand of steel" in Finnish) ä = ä
Actually, TFA says: "Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."
Better take that article with a grain of salt size of Uluru. 120 W per square inch is about 186 kW per square meter. This is pretty high, considering the solar constant is 1367 watts per square meter. Maybe the guys at Nanosolar illuminated their panel with one of these instead of plain old sunlight.
Even if N.N. Sachitanand confused square inches with square feet, that would still be almost 1.3 kW/m^2.
The Finnish copyright law allows making personal copies of published works. Computer programs are an exception, covered by a later addition to the law. This makes downloading movies and music legal, since it is considered equal to copying library CDs or taping radio broadcasts.
However, providing copies of copyrighted works is generally prohibited without permission from the owner of copyright. This makes sharing music and movies illegal. It it admitted that using BitTorrent to download material is in the gray zone, since you are (most probably) also uploading material at the same time. As far as I know, no court has taken a stand concerning BitTorrent downloads, but I guess we'll have one soon.
Explosions are not a real hazard. Methanol is a liquid and the container is not pressurized. Making lightweight liquid-proof containers is not extremely challenging and furthermore, the amount of methanol can't be very large in a device that small. The worst-case scenario I can think of is that you might be able to break the methanol container and start a small fire.
Yes, reversible fuel cells have not been left without attention, but there are some problems, both electrochemical and mechanical. First, the catalyst used for the cell can't be carbon supported platinum, which is the best for hydrogen fuel cells, since electrolysis happens in a potential region(*) where carbon is oxidized. Therefore, a non-carbon supported catalyst or a non-supported catalyst is needed and the search is still on.
Second, storing the hydrogen might be a problem. Pressurized container are bulky and require additional components, e.g. compressors, and chemical storage systems, for example metal hydride containers are heavy and expensive.
For most uses, there is no need to store oxygen. There's enough oxygen in air, and air is readily available in most use environments.
* Yes, you can split water at a potential, which is under the oxidation potential of carbon, but reaction kinetics at that potential are not favorable, i.e. too slow. Therefore, practical electrolysis requires a higher potential.
So much for trusting Maxtor support. :) As you said, in my case it made no difference whether the play-nice limit was 32 or 128 GB. Anyway, thanks for setting me straight on this.
BTW, I looked up that 48-bit LBA batch, and it seems to be a part of SP3. No need to worry about that, then - SP3 was installed long before I got my external drive.
That is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Something very similar happened to me when I bought an external hard drive for my laptop. The drive was pre-partitioned and formatted as one 160 GB FAT32-drive. Stupid me, but didn't know at that time that W2k can't play nice with FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB.
Everything worked fine for some weeks, until one day I booted up W2k to play some BGII and noticed that the external drive was missing from the Explorer view. The drive was so messed up that I couldn't even re-format it.
I bought a drive recovery program and was able to save most of the data I had on the drive. Fortunately I didn't lose any important stuff, since I used that drive to store music and movies. Still, paying $75 for recovery software sounded a far better idea than re-ripping most of my CD collection.
The funny thing is that the manual of the drive doesn't give any reasons why partitions larger than 32 GB are a bad idea with FAT32. It just recommends using NTFS for large partitions.
I also consider the battery life. I don't have use for a music collection n^y (y big) times larger than the available play time. I usually recharge my player in a place where I can transfer new tracks onto my player, ie. at home or at work. For my purposes 4 GB has been enough, but I admit I don't haul backups or other data on my mp3 player.
I have lived most of my life in Scandinavia and used online banking with one-time passwords since 1994, but I moved to the States about a year ago. Honestly, I was scared when I learned that my local bank uses a permanent username-password combination for online access - transfers, loan applications and everything! One-time passwords shouldn't be too difficult, since even the smallest Scandinavian banks have been using them for years.
I've never heard of "The Snorks", but I find the name "Orkut" quite funny. It is the plural of "orgasm" in Finnish.
If we stop being pedantic Tolkien-readers for a while and consider Jackson's omissions, changes and additions as such, has anyone found anything positive about these changes? Has anyone liked the scenes Jackson added to the story? Which of these scenes would you definitely want to see removed from the extended DVD version?
They should have named it Buyukkokten! :(
Why on earth? "Orkut" is hilarious enough. It's the plural of "orgasm" in Finnish!
But its the damn Gulf stream in the Atlantic that keeps (at least) southern Finland relatively warm, considering the geographic location...
I know in DoD these are taken seriously. In other departments? I think things are more slack at the Dept of Agriculture, for instance. :-)
Also Department of Energy takes things seriously, at least the National Nuclear Security Administration part of it. As HBI said, there are clear standards for "unclassified sensitive" systems.
You're right, fuel cells won't replace oil. Fuel cells are energy conversion devices, and crude oil is a primary energy source. Saying that is like saying 'Internal combustion engines will replace uranium.'
However, hydrogen may eventually replace gasoline, which is an energy carrier. Just like hydrogen, gasoline has to be manifactured from a raw material. The cool thing with hydrogen and fuel cells is high efficiency. A fuel cell car will get double the mileage per energy content of the fuel, compared to an internal combustion engine car.
It is true that producing hydrogen from eg. natural gas is not emission free, but due to better efficiency of fuel cells the total emissions are smaller than when burning the fuel in the conventional way.
--
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. - Dalai Lama