H2Go Power Seeks To Power Drones With Hydrogen (bbc.com) 65
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames. But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely.
Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tire. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression. "The pressure involved is similar to what you'd get in a coffee machine," she says. The university paired her with materials scientist, Luke Sperrin, to try to find commercial applications for the innovation -- and H2Go Power was born. The company partnered with Canadian hydrogen fuel cell maker Ballard to create a drone which used their reactor to safely store hydrogen for flight. The aluminum reactor weighs less than a bag of sugar and features a small gas cylinder with an intricate network of 3D-printed aluminum tubes inside.
"The hydrogen remains stable and solid in these structures until 'coolant' is pumped through the tubes, warming them and releasing hydrogen gas to the drone's fuel cell," reports the BBC. "Hydrogen (H2) is pumped into one side of the fuel cell through a catalyst which frees electrons, creating electricity. Oxygen (O) is then pumped into the other side of the fuel cell and combines with the left over, positively-charged hydrogen atoms (H+). The only final waste product is water vapor (H2O)."
Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tire. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression. "The pressure involved is similar to what you'd get in a coffee machine," she says. The university paired her with materials scientist, Luke Sperrin, to try to find commercial applications for the innovation -- and H2Go Power was born. The company partnered with Canadian hydrogen fuel cell maker Ballard to create a drone which used their reactor to safely store hydrogen for flight. The aluminum reactor weighs less than a bag of sugar and features a small gas cylinder with an intricate network of 3D-printed aluminum tubes inside.
"The hydrogen remains stable and solid in these structures until 'coolant' is pumped through the tubes, warming them and releasing hydrogen gas to the drone's fuel cell," reports the BBC. "Hydrogen (H2) is pumped into one side of the fuel cell through a catalyst which frees electrons, creating electricity. Oxygen (O) is then pumped into the other side of the fuel cell and combines with the left over, positively-charged hydrogen atoms (H+). The only final waste product is water vapor (H2O)."
Knight Rider (Score:2)
That's sounds damn familiar to how the fuel system for KIT in the TV show Knight Rider worked. Solid-stored hydrogen.
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VERY dangerous: Huge numbers of un-tracked drones. (Score:2)
Boeing lost 2 huge aircraft recently. That was due to insufficient management. Think how un-monitored and poorly managed drones would be.
Even worse: Low-flying personnel drones! (Score:2)
The ones that move around by the millons through our cities, and are controlled by every idiot out there.
The ones with the weels, I mean.
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Actually not that dangerous... The Toyota fuel cell car carries 5 kilos of hydrogen at 10,000 PSI. SCUBA come in two versions low and high. Low is 2200 PSI and high is 3000 PSI. The most common in vehicle storage tanks are 5000 PSI.
Complexly information free (Score:5, Insightful)
I therefore call bullshit. When you see the hype, and 100% of it is all about long known stuff like "how fuel cells work" and "how wonderful it would be to have cheap, clean, safe energy storage" but zero about how they are going to do these long sought goals, and are "applying for a patent" but haven't gotten one yet -
Well, that pretty much mirrors every alt-energy scam ever, and I've seen quite a few, having lived off grid on alt-energy since around 1979.
Not even a word about how many watt-hours they were able to lift with that drone...or what the net efficiency would be - even in dreamland - for "charging" this. That's one way to stay out of court for lying - just don't say anything. And people still fall for that!
Not "alt-energy", but what I call pseudo-innovatio (Score:2)
From Slack to Uber to WeWork to the iPhone to the Juicero [youtu.be]
Stuff that is a redressing of existing innovation, in a completely misguided way, with the only "features" that are new being useless crap that is the mark of how it is misguided, in order to treat it as new and innovative, even in the case it isn't just a flash in the pan or vaporware.
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Re:Complexly information free (Score:4, Interesting)
It does look a bit strange. The CEO appears to have spent a lot of time researching the use of metal lattice structures to store hydrogen, but they barely mention this at all in the press release so it does not appear to be a key part of the business.
I would not be surprised if what has happened is that they started with the cutting edge hydrogen storage research, went out to a bunch of companies to try to find an application, but in the end it just didn't really work well enough (probably way too expensive and low density vs compressed gas), so they are pivoting towards what appears to be a grid scale fuel-cell storage battery - something that, if the numbers work out compared to what Mr Musk is doing, would certainly have a market.
Where the drone thing comes from I have no idea really. Maybe they still think the metal lattice storage will work out if given enough development funds or something.
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Their website claims 2x power/weight compared to Li-Ion - no information about volume, however.
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It goes to eleven.
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There is a car in Britain made by Riversimple. It carries an 8Kw fuel cell fed by 1.2 kilos of hydrogen at 5000 PSI. The rig is rated to run for 5 hours, yielding 45Kwh. That fuel cell weighs 45 pounds and and is made by a Canadian company named Hydrogenics. The fuel tanks are fiber reinforced plastics.
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As the numbers in your anecdote suggests, the total weight of the fuel cell is a big factor in the stated energy densities, of particular note when the article is talking about drones. I have no doubt the combustion engine for burning kerosene is not a featherweight either, but batteries, despite low energy density, at least have the merit of requiring no other heavy apparatus to supply energy.
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Interesting.
As the numbers in your anecdote suggests, the total weight of the fuel cell is a big factor in the stated energy densities, of particular note when the article is talking about drones. I have no doubt the combustion engine for burning kerosene is not a featherweight either, but batteries, despite low energy density, at least have the merit of requiring no other heavy apparatus to supply energy.
We have had aircraft powered by kerosene for 100 years now. There is no doubt this technology works and it works well enough that flights crossing oceans are routine.
On the other hand any aircraft that are powered by batteries or fuel cells rarely carry passengers. When they do carry passengers then it's for something like 20 minutes at most. On the other hand we are seeing airlines experiment with 20 hour flights with aircraft powered by kerosene. The experimentation is in fact less about the aircraft
Padded but not free of information (Score:1)
Hello blindseer, we meet again.
The patent was granted for the H storage cell - GB2574673A;WO2019239141A1
The priority date is mid-2018.
I guess the news is that they're doing drones. That's a fairly power-intensive application.
If they can scale it up well there should be a lot more applications for it. Pity about the
need to refill with gaseous H_2; I understand it's a problem to handle safely.
That will go off with a bang. (Score:1)
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Perhaps they should look up a bit of history? for eg the Hindenburg disaster
What about Apollo? They used hydrogen and fuel cells.
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What about Apollo? They used hydrogen and fuel cells.
They also used radioactive thermal generators for heat and power. That doesn't mean I'd want that technology on civilian aircraft.
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Re: That will go off with a bang. (Score:2)
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Indeed - some good lessons from the Hindenberg - like don't let the pencil pushers call the shots. If you build a cheaper helium-based airship without the fire-suppressing systems normally found in a hydrogen airship - don't then fill it with cheaper hydrogen lift-gas.
Not sure what that has to do with a fuel cell that stores hydrogen in a solid lattice though.
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Indeed - some good lessons from the Hindenberg - like don't let the pencil pushers call the shots. If you build a cheaper helium-based airship without the fire-suppressing systems normally found in a hydrogen airship - don't then fill it with cheaper hydrogen lift-gas.
Not sure what that has to do with a fuel cell that stores hydrogen in a solid lattice though.
It shows just how cheaply and safely we can already store hydrogen in a large low pressure semi-rigid envelope. This is using 100 year old technology.
Perhaps not safe enough to use as a lift gas for passenger service but safe enough for grid scale energy storage. We can use these low pressure storage systems to store fuel for fuel cells that provide power at times of peak demand, and then refill the tanks at lower demand in the evening with wind, hydro, and nuclear fission power.
Using hydrogen as transpor
Lossy, lossy, hydrogen. (Score:2)
It's all fun and games until you realize that there is no vessel that can hold hydrogen for long times, and it all diffuses out and gets lost to space via the uppermost athmosphere forever.
Why not just regular air fuel, synthetically made by sequestering CO2, and "burned" in fuel cells so the end products are clean and can be recycled again?
Re: Lossy, lossy, hydrogen. (Score:2)
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Actually it sounds like they're using some kind of capillary effect to liquify it. Maybe?
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The use of metal hydrides as a method of storing hydrogen is nothing new but it is not without its problems -- namely that the hydrides must be heated to release the H2 and although the overall efficiency isn't that bad, the energy density is pretty poor when compared to cryo-storage.
The problem is that as a liquid, H2 is a pretty good fuel in terms of volumetric and mass based energy density but as a gas, its volumetric energy density sucks!. All those claiming that there's more energy in a Kg of H2 than
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It's almost surely storage via chemical bonding in a compound. Could be as simple as the already-patented use of Al (with Gallium alloy to break up the oxide coating) to split water. Which is horribly inefficient as a cycle. Not to mention inconvenient.
If they have anything at all. They suspiciously avoid making any falsifiable claims. That alone tells you something, since almost everyone publishing anything on the topic in the "press release science" at phys.org claims the sky - and then is never hear
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https://patents.justia.com/pat... [justia.com]
Yep, it's not fucking mechanically rechargeable with plain hydrogen and the chemical used for storage is inefficient to create. What a fucking waste of time, what a disingenuous mess. Either she's naive and so in love with an impractical idea that she can't see it's shit, or she's intentionally selling a way overly complex method of using metal hydrides and relying on that complexity, being a minority and a woman to get money and not get called on the emperor having no cloth
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Round trip efficiency problems.
Hydrogen generation has relatively high efficiency, hydrogen fuel cells have relatively high efficiencies ... and even then round trip efficiency is kinda sad. Once you start using less efficient generation and less efficient fuel cells it becomes kinda pathetic instead. For using legacy machinery and for very high capacity energy storage (airplanes) electricity to liquids might make sense at some point, but for most applications we need something far better.
Or fuel cell powered derigible (Score:2)
A problem with a potential hydrogen economy. (Score:5, Insightful)
While it is the most common element in the universe - hydrogen is extremely rare in our atmosphere - because it escapes into space by floating to the top and being subject to solar winds.
Make hydrogen into a major growing aspect of our economy, and it WILL escape over time proportional to that.
The problem with that is that unless we're using something other than water to do that, then, well, we're losing water from the water cycle every time we do that. That's essentially how Mars died, by a very similar method of losing its water to solar winds.
More than that even - we also free up oxygen with that process. You know the other half of the oxygen cycle, right? Carbon dioxide.
Every option has costs - we have to use resources to live, and entropy is in all directions - but some options can lead to much worse outcomes if we stop caring about the future.
That's why basic research is crucially important, not just marketing and economic research. But again - that requires caring about the future, and that's also something that's been lost with the generations in power for recent decades.
The power of the economy means nothing without a future to expand into. That requires clear vision based on repeatable truths. Runaway destruction only requires ignoring those truths in favor of an illusion of infinite gain - an illusion that robs us as a people of everything.
Ryan Fenton
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There is no shortage of water on Earth. Right now we're in fear of a crisis of excess water and rising ocean levels. Long before any noticeable amount of water-derived hydrogen escapes into space, comet-towing will be a cheap side project in a space economy.
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>>No problem. Go grab a chunk of space ice and bring it back. Getting it down may be an issue, but by the time this becomes a problem we should be able to tow spacebergs easily.
"Solving the problem forever. FOREVER.", no doubt. Was that an intentional Futurama reference?
Add up all the ice we can reach even if we make workable space elevators, and you don't feed the solar winds terribly long. Space rocks made our planet - but we just don't have that abundance any longer.
It's the same logical problem
Re:A problem with a potential hydrogen economy. (Score:4, Informative)
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>>It may "escape proportional to that" but by a low constant factor, as H2 is going to react with oxygen most of the time, and only a sliver of the H2 reaches escape velocity. Currently hydrogen escapes approx 3 kg / s. We'd be adding a negligible amount to that, but let's say 1kg / s. Oceans are 10^21 kg of water...8 trillion years instead of 10.
Are you really making a "it's too big, we'd never have an effect on the environment" argument?
First off - you need more heat than is in the normal atmosphere
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> > er...8 trillion years instead of 10.
> Are you really making a "it's too big, we'd never have an effect on the environment" argument?
Not NEVER, in 8 trillion years, I believe they said.
For someone posting about honestly counting costs and looking at truth, you seem a bit hostile to math here.
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Are you really making a "it's too big, we'd never have an effect on the environment" argument?
Are you really ignoring the numbers? If you can't substantiate, you should retract.
First off - you need more heat than is in the normal atmosphere to react hydrogen to oxygen as it's floating up.
More heat than 1000k in the upper atmosphere? https://www.nature.com/news/20... [nature.com] -- "Being so light, hydrogen rises rapidly through the atmosphere. In the upper reaches, or stratosphere, it reacts with oxygen to form water."
That article claims that the more pertinent concern is ozone disruption, by such water vapour cooling the air -- though they don't specify the mechanism (mixing?).
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While it is the most common element in the universe - hydrogen is extremely rare in our atmosphere - because it escapes into space by floating to the top and being subject to solar winds.
Make hydrogen into a major growing aspect of our economy, and it WILL escape over time proportional to that.
The problem with that is that unless we're using something other than water to do that, then, well, we're losing water from the water cycle every time we do that. That's essentially how Mars died, by a very similar method of losing its water to solar winds.
More than that even - we also free up oxygen with that process. You know the other half of the oxygen cycle, right? Carbon dioxide.
Every option has costs - we have to use resources to live, and entropy is in all directions - but some options can lead to much worse outcomes if we stop caring about the future.
That's why basic research is crucially important, not just marketing and economic research. But again - that requires caring about the future, and that's also something that's been lost with the generations in power for recent decades.
The power of the economy means nothing without a future to expand into. That requires clear vision based on repeatable truths. Runaway destruction only requires ignoring those truths in favor of an illusion of infinite gain - an illusion that robs us as a people of everything.
Ryan Fenton
I think you should either stop smoking weed, or smoke more of it.
Re: A problem with a potential hydrogen economy. (Score:2)
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Yes -and that's in one sense expected - like "carbon neutral" processes like trees growing then burning - it's part of the current calculations of sustainable life on earth.
Start producing and leaking hydrogen using lowest-bidder processes... and it becomes part of an economic game.
You don't generate energy with hydrogen outside fusion - you store it. It's a sort of battery.
We're going to be hungry for batteries over time.
Relying on hydrogen as a battery might mean losses over time - but losses that cost u
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I think you are mixing some unrelated information here
While it is the most common element in the universe - hydrogen is extremely rare in our atmosphere - because it escapes into space by floating to the top and being subject to solar winds.
Free Hydrogen is rare, sure. Some of this blows away but the real problem for free Hydrogen is that it just loves to bond with other elements. We have a lot of Hydrogen on earth simply because it is all bonded to other stuff.
Make hydrogen into a major growing aspect of our economy, and it WILL escape over time proportional to that.
The problem with that is that unless we're using something other than water to do that, then, well, we're losing water from the water cycle every time we do that. That's essentially how Mars died, by a very similar method of losing its water to solar winds.
We are not setting hydrogen free, Hydrogen is the fuel that generally combines with oxygen to give us energy and water. I guess there could be a leak in whatever you are storing the hydrogen in but having enough leaks that we have
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Re:A problem with a potential hydrogen economy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nature already figured out a solution to this. Plants pull CO2 from the atmosphere and H2O from the ground, and use photosynthesis [wikipedia.org] to combine it into C6H12O6 (glucose, which is the building block of sugars, starches, carbohydrates, and wood). When you eat sugar and carbs, or burn wood, you're releasing the energy in that hydrogen, and converting the sugar/carbs/wood back into CO2 and H2O.
That's what people advocating using hydrogen directly as a fuel don't seem to get. Nature has been trying to figure out a way to do that for over a billion years, without success. Hydrogen in its elemental form is too low-density, too ephemeral, too unwieldy to store, manage, and use directly. The solution nature found was to keep it connected to carbon and oxygen to give it a more manageable form of energy storage - sugar, starches, wood. The solution we're currently using is the same - find the hydrogen connected to carbon and oxygen in more manageable forms and use that as fuel - coal, oil, alcohol.
The hydrogen fuel cell folks are starting to see the light. A lot of the newer fuel cell applications don't try to use H2 directly as a fuel. They try to use it in a different form (usually methanol) which stores the hydrogen much more compactly, and is liquid at standard temperature and pressure for easy storage and transport. Why go to the effort to compress hydrogen gas at 10,000 PSI or cool it to -253 C just so you can store it compactly, when you can just attach it to a molecule like alcohol which is already liquid at room temperature?
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We're not running on renewables (Score:2)
the widespread availability of renewable energy and improvements in electrolysis [...] have brought down the financial and environmental cost of producing hydrogen for fuel.
Renewables contribute about 6% of grid electricity. (Excluding ethanol / biodiesel because it's ruinously inefficient in terms of habitat destruction per watt -- that only would bring it up to 8% anyway). Adding more energy-wasting steps like electrolysis to the chain, does not an improvment for the environment make. That's not to say that charging batteries is better, joule for joule. But the article makes it sound like the grid is somehow mostly renewables now, and it's not.
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The biggest problem with renewables right now is the storage of excess energy; making solid hydrogen is storing the energy for later use.
How much energy do you think is lost burning coal and gas? At least 50% by the time it is in your hands. Lots is lost from solar as well.
So guess what happens if there is more demand for renewable energy without the need for traditional storage (some of which is very dirty, i.e. lithium batteries) and cuts down co2 emissions? More will be created.
But anyway it's great that
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The biggest problem with renewables right now is the storage of excess energy; making solid hydrogen is storing the energy for later use.
It's one method. Pumping water into high elevation reservoirs is a whole lot easier and can store vastly more energy. You get up to 87% efficiency with pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
But anyway it's great that you thought of a "reason" why this tech wouldn't work and we should keep going doing what we are doing
Wrong and childish.
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Pumped hydro has high round trip efficiency, hydrogen storage in old gas fields is likely lower cost per energy stored.
Depending on the price of hydrogen->electricity generation and PV, hydrogen storage could become competitive.
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The biggest problem with renewables right now is the storage of excess energy; making solid hydrogen is storing the energy for later use.
Even if we find a better way to store the hydrogen there is still the problem of how inefficient the processes are of producing the hydrogen and converting it to useful energy again.
How much energy do you think is lost burning coal and gas? At least 50% by the time it is in your hands. Lots is lost from solar as well.
Yes, "lots" is lost from solar. As in more than 80%.
Let's look at a more useful metric for determining the viability of an electrical source, energy return on energy invested (EROEI).
Here's a few links to show how different sources compare. No need to read the articles in their entirety, just looking at the charts and graphs s
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The biggest problem with renewables right now is the storage of excess energy; making solid hydrogen is storing the energy for later use.
The biggest problem with renewables is that the capacity installed is way too low still. Storage will become a concern in a few of the most progressive places over the next 5 years. For the rest of the world, conventional sources can easily power through the dark quiet nights over the next decade.
Remember: It is perfectly okay to throw excess renewable energy away, if that is cheaper than storing it.
What about large scale District heating (Score:1)
Currently district heating is usually created by burning coal or similar to create electricity and the excess heat is distributed to heat houses etc.
I have often heard hydrogen usage in small batteries, but could hydrogen be used more efficiently in large facilities that produce electricity and heating to large part of a town? This could be more environment friendly alternative to northern areas where during the winter water/solar/wind power is not very efficient.
A bag of sugar (Score:5, Insightful)
The aluminum reactor weighs less than a bag of sugar
I have a fraction of an ounce bag of sugar that i just put in my tea.
I have a five pound bag of sugar on my kitchen shelf.
I just helped a local baker unload a few 50 pound bags of sugar.
Thought maybe it was just lazy Slashdot editing ignoring real technical information so I read TFA. Nope, that was about the most complete technical statement there.
I didn't know that "a bag of sugar" was a standard unit of weight.
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By "bag of sugar", they mean "kilogramme". In the UK, sugar typically comes in 1kg bags, and these are widely understood as the everyday reference point for what a kilogramme feels like.
BTW, the smaller "bags" that you put in your tea are invariably called sachets, and large ones are generally known as sacks, so it's not as ambiguous as you make out.
I hope that clarifies things.
what could go wrong? (Score:2)
with an hydrogen powered aircraft? Oh, the humanity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And this is exactly why /. is going downhill, much like the Hindenburg.
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Please stop bringing up the Hindeberg as if it were some sort of watershed moment in hydrogen (non)safety. It's not. There was a lot of research done into hydrogen-powered aircraft in the 50s and 60s and they showed that hydrogen is not a significant safety hazard compared to conventional liquid fuel. In fact it's really quite hard to get hydrogen tank to explode unless it's full of hydrogen mixed with pure oxygen near the stochiometric ratio. There were several aircraft developed and flown that were po
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Mod parent up informative....
I'm still not comfortable with 'flying hydrogen' at low altitudes.
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The thing about hydrogen is that when it is ignited, the fireball rises.
That happened in the case of LZ 129; the fireball was well above the passenger compartments.
The skin of the Hindenburg was highly flammable due to the doping used (see the wikipedia article referenced above (Incendiary paint hypothesis), and that was the burning material visible raining down from the airship.
A bag of sugar (Score:3)
This is probably hydrogen stored in Hydride form, which is really nothing new. But you might think they's mention that somewhere,
If I were to make an educated guess, this will probably end up as a kickstarter campaign, in similar fashion to WaterSeer, or EVScope.
The tells are the "So if drones could stay longer in the sky, they can deliver medicine," she says. "Or scan a disaster area and send the information back." This is all set up for a Kickstarter scam, with the light on content semi- breathless reportage, and the help humanity aspect. Helping humanity is good, but so many of these things seem to want to defy physics.
I'll bet Thunderfoot will have a video out on this soon.
This is Metal Hydride, a technology from the 70's (Score:2)
All hydrides work by flowing hydrogen through them hot; the hydrogen becomes bound to the metal lattice as it cools.
It is a safe way to store hydrogen, because it's typically only a few PSI above atmospheric pressure.
But you need to apply heat to dislodge the hydrogen as a gas from the lattice; that appears to be their actual invention, where they circulate hot liquid through tubes to heat the hydride. I assume t