Oh, the humanity!
Posted on 04/22/2024 10:32:26 AM PDT by Freedom4US
I’m sitting here re-charging my RV battery bank. Just messing around seeing how this stuff works.
One trend is RV manufacturers now furnish 12 volt DC powered refrigerators. Even the small units pull 10 amps, on hot days I can see 40 amps or so daily would be routine. Using a generator and the installed RV converter, it needs re-charging often, and while the performance is good, it is what it is.
A propane powered refrigerator, on the other hand, will run for a month on a standard 20 pound barbecue tank.
Out in the desert, water looms critical when “boondocking” or camping at remote sites. Remember the Apollo program?
One of the then-new technologies they employed for powering the Command and Service modules were called Fuel Cells. While they have been around for a really long time, they refined them and used them to good effect.
They run on Oxygen and Hydrogen. And produce gobs of electricity. Aren’t both Oxygen and Hydrogen available at Welding supply houses? I guess Hydrogen is “Cryogenic”, is that a show stopper? Can’t fill up a tank like propane?
These fuel cells would be *perfect* for the RV industry. Cabins. Etc. Oh - Did You Know what the byproduct of a hydrogen oxygen fuel cell is?
Pure water. Exactly what is needed at remote sites! What say you engineering Freepers? What happened to fuel cells?
The Laws of Thermodynamics Must be Followed
For further explanation, see “energy vector transition”
later
13 had a defective tank, that had been dropped, and wouldn’t vent, and so they “boiled” it out, considered acceptable. The internal wiring that was exposed to 65 volts was only rated for 28 volts DC. Oops. They were lucky that thing didn’t blow up at any other time, including on the pad. It was a bomb waiting to go off.
None or this has anything to do with the practicality of fuel cells in general. I don’t believe it would pencil out any efficiency”. There isn’t anything “efficient” about trying to keep beer cold in the desert in the first place.
Same thing that happened to flying cars. 🤡
The effluent from fuel cells is dihydrogen monoxide, a dangerous gas that contributes the most to climate change.
Micro Fuel Cells: A Novel Breakthrough in Portable Power
By Smita Shukla
March 31, 2013
Oh, the humanity!
It’s not ‘dead’ at all. At least for where it makes sense - which is Class 8 trucks. The loads they’re required to pull is not well suited for EV solutions on batteries alone. They’re too heavy and limited in range, requiring far too long a recharge cycle.
Hydrogen fuel cells make an interesting technology intersection in this space. Toyota and PACCAR are still working on them (which is public). There’s other, less public, things I’m aware of.
I had a cousin who was an eyewitness to that. He was five years old, living near Lakehurst. His parents thought it might be fun to take the kids to see the Hindenburg land and the rest is history.
https://www.imarineusa.com/Efoy151-000-210.aspx?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhLvv8bXWhQMVfRCtBh00kgpGEAQYASABEgJzVPD_BwE (alcohol, marine rated)
sells RV/boat fuel cells. Off the shelf.
Google is your friend, if you bother to use it.
Exactly. Cars in the hands of sober, law-abiding drivers are dangerous enough.
Government subsidies ended and the business gave up. They just don’t work in any practical sense. The ones I worked on were methanol based. Worked in a lab setting. But too hot, too cold, too anything, they didn’t work. Not sure how the NASA ones worked. But they would have been planned and proved to the gram of fuel.
As for off grid RV... Stick with a trusty old style absorption system. My friend had the Dometic 12v compressor and it had nothing but problems with the control electronics. There’s nothing to break on absorption units other than the occasional clogged orifice.
I’m not going to a DC fridge for the reason you give, but I sure wish someone other than those European pricks Dometic would make a decent one. They quoted me over $1000 for the controller module I’m replacing today, which I finally got for a bit over $200 but had to ask a buddy in the UK to put and re-ship it as the distributor evidently had never heard of international shipping. Pisses me off to be at the mercy of some outfit that owns the market but doesn’t give a damn about service after the sale.
I think the idea is that hydrogen would be for energy storage and transport, not an energy source in itself. In particular it would be a good way to store energy generated during times when people aren’t using much electricity, like at night. You’d use the excess power for hydrolysis and store the resulting hydrogen for use in vehicles with fuel cells. It seems like a good way to match supply with demand, ideally with nuclear as the energy source. IMO the problem would be in the mechanics of handling pressurized hydrogen but I get the impression that it’s a manageable problem.
That’s awesome!
Put together a NASA-sized budget and this will easily be within your reach
There several kinds of “ Fuel Cells” out there. Fuel cell is a generic term. Race cars have a fuel cell that is basically a fuel tank. You can use hydrogen and air to run an internal combustion engine but why? You can use dc electrical current to produce hydrogen and water in a fuel cell. I would use propane as there are propane or 12 volt absorption refrigerators and propane generators.
Fuel cells may have been the cheapest option or even the only viable in space. They aren’t on earth. They couldn’t compete.
No. Simply put, it was an internal short circuit of an oxygen tank, NOT the fuel cell.
You can find the details with a quick search.
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