Second Fuel Surcharge?

[Doug]

Sorry...I cannot let an undeveloped, uncertain fuel cell go without a debate with the people who have the full knowledge...at least bio-diesel can be replaced/regrown.

[Alex]

harbourlynxkid said:

from the diesel engines. you need to prime the engine anyway. so when the hydrogen system is running, then its all good. and the electrolosys system extracts more energy than it puts into it.

Sorry, but that's actually impossible. It violates the laws of Thermodynamics, because you've effectively created a perpetual motion machine.

In fact, you end up losing energy in the hydrolysis reaction, since it's efficiency is below 100%. Therefore, in the end, all you're doing is using a deisel engine to make electricity (losses there, lots of losses), then using the electricity to make hydrogen (more losses), then using a fuel cell to make electricity again (more losses), and then you're back at the second step, except with less electricity.

I'm afraid that there's no magic solution to gaining energy. The only reason that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles end up being more efficient than internal combustion engines is simply because the hydrogen can be created from a much more efficient source (ie: a big ass power plant runs at a higher efficiency than an internal combustion engine in a car), so therefore there is a greater total efficiency in the entire process, from start to finish.

[Alex]

dougubell said:

How is the hydrogen extracted?

Like I said, hydrogen is generally extracted through hydrolysis in water. In simple terms, you put electricity into the water, and it breaks apart the atom. Therefore you need electricity from somewhere. In BC it works well, in that our electricity is from hydro-electric plants (mostly). In most places in the states or back east even, that electricity would come from a fossil fuel burning plant.

The use of water is probably pretty limited in that respect. The general idea at the moment is that the hydrogen would be created at a central location (because of the effeciency stuff I mentioned in my last post), and you would refuel each fuel cell vehicle from a distribution network, similar to how it's done with gasoline.

Then, the reactants for the fuel cell are simply the hydrogen, and oxygen, which can be extracted from the air (although it may need to be compressed, I forget). And the product is just water.

The main stumbling block for putting it in ships is that the technology would need to be scaled up to that size. That would need an incredible amount of research, and no company seems to be willing to do it because there isn't a huge market for it. Furthermore, I'm not 100% sure if it would scale up to such a large power requirement. There may be unforseen problems when you need the kind of power necessary to push a huge ship through the water.

[Alex]

cascade said:

My Business Partners Son is doing his Master in London on Naval Architecture and is a member of RINA. The things they are working on now is the way water moves over and under the hull and the design of the Propellers.

Yeah, I've been hearing about that lately. Naval Architecture is part of the Thermofluids option of Mechanical Engineering at UBC, so we got some info about that kind of thing last year.

Naval Architects have been attempting to perfect hull design for decades. Unfortunately, the math surrounding the hull forms and fluid flow are insanely complicated.