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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (124075)	9/18/2000 10:35:37 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572313

Dear Daniel: A vaccuum flask of LiH can be built as rugged as a gasoline fuel tank, (IMHO far more rugged), and it could be filled via automated (robotic) fueling centers. Mass to mass, LiH actually has more energy than gasoline (Hydrogen is very light) but, since LiH has less weight per volume, not as much can be stored per unit volume (Kwh per liter). The problem with propane and butane as air conditioner is that a single rock into the condensor in front and BOOM! A LiH flask can be made to take a high impact and because a double wall is absolutely necessary, an loss of vaccuum would result in increased boil off and thus, a pressure relief and burn off system would be required for safety. In normal operation, some of the boil off would be used in a fuel cell to create power for refrigerating the rest stored in the tank. In this fashion, a 25 liters of LiH (equal to 25 to 30 gallons of gasoline with conventional engines) could be kept cold for about a month and most people would use this long before then. The big difference in fuel volumes comes from the fact that fuel cells are between 85 to 95% efficient (Hydrox fuel cells are the best at this) and an ordinary auto engine gets about 5 to 10% (mostly because autos run at very low power relative to max power say 20 HP compared to 120 HP at max torque (usually the most efficient point)). And fuel cells have a very wide high efficiency power band 10 to 20 to 1 versus IC's 1.5 to 2 to 1. And minimum fuel consumption in a fuel cell is about 1% of max power whereas IC engines are about 10%. Given the normal operating parameters of autos, fuel cells will go 10 times as far as IC engines for about 10 times the cost (when gas is cheap, this is hard to justify). The current R&D is to make fuel cells much cheaper so that even with cheap gas, they make economic sense. Pete