Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Minn Kota - Thrust

["Vikking" <vikking@mindspring.com>]

Wade, good morning, seems that the production of fuel cells for automotive
use ,wich we will be able to adapt for psubs, depends at this moment to the
development of a methanol reformer unit, like an electrolizer if you were
producing H2 from water, to use this methanol fuel as the power behind fuel
cell transformation, they believe the production of energie will be as high
as 70%, some scientist have also find a way to produce hydrogen using a
biological process whith an algae, that looks also very promising.
there is already air independent fuel cell systems for underwater use, which
use electrodes of aluminium as fuel, (al) O2 fuel cell, i believe the
company that manufactures this type of cells is call ALUPOWER they are use
for back up energy .
I will contact my friends at the Technion in haifa to see if they have been
any new developments during the last month.

gabriel
----- Original Message -----
From: Wade Carson <wacarson@interchange.ubc.ca>
To: <personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2000 3:08 AM
Subject: RE: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Minn Kota - Thrust


>
>
> Paul,
>
> You're right, it is Mercedes or some subdivision thereof.  They are called
> Daimler Benz or something like that.  The best way to go with fuel cells
is
> just having a tank of O2 and a tank of H2 and running that directly
through
> the cell with the only byproduct being pure water.  Unfortunately, they
are
> not able to market that because people seem to have an odd fear about
> sitting on top of a large tank of hydrogen.  Go figure.  Anyways, I think
> the idea with the water and the fuel is that the water is first divided
into
> it's component atoms and then passed through the cell.  I may be wrong on
> this but I think if it is possible to find one you might be better off
using
> a pure cell in a sub because you are less likely to run into another sub
and
> blow up the neighborhood.  I've actually heard that the tanks are pretty
> safe but that it's just a mental thing with people.  I think the pure cell
> would be quite a bit smaller and lighter.
> Just as a little tid bit, Ballard was originally funded by the Canadian
> government to develop the fuel cell as an alternative power source for
naval
> submarines.  I think the main benefit was that they run almost silently.
> NavCAD will not calculate optimal hull shapes for you.  You must input a
> resistance based on the hull form characteristics.  It will then calculate
> the powering required to achieve a desired speed or the maximum speed
based
> on a given powering.  It also does a few other neat things like giving a
> propeller efficiency based on the parameters you put in for the propeller
so
> it is possible to get general information on an optimal propeller shape.
> But it doesn't do any fairing for you.  You could mess around with
inputting
> different form coefficients for the hull until you got one with a low
> resistance but still enough internal volume, but you could probably do a
> better job sketching the thing on a napkin.  There are other programs out
> there that will calculate optimal hull shapes but I haven't used them yet.
> For the most part I think they use evil things like computational fluid
> dynamics as I mentioned earlier.  Unless you really like very complicated
> math you probably don't want to go there.  Napkins and windtunnels are
still
> better in my opinion.  There is no reason NavCAD shouldn't work for
> submerged structures.  I would just set the surface interface resistances
to
> zero.  The program doesn't really care what the thing looks like.  It's
> actually not really that complicated, I'm just not that good at explaining
> things in this manner.
>
> Wade
>