Flying High on Hydrogen Power

defensenews.com

Published: 20 April 2009 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Image: Hydrogen and oxygen from a water electorolyzer (tubes on the left) go into hydrogen and oxygen tanks in a model explaining the combination system of sloar cell-fuel cell at the International Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo February 25, 2009. Copyright: Reuters)

Over the past decade, small, hand-launched drones have proven so useful that the U.S. military has bought more than 12,000 of them. Some weigh less than a pound and have wings that span just 2.4 feet. Others weigh 14 pounds and stretch 9 feet from wingtip to wingtip.

Small enough to be carried in a backpack, they can be snapped together in minutes and hurled into the air by a soldier.

Typically, these tiny aircraft carry sophisticated cameras that beam an overhead view of the battlefield back to operators on the ground. Driven by electric motors powered by batteries, they can usually stay aloft for an hour or two.

Now the U.S. military wants small drones with longer dwell times. It’s on the verge of getting them, thanks to hydrogen. Not hydrogen as in Hindenburg; hydrogen as in fuel cells.

Fuel-cell maker Protonex has shown it can fly a 14-pound UAV for nine hours on electricity generated by a hydrogen fuel cell and fuel cartridge that together are just a little bigger than a 2-liter soda bottle.

Now, with a $3.3 million contract from the Defense Department, Protonex plans to make a fuel-cell-and-cartridge combination that’s even smaller and has greater energy density, said Scott Pearson, Protonex chief executive.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a power source that automakers intermittently tout as a replacement for gasoline and imported oil. But there are numerous technical problems, ranging from heavy hydrogen tanks to the absence of a hydrogen infrastructure for supplying autos with fuel.

Protonex has overcome those, at least on the scale required by small, hand-launched UAVs.

The company’s new fuel cell is being designed to power to an AeroVironment Puma AE UAV. The 4.6-foot-long Puma has a 9-foot wingspan and carries electro-optical and infrared cameras for day and night surveillance. The fuel cell powers the cameras, communications gear and flight controls, as well as the electric motor that turns the plane’s propeller.

Protonex has built a variety of fuel cells to power UAVs. They produce 100 watts to 500 watts of continuous power, and use a lithium-ion battery to provide extra power for taking off or maneuvering. Electricity from the fuel cell keeps the battery charged.

Fuel-cell-powered UAVs fly two to four times longer than their battery-powered counterparts, Pearson said.

Extra time in the air is important. It means U.S. troops are able to observe targets for longer periods and view larger areas before their UAVs have to return to refuel, said Lt. Mark Roosz, who works on fuel cell-powered UAVs at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Contrary to how Hollywood often depicts it, ‘bad guys’ don’t conduct hostile activities all the time. By increasing the length of time available to observe a potential target, we increase the chances of catching them performing a hostile act,” Roosz said. “On today’s battlefield, information is key, and by enabling longer missions, we increase the amount of information available to friendly forces,” he said.

The power for these fuel-cell systems comes from hydrogen that is stored in the form of sodium borohydride, a white or grayish powder used in manufacturing pharmaceuticals, among other things.

Hydrogen is released when sodium borohydride is mixed with water and exposed to a catalyst and heat. Essentially, “you just add water, shake and you have an instant high-energy-density fuel ready for use,” Protonex literature says.

A control system built into the cartridge regulates the rate of hydrogen production so that it is generated only as needed by the fuel cell to produce electricity.

Hydrogen from the cartridge is fed into the fuel cell to the anode, which uses a small amount of platinum as a catalyst to divide the hydrogen into protons and electrons.

The resulting stream of electrons is an electrical current. The protons are conducted through a hydrogen proton exchange membrane in the fuel cell to a cathode, where they combine with oxygen from the air to produce water.

The water may be discarded – allowed to drip out of the fuel cell and out of the UAV – or it may be recycled back to the fuel cartridge. Protonex is experimenting with recycling, Pearson said, because it may mean that the power system can work with less water, which would reduce weight and may allow for heavier payloads or longer flight times.

When the hydrogen has been extracted, what’s left in the fuel cartridge is a sodium borate solution – essentially borax, a relatively benign chemical that’s used in a variety of products, from detergents to fire retardants.

The cartridges can be saved for recycling or discarded, Pearson said. Both the fuel and the residue are nontoxic, nonflammable and cost-effective, Protonex says.

A small fuel cell-powered UAV is attractive to the military because it makes small, relatively inexpensive UAVs capable of performing persistent surveillance – something now done only by larger, much more costly drones, said Steven Gitlin, a spokesman for Puma producer AeroVironment.

“It would be particularly useful for perimeter monitoring, and for flying ahead of a [ground] convoy for an extended time,” to spot enemy fighters waiting in ambush or to search for roadside bombs, Gitlin said.

The Puma AE may also be attractive to the Navy. “AE” in the name stands for “all-environment,” and the rugged, waterproof Puma can land at sea. AeroVironment is promoting it for maritime intervention operations, search-and-rescue missions, coastal and port patrols and drug interdiction operations.

Pumas are operated with a 6-by-10-inch hand-held controller that features a 4-by-6-inch screen that displays the UAV’s video feed, and five knobs for directing the UAV and its onboard cameras.

Around the World in a Solar Boat

wired.com

Published April 10, 2009 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Image courtesy: Planetsolar)

 

A seafaring band of scientists, engineers and yachtsmen with an obsession for Jules Verne and clean energy are building what they call the largest solar boat in the world, a $13 million catamaran they hope will take them around the world next year.

Construction is well underway on the 98-foot-long vessel, which will feature 5,059 square feet of photovoltaic cells. The project is being funded by Rivendell Holding AG, a Swiss firm that invests in renewable energy, simply to prove it can be done and the shipping industry can reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.

The team plans to circumnavigate the globe at the equator in 120 days at an average speed of 10 knots. Should they succeed, Planet Solar will set a maritime milestone. Solar electric pleasure boats have been tooling around lakes for awhile now, solar electric ferries are increasingly common and a solar electric catamaran called Sun 21 crossed the Atlantic in 29 days. But so far no one’s made it around the world in a solar electric boat.

“Solar boats are a viable form of transportation for the future,”  Delia Collardi, a spokeswoman for the project, told Wired.com. “Our society is too dependent on fossil fuels, which are in limited supply and which are causing measurable negative effects on the earth’s atmosphere. It’s now time to demonstrate the potential that renewable energies have to offer in the area of mobility.”

The project still has a long way to go – approximately 24,901.55 miles – but work on the solar cat’s hulls is almost complete.

Planet Solar is being built at the Knierim Yacht Club in Kiel, Germany. The vessel, which is shaped something like an arrowhead, will be 98 feet long and 50 feet wide. That climbs to 114 feet and 82 feet when the solar panels are fully unfurled.

There aren’t many details on the drivetrain, and Collardi says the batteries “have not been defined.” A press kit says the boat will weigh 60 tons and feature 470 square meters – 5,059 square feet – of photovoltaic cells that offer 22 percent efficiency.

Collardi says the vessel will have enough power to carry skipper Raphael Domjan, the 37-year-old founder of Planet Solar, and navigator Gerard d’Aboville. Both men are accomplished sailors and adventurers who, according to a press release, “want to be the Phileas Fogg” of the 21st Century.

Fogg, of course, was the adventurous main character Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne’s novel about a man who travels by train, balloon, steamer and even elephants to circle the globe in record time and win a bet. Verne’s great-grandson Jean Verne has signed on to the project, which organizers say represents “humanity’s hope for a better future.”

The route is still being worked out, but Planet Solar will set sail from Marseilles, France sometime next year and cross the Atlantic, then cut through the Panama Canal to cross the Pacific. From there she’ll head south through the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean before crossing the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Then it’s through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean Sea and back home.

Ports of call are to be announced, but stops in New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Monaco are among those being considered. Supporters and well-wishers will be welcomed aboard, and Collardi says 50 people can fit inside the catamaran for short jaunts.

Immo Stroher, founder and president of Rivendell Holding, has dibs on Solar Planet at the end of the journey.

7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs

wired.com
Published April 10, 2009  
 

(Image: A raven picks the carcass of a roe deer in the 30 km (18 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near the village of Babchin, some 370 km (217 miles) southeast of Minsk, January 10, 2009. Still inhospitable to humans, the Chernobyl “exclusion zone” — a contaminated 30-km radius around the site of the nuclear reactor explosion of April 26, 1986 — is now a nature reserve and teems with wolves, moose, bison, wild boars and bears. Copyright: Reuters)

You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility.

Nuclear weapons aren’t only good for leveling cities, they’ve also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit. 

 
The U.S. government sponsored Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to come up with and research ideas for what was known as Project Plowshare. While Livermore scientists tested new ideas through about a dozen explosions, Soviet scientists had a much larger program known as “Program No. 7 — Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” which detonated more than 120 nukes to aid civilian aims.

Here’s a rundown of ideas, both tried or just proposed, for how we could put nuclear weapons to work outside war. After all, the world’s got at least 23,000+ warheads just laying about.

Creating a Harbor, or Just a Hole
If there is one thing nuclear weapons have been proven to do, it’s make big holes, and some scientists realized that could be a business proposition.

As Livermore Lab physicist Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a backer of Plowshare, wrote in 1963: “The discussion of the peaceful applications of nuclear explosives has produced some concrete ideas that surely can be realized and it has also produced some promising possibilities which for the time being we must consider as dreams. First, we shall mention those applications about which we can feel quite sure. They boil down to a single fact: We can make a hole in the earth — if anybody wants to do that.”

And, as Teller continues, “as a matter of fact, there are some important reasons why one should want to move big quantities of earth.”

Great big holes could be useful for mining, reservoir creation, or even creating, say a new Panama Canal.

Creating a New Panama Canal
There’s long been a problem with that engineering marvel of the early 20th century, the Panama Canal: It’s just too small. For decades, people floated plans to build a bigger, better canal that could accommodate supertankers and our other outsize transportation vehicles. No less a leader than President John F. Kennedy called for looking into the feasibility of using nuclear explosions to excavate such a canal.

A declassified letter (.pdf) between Atomic Energy Commission employees reads:

To the best of my knowledge, National Security Action Memorandum No. 152 (dated April 30, 1962, subject: Panama Canal Policy and Relations with Panama) signed by President Kennedy is still in effect. In particular, this memo states that, “The Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, will establish within the Plowshare Program a research goal to determine within approximately the next five years the feasibility, costs and other factors involved in nuclear methods of excavation,” (referring, of course, to the Trans-Isthmian Canal).  

Natural Gas Exploration
One of the most extensive Plowshare programs was an attempt to increase natural gas production. Beginning in the mid-1960s, scientists used targeted nuclear explosions to stimulate natural gas production by fracturing the rocks in which the gas was locked to make them more permeable. It worked well enough to warrant progressively larger tryouts. In 1967 Time described the first demonstration, Project Gasbuggy in New Mexico, like this:

On a butte above New Mexico’s Leandro Canyon last week, chilled observers fell silent as a voice on the public-address system reached the end of the countdown. For a tense moment, nothing happened. Then the earth jolted underfoot and a dull, distant boom was heard, followed by a second, more gentle, rolling shock. Someone shouted: “We did it! We did it!” Hand shakes were exchanged all around. The U.S. had successfully set off the first nuclear explosion sponsored jointly by the Government and industry.

The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health.

Mining Oil Shale
Any time energy prices go up, people start talking about transforming the carbon-rich sedimentary rocks of the intermountain West, known as oil shale, into liquid fuels. The problem is it costs a lot of energy and money to move all that rock and extract the useful stuff (kerogen). Solution: thermonuclear explosions.

In 1970, Milo Nordyke, a Livermore physicist in the Plowshare program, filed a patent for a Nuclear Explosive Method for Stimulating Hydrocarbon Production from Petroliferous Formations.

“It never went into the field, but we actually did experiments filling up a large chamber with oil shale and seeing how you could get the oil out,” Nordyke said.

Disposing of Nuclear Waste
One of the most incredible proposed applications of a nuclear explosion is to help store nuclear waste itself. The idea was detailed in a 1973 article in Science:

This scheme was originally proposed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. A hole is bored beneath the waste processing plant, and a nuclear bomb is set off in the hole. Then the radioactive waste is poured into the subterranean cavity so formed, over a 25-year filling period. The wastes heat up through their own activity, boil dry, and eventually melt themselves and some surrounding rock into a glassy ball. The cost is quite uncertain but was judged to be extremely attractive.
What could possibly go wrong with setting off a nuclear explosion underneath a nuclear waste processing plant? Ultimately, despite its creativity, the plan was abandoned. 

 
Building such a cavity, though, was quite possible, as you can see in this video from the early operation Project Gnome in New Mexico. Nordyke actually walked the cavern in the video.

“I was one of the lucky people who got to go into that cavern,” he said. “The week after I went in there, they shut the place down.”

Why was it possible for people to walk around a few months after the explosion? Nordyke said the Plowshare team designed a series of weapons that contained very little fissionable material, which is what makes radioactivity dangerous to humans.

“For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material,” Nordyke said.

But despite the technical success of the Plowshare program, Nordyke doesn’t see nuclear weapons being used for excavation or mining anytime soon because it doesn’t seem politically feasible.

“I think its time came and went,” he said. “I think reconciling it with the enhanced environmental concerns today and the inherent association with weapons is difficult.”

Human Spaceflight
If we can’t use them on Earth, we might still be able to use them to get to outer space. Project Orion, spearheaded by Freeman Dyson among other eminent scientists, was to build a spaceship powered by atomic weapons.

The large version of the ship could have housed a city full of people and would have disposed of 1,000 nuclear bombs in one go.

All sorts of declassified documents about the project are now available online at the NASA Technical Reports Server.

Defending Earth From an Asteroid
Many scientists aren’t so sure that nuclear weapons are the best way to defend Earth from a close call with a world-ending asteroid, but NASA maintains that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons could save the Earth.

Wikia Death Proves Google Is Search-Startup Killer

 

 

 (US entrepreneur and founder of the Wikipedia internet encyclopedia Jimmy Wales holds his Quadriga Award 2008 he was given in the “Mission of Enlightenment” category at the Komische Oper opera house in Berlin on October 3, 2008. Copyright: Getty Images)

By Ryan Singel | wired.com

Published: April 3, 2009

 

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ open source, human-powered Google killer died a quiet death Tuesday, making Wikia.com the latest object lesson in the futility of trying to unseat Google as the king of search engines.

Even though the site lasted barely a year, Wales should not feel badly about pulling the plug on his ambitious attempt to harness the power of the crowds to take down Google and force search algorithms to become more transparent.

In fact, Wikia even managed to force Google to adopt a Wikia-like feature in November that solicits user opinions on whether search results are relevant.

But, the reality is that no one can kill Google, and its search box is going to rule for many more years. It employs 20,000 of the world’s most intelligent people and rakes in billions yearly. It has a squadron of other products from YouTube to Gmail that insinuate the company’s technology deep into its users’ lives. It runs the net’s best data centers, something that any true competitor would need hundreds of millions to come close to matching.

While it may be little comfort, Wikia has well-esteemed neighbors in the search engine graveyard.

Amazon’s attempt to build a successful search engine called A9 failed, and its former head Udi Manber is now a vice president at Google. Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com all continue to struggle to maintain what’s left of the search pie after Google grabs its 60-something percent. Technorati, the blog search engine, has been all but abandoned by web users.

Simply put, Google knows history. Google came marching from Stanford armed with the PageRank algorithm to conquer the search engines of the late 1990s. And after it won, it made sure to become powerful enough that no young upstarts would do to it what it did to Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot and Ask Jeeves.

Google, which the feds sometimes suspect has grown into a monopoly, says search is very competitive and that its users will head to Yahoo at the first sign of trouble. It also points to its experiments to show that the company remains innovative and has no lock on users.

In 2006, Idealab’s Snap.com was hailed as a Google-killer, but it all but ditched its search engine in favor of pop-up-ad bubble technology. Last year’s hyped entrant Cuil may have figured out a smart way to build a deep index of the web without needing millions to build sprawling data centers, but it differs little from any other post-Google search engine — it has little to draw users from Google’s comfortable embrace.

There’s been plenty of attempts to make search smarter — figuring out what a user means is one route.

That’s the point of 2009’s hyped entrant Wolfram Alpha, which hasn’t even launched yet but is said to know how to answer questions as if it were a sentient computer. Powerset managed to convince Microsoft that its grouping technology was worth $100 million, even though its public search engine only let users explore Wikipedia.

Others try to make search deeper, by looking into the net’s unplumbed databases — sometimes called the Dark Web. Try DeepDyve. Some are trying to tap into the instant zeitgeist — by searching Twitter microblog posts, but Google will surely take over this category as thoroughly as it did blog search.

And still others try to make search results look different. The latest visualizer — SearchMe — mimics iTunes’ Cover Flow, while older attempts such as Kartoo and Ujiko bravely tried more futuristic layouts.

Perhaps the best approach these days is to disavow competition with Google entirely.

The best new entries on the web are Kosmix, ChaCha and DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo feels like a search engine for 5th graders doing their homework. That may sound mean, but it’s a compliment.

ChaCha answers questions you ask by text message, and sends the answer and an ad or two back to your phone.

Kosmix’s founders scream as loudly as they can that they are not a Google competitor — instead calling what they do exploration, rather than search. The company’s technology works by creating on-the-fly pages about a topic from sources such as Wikipedia, Flickr, AllRecipes, YouTube and yes, Google and Google News.

For general queries, Kosmix is a refreshing change from the straight list of search results we’ve all grown so accustomed to. And hopefully, its founders are feeling lucky.

Interested in alternative search engines? Here’s a selection of new and old challengers.

DuckDuckGo, Wikia, Kosmix, OneRiot, ChaCha, DeepDyve, Powerset, Technorati, Yauba, Hakia, Ixquick, Clusty, Grokker, Kartoo, Ujiko.