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I wonder how safe this will be with hydrogen gas being a part of it. Sounds promising but you’d want it extra safe considering a mini Hindenburg would be attach
by weaksauce 8y ago
I wonder how safe this will be with hydrogen gas being a part of it. Sounds promising but you’d want it extra safe considering a mini Hindenburg would be attached to your house. Edit. I suppose I read it incorrectly as this is being invented for the utility scale.
- freeone3000 8y agoWe currently put high-temperature, charged lithium in our pants pockets. The technology this is replacing uses lead and sulfuric acid. Hydrogen is probably fine.
- gsich 8y agoIn case of problems you can remove your pants very quickly.
- Multicomp 8y agoSomething something new meaning to the safety dance
- jclulow 8y agoHave you seen how fast a lithium battery fire gets going?
- gsich 8y agoYes.
- zaarn 8y agoI doubt you can remove your pants faster than a lithium cell going skywards, especially since you'll be experience some quite decent panic at your pants being literally on fire.
- picsao 8y agoLevi's proudly present the smoke jumper pants. Protecting your Future Family with patented CTE Technology. (Controlled Trouser Explosion) Save your last pair of marbles.
- kbenson 8y agoWell, any vehicles you park in your garage or in your driveway probably have a lot of stored potential energy that can be released catastrophically under the wrong circumstances too. (this goes for whether it's ICE or electric). The fact that we generally consider those safe to sleep next to is a testament to safety engineering (and possibly a bit of self delusion).
- dbasedweeb 8y agoThe wrong circumstances required to catastrophically release all of that energy in an ICE car is pretty extreme, requiring the fuel to atomize and thoroughly mix with air. Otherwise you have a fire, not a bomb. Hydrogen by contrast just needs a spark and then it comes to strongly resemble a bomb. If your hydrogen is under pressure, then simple containment failure can be the “spark” required. Plus, gasoline is easy to store, while hydrogen tends to embrittle materials storing it. We shouldn’t short sell just how tricky hydrogen can be.
- kbenson 8y agoGasoline evaporates under most normal conditions when exposed to air. Fiel soaked rags have been known to spontaneously ignite in garages. I think what you're describing is the decades of safety advances we've had in ICE engine design that allow for safe fuel storage. I'm not trying to say that storing hydrogen is easy, I'm just saying that there's probably a significant amount of things we can do to bring the hazard level down, and there would be a real push for more work on those things if we were routinely using these units at our houses. That is, we would also view the proximity and operation of early model ICE engines to be too hazardous. We've come a long way since then.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoI was only aware of oil (not gas) soaked rags spontaneously combusting
- weaksauce 8y ago
- isoprophlex 8y agoWith adequate seals this is no more dangerous than existing chemical energy storage, such as gasoline and natural gas. The researchers state (in the paper itself) that they carefully control the charging voltage to avoid oxygen production in the same cell. Oxygen and hydrogen in the same device is dangerous, only hydrogen not so much.
- vvanders 8y agoUh, doesn't hydrogen have a history of leaking through most materials due to its small atomic size?
- lostapathy 8y agoAt which point it disperses very easily as it floats up. The key is just to keep it separate from pure oxygen, not keep it contained
- simonh 8y agoYes, but if you’re only storing it <24h to smooth out your daily power generation curve that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s only really an issue if you’re storing it for weeks or more.
- taneq 8y agoYou're always storing some hydrogen even if the actual atoms are swapped out.
- simonh 8y agoOf course, but for short term storage the percentage loss should be small relative to other losses in the system. Lets say on each storage and recovery cycle over 24h I'm losing 10% of the stored energy from various losses each cycle, including 1% of the stored energy from Hydrogen loss. No big deal. Even though I'm losing 1% to hydrogen loss every 24h cycle, it's small relative to other losses per cycle. After many cycles it would still be a small fraction of overall losses. Conversely if my cycle time is 10 days for one storage and recovery cycle, at 1% hydrogen loss per 24h all of a sudden I'm now losing more from Hydrogen loss than all other losses combined. That's really bad.
- walshemj 8y agoOne of the major complaints when they trialed fuel cell buses in London years ago was that people though the fueling station would blow up ala hindenberg.
- jwilk 8y agoHindenburg