Fuel Cell
A Fuel Cell is an electrochemical energy conversion and storage device.
- It is a significant advancement in Energy Technology.
Description (Specifications)[edit]
Fuel cells differ from batteries in that they are designed for continuous replenishment of the reactants consumed; they produce power from an external supply of fuel and oxidant (typically oxygen or air, although chlorine and chlorine dioxide have also been used among others) as opposed to the limited internal energy storage capacity of a battery. Additionally, while the electrodes within a battery react and change as a battery is charged or discharged, a fuel cell's electrodes are catalytic and relatively stable.
Efficiency[edit]
Fuel cells are not constrained by the maximum Carnot Cycle efficiency as combustion engines are, because they do not operate with a thermal cycle. Consequently, they can have very high efficiencies in converting chemical energy to electrical energy, especially when they are operated at low power density, and using pure hydrogen and oxygen as reactants.
The efficiency of a fuel is very dependent on the current through the fuel cell: as a general rule, the more current drawn, the lower the efficiency. A cell running at 0.6V has an efficiency of about 50%, meaning that 50% of the available energy content of the hydrogen is converted into electrical energy; the remaining 50% will be converted into heat.
For a fuel cell operated on air (rather than bottled oxygen), losses due to the air supply system must also be taken into account.
It is also important to take losses due to production, transportation, and storage into account. Fuel cell vehicles running on compressed hydrogen may have a power-plant-to-wheel efficiency of 22% if the hydrogen is stored as high-pressure gas, and 17% if it is stored as liquid hydrogen.
Fuel cells cannot store energy like a battery, but in some applications, such as stand-alone power plants based on discontinuous sources such as solar or wind power, they are combined with electrolyzers and storage systems to form an energy storage system. The overall efficiency (electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity) of such plants (known as round-trip efficiency) is between 30 and 50%, depending on conditions. While a much cheaper lead-acid battery might return about 90%, the electrolyser/fuel cell system can store indefinite quantities of hydrogen, and is therefore better suited for long-term storage.
History & Background (Dossier)[edit]
Fuel Cell Applications: Fuel Cells are often very attractive energy storage and utilization devices for TL:7-15 societies. Fuel cells are very useful as power sources in remote locations, such as spacecraft, remote weather stations, large parks, rural locations, and in certain military applications. A fuel cell system running on hydrogen can be compact, lightweight and has no major moving parts.
Because fuel cells have no moving parts, and do not involve combustion, in ideal conditions they can achieve up to 99.9999% reliability. This equates to less than one minute of down time in a six year period.
However, since electrolyzer systems do not store fuel in themselves, but rather rely on external storage units, they can be successfully applied in large-scale energy storage, rural areas being one example. In this application, batteries would have to be largely oversized to meet the storage demand, but fuel cells only need a larger storage unit (typically cheaper than an electrochemical device).
References & Contributors (Sources)[edit]
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This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Fuel_Cell. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |
- Frank Chadwick, Dave Nilsen. Fire, Fusion, & Steel (Game Designers Workshop, 1994), 64.
- Greg Porter. Central Supply Catalog (Imperium Games, 1996), 61,60.
- Traveller Wiki Editorial Team
- Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science