I've put a long "Introduction to Mars ISRU" post on my forum at http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/mscforu ... opic=897.0 for anyone who's interested.
One thing that you may have noticed is that pressurized hydrogen is very poor in some performance driven applications. In the case of a compressed hydrogen powered car, the tank is 98% dry tank and 2% hydrogen by mass at 10,000psi (www.dynetek.com), making it rather lame for that particular application.
If any of you are interested in liquifying hydrogen, I know how to start. I'm pretty sure there would be some government paperwork type stuff, and cryocoolers are thousands of dollars (a few are small enough to run on household power) and do-it-yourself maintenance for most problems.
It would not be for the faint of heart, as a pretty big investment. It is also characteristically dangerous (i.e.: you stand an excellent chance of blowing your house up if you are not careful.)
Electrolysis on Mars
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Electrolysis on Mars
by aftercolumbia » Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:09 pm
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by aftercolumbia » Sun Oct 15, 2006 11:32 am
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by rsgpitt » Sun Oct 15, 2006 7:50 pm
The new way to store hydrogen is much better. It is called metal hydrides, which is where a tank is filled with a metal powder and the hydrogen actually bonds to the metal, forming something like NaH or MgH2. When heated with the car battery, the hydrogen is released. The tank can hold something like 1000x its volume in hydrogen. You could compare it somewhat to dry ice and the amount of carbon dioxide gas formed from a cube of it. It much better than storing the pressurized gas.
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by aftercolumbia » Tue Oct 17, 2006 1:04 am
So that would be a sorption tank?
Yeah, that is a much better idea for everyday applications, safer too, I'd bet. It could be a good way to store the gas chromatography hydrogen supply for the rover, but alas, would be useless for the booster. It wouldn't surprise me if a really small Mars sample return mission could use it.
Actively cooling it would work much better (i.e. on Planck, they use H2 sorption cryocoolers, passively cooled to 60K.) Also, it wouldn't need a cryocooler. Hmm...imagine recharging your car by plugging it into your fridge
Yeah, that is a much better idea for everyday applications, safer too, I'd bet. It could be a good way to store the gas chromatography hydrogen supply for the rover, but alas, would be useless for the booster. It wouldn't surprise me if a really small Mars sample return mission could use it.
Actively cooling it would work much better (i.e. on Planck, they use H2 sorption cryocoolers, passively cooled to 60K.) Also, it wouldn't need a cryocooler. Hmm...imagine recharging your car by plugging it into your fridge
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