Video: Navy UAV uses hydrogen fuel cells for greener surveillance
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted April 17th 2009 6:19PM
posted April 17th 2009 6:19PM
It sure is nice to see that the military is paying attention to the environment, always on the lookout for greener ways to spy on people, foreign and domestic. Ion Tiger, for instance, is an unmanned vehicle being cooked up at the Naval Research Laboratory that incorporates a hydrogen fuel cell, offering many improvements on earlier battery powered designs -- including a greater range (up to seven times further than that of current designs), heavier payloads, smaller size, reduced noise, a low heat signature, and zero emissions. The Office of Naval Research is making much of the possible civilian potentials for this technology, pointing out that research contributes "directly to solving some of the same technology challenges faced at the national level," but we know the truth: the US military is in cahoots with Greenpeace. You heard it here first, folks. Video after the break.
[Via PhysOrg]
[Via PhysOrg]
Spying on our enemies in an environmentally friendly way
Until you realise H either comes from oil, or electrolysis (I think?) which requires electricity, and most likely, oil...
electrolysis or I'm not a chem major!! It would be too hard to separate from oil. As any of the profs would tell you: "oil and the more refined gasoline are a dogs breakfast of hydrocarbon flames and as you all should know from my previous lectures it only requires a slight bit of added energy to perpetrate a combustion reaction. Now if you will remember the Habour process..." Long story short, to use oil would be a waste of nrg when there are certain activity series that would perpetrate a spontaneous electrolysis rxn. The only drawback is the cost of metals nowadays... Why did we squander so many of our resourses? Oh well, it is still cool, and thank you French-Canadian heritage pour la translation automatique!
Sorry, Marcus, but we've been making hydrogen from hydrocarbons for some time now. I'm not sure where the Haber process comes into things, other than that a lot of the hydrogen from the syngas process goes into making ammonia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
Karen needs a haircut. (I would give her one) :)
Hydrogen does not come from oil. Most of it does come from natural gas today, but natural gas is seen as a transition to making most of the hydrogen from water using clean sources of electricity. It's worth pointing out though that even when hydrogen does come from natural gas, when you look at the whole process, very little natural gas is used and it produces only half the emissions that a gasoline engine would. Part of the reason so little natural gas is used is because in the process, half of the hydrogen actually comes from water.
Did you know that just a 2% increase in U.S. natural gas supply would fuel 10 million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles annually?
http://www.hydrogenassociation.org/general/factSheets.asp
http://www.h2andyou.org/tenThings.asp
Spy on those villagers that gave google the business. That'll learn em.
The woman talking in the beginning has way too much hair residing on her head.
That's her hair? I thought it was the UAV.
As opposed to the woman talking at the end?
more like an unmanned hair-iel vehicle
This is obviously not focused on the "green" aspect. The military doesn't give a damn about the environment.
It's probably because of a smaller heat signature and/or noise.
Or because zero emmisions leaves no trail
I agree, the military spends to many resources to care.
A fuel cell is a good idea but if they used butane , For that cell it would have more range .
I think it's mostly range & weight. It's the reason why batteries are not suited for airplanes. That, and unlike most people, they have the money to splurge on fuel cells. Most of us have to make do with batteries in our gadgets and also probably none of us can afford $500k-millions to spend on a fuel cell car, not to mention the refueling.
Yeah, that will offset a fleet of Nuclear powered Ships....
this could have interesting applications in subs! plenty of water, salt water, that encourages reactivity series, only the anode rusts, or I don't know anything about galvanization. Which in turn generates an electron flow, that can in turn be used for direct (but low voltage powers) that can in turn be used to generate H. I wonder what the yield would be...
3 kill streak...Our UAV is online!
As if bombs don't add something to global warming. Dropping one bomb with such a vehicle, and the efford for making it green is for nothing!
Ok, not when it is used for spy activities...
Not sure where I ll put it but.... DO WANT!
Ok, excuse me for missing the point of the video, but how do they land that thing on only one wheel? Did anyone notice that they didn't actually show it landing, just a touch and go of the sorts? Seems to me like it would tip over and scrap the wing tips all to hell. ????
KAMIKAZE~
with the hydrogen fuel cell, the explosion might be more deadly I suppose...
HYDROGEN FUEL CELLS ARE STUPID.
There are way too many things to overcome. The biggest being that we can't just pump something up with hydrogen. We have to first "make" the hydrogen using electricity...
Why not skip a step and just USE ELECTRICTY. We are way further along and moving at a much faster pace with electricty, batteries, solar panels, and other related tech.