The dirty little secret to the larger shipbuilding budgets the US Navy appears to have in FY07 and FY08 in its effort to build the 21st century fleet (under the 313-ship plan) is the reduced funding the Navy is allocating to innovation. It literally took an act of Congress to get "
Tango Bravo" for example, and the same can be said for
N-UCAS technologies.
This presents a problem as shipbuilding costs go up and the Navy tries harder to 'stay the coarse' with the shipbuilding strategy, and if Navy is going to continue high R&D budgets, the reasons need to scale a lot further than weapon system purposes.
Enter the nations largest civilian lobby, specifically the Environmental lobby and Global Warning Crowd. Backed by Nobel Peace Prizes, predicting the end of the human race (or perhaps just a few degrees Fahrenheit over the next century), and the sinking of our cities (or perhaps the rise of sea levels 18 inches in the next century), there is a lot of money being spent on alternative energy sources. It is time someone in the Dept. of the Navy took notice, and put a plan together.
If I had a voice, I'd offer an alternative to Congress through DARPA, and yes it means a conventionally powered submarine. While I do not believe the US Navy has a military need for a conventionally powered submarine, I do think the US Navy could use a new conventional submarine for both industrial and innovation purposes. Let us also remember the USS Nautilus (SSN 571) came before the surface fleet built a nuclear vessel. In the same regard, the Navy should follow this historical example and build the first conventionally powered vessel not to use gas or diesel fuel in the 21st century as a submarine.
The first of two technologies that need a serious look and offer the most potential for submarines, not to mention us average Joe's and Jane's driving cars, is the technology developed at the University of Purdue by
Professor Jerry Woodall. With two doctoral students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Jeffrey Ziebarth and Charles R. Allen, Professor Woodall has been perfecting
affordable Hydrogen producing technology that can scale as a realistic replacement for current fuels.
Researchers at Purdue University have further developed a technology that could represent a pollution-free energy source for a range of potential applications, from golf carts to submarines and cars to emergency portable generators.
The technology produces hydrogen by adding water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium. When water is added to the alloy, the aluminum splits water by attracting oxygen, liberating hydrogen in the process. The Purdue researchers are developing a method to create particles of the alloy that could be placed in a tank to react with water and produce hydrogen on demand.
The gallium is a critical component because it hinders the formation of an aluminum oxide skin normally created on aluminum's surface after bonding with oxygen, a process called oxidation. This skin usually acts as a barrier and prevents oxygen from reacting with aluminum. Reducing the skin's protective properties allows the reaction to continue until all of the aluminum is used to generate hydrogen, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.
Since the technology was first announced in May, researchers have developed an improved form of the alloy that contains a higher concentration of aluminum.
Because the technology could be used to generate hydrogen on demand, the method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major obstacles in creating a hydrogen economy, Woodall said.
The gallium component is inert, which means it can be recovered and reused.
"This is especially important because of the currently much higher cost of gallium compared with aluminum," Woodall said. "Because gallium can be recovered, this makes the process economically viable and more attractive for large-scale use. Also, since the gallium can be of low purity, the cost of impure gallium is ultimately expected to be many times lower than the high-purity gallium used in the electronics industry."
As the alloy reacts with water, the aluminum turns into aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminum. The recycled aluminum would be less expensive than mining the metal, making the technology more competitive with other forms of energy production, Woodall said.
The article goes into a great deal of detail, but additionally there is contact information at the bottom. I emailed Emil Venere as advised and was sent a good deal of additional information. There is also additional information
available online here.
However there is a catch, in order for Woodall's technology to be cost effective fuel cell efficiency needs to be increased to around 75%. At Texas Tech, a scientist named
Deeder Aurongzeb appears to have solved this problem with the second technology required.
A scientist at Texas Tech University named Deeder Aurongzeb may have developed a way to greatly increase fuel-cell efficiency. He uses a type of high-temperature fast assembly technique to create faceted depositions of Titanium, the primary catalyst in fuel cells. The facets create tiny bowls greatly increasing surface area. This potentially gives fuel cells much improved efficiency.
Not surprisingly, the article discusses Woodall's technology.
Dr. Jerry Woodall of Purdue University told me recently that the goal for fuel cell efficiency is 75%. If a cost-effective 75% efficient fuel cell could be created, there are countless alternate energy sources which would become economically viable as a replacement for fossil fuels, including a type of "water burning" chemical process he's developed called AlGal. He told me that 75% efficient fuel cells do exist today, but they are pohibitively expensive, costing several million dollars due to the complex manufacturing process and extremely low yield. He also told me that due to the fragile nature of those devices and their single-component makeup, their operational life is measured in only a few thousand hours. If one part breaks, the entire thing becomes unusable. Imagine a $4 million fuel cell giving you only 2,000 hours of life. It cost $2,000 per hour to operate. These devices need to get down to the $100s of dollars for the total unit, with many thousands of hours of operational life before they will be widely accepted.
Woodall is on record in a
number of places calling out the Dept. of Energy for holding up the revolution. Maybe the DoE can afford to go without the latest and greatest technology, but assuming the D0D can overcome the nuclear mafia in the name of progress, the Navy should embrace the technology.
While many people have recently advocated the US Navy moving towards conventional submarines, I'm not one of those people. This technology does not represent a significant advancement in conventional submarine technology as much as it represents an alternative fuel technology demonstrator. However, just as the Navy led the way in the development of nuclear power, particularly in producing most of the nations nuclear engineers working in the private sector today, once again the Navy has an opportunity to lead in the area of alternative fuels.
It is also a way for the Navy to get increased funding for R&D, which is currently hampered by a high shipbuilding budget requirement. The way I see it, the US Navy needs to build another USS Nautilus (SSN 571), except instead of a nuclear submarine, a conventional submarine to pioneer technologies for the 21st century. I'd call it the USS Nautilus (SS 1000).
The discussion for the Navy's new Maritime Strategy is at CDRs place today, and likely all week. Also worth watching is SJS's place, where the author intends to add daily contributions. My contribution will likely be light today, only because I have so much to say and am not sure how many words I want to fill in the comments by myself. These are my questions regarding the strategy.
