ROHS directive and electric vehicles?

Ok - obviously not that useful at all then !

Graham

No, that's plain boron. In an orthoborate, each boron already has all the oxygen it can take.

Ignition temperature is ~1,500 Celsius. At 1,000 C it will sit in air all day.

It also, as mentioned, burns in steam. The heat of that burning is of course much less, but even so, the ignition temperature is less, ~800 C.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan "Boron: A Better Energy Carrier than Hydrogen?"

That's boron element, not an orthoborate. But you get a reaction only at a high temperature, with steam under pressure. Once started, the reaction can maintain the required temperature.

It is often seen as an inert brown powder, but it can also appear as black shiny fragments, very similar to silicon in appearance.

Europe seems to be backing out of the hydrogen hype. Someone important must have pushed a few buttons on a pocket calculator.

robert

No the full article explains...

Heat the water to 800 add the Boron and you get Boron Oxide and Hydrogen. Daimler Chrysler built a concept car that used this reaction some time ago. In did 130Kph and 500K ragge.

The problem was the infrastructure needed to support the car. This time the proposal is different.. Heat the Boron Oxide waste with Magnesium to recover the Boron and seperate the resulting Magnesium Oxide using electrolysis (solar generated electricity). Getting the infrastructure in place would take government action that I can't see happening. Personally I think that someone will crack the battery problem before that happens.

About as good as? Hell, they have about twice the power density of NiCad; volumetric or mass.

Try this:

Yes, but they've had severe self-discharge and charging cycle limitations that tended to favor NiCd for most applications.

car/plane

I know but traditionally (eg early NiMH cells) had higher internal resistance and you couldn't run them at high discharge rates. That problem is now solved for most form factors

For digital camera batteries I am experimenting with the D.O.L. inverter ripped from a scrap Philishave, it charges the battery from a high frequency inverter with just a rectifier diode and no smoothing cap, this arrangement works extremely well with NiCd and may also improve charging performance with NiMh. The inverter is controlled by a TEA1088T chip which senses the slight drop in terminal voltage that NiCd's show at the full charge point, but NiMh has a less pronounced drop and some pairs of cells trip the full charge change to trickle charge while others don't. So far NiMh cells charged with this hold the battery charge symbol in the display as showing full during flash chargeup which conventionally charged cells don't! At the moment the charger has to be supervised when charging NiMh but when I get bored enough I might build a simple temperature controlled trip to shut it down at full charge.