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Vehicles such as the Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle required more power than could be supplied by batteries or solar panels, and so relied on hydrogen fuel cells to provide several kilowatts of power for hundreds of hours. [2] A reserve battery is a primary battery that keeps its chemical reactants separated until needed. This improves ...
Use of this system reduced usage of a shuttle's on-board power-generating fuel cells, allowing it to stay docked to the space station for an additional four days. [ 35 ] SSPTS was a shuttle upgrade that replaced the Assembly Power Converter Unit (APCU) with a new device called the Power Transfer Unit (PTU).
The first commercial use of fuel cells came almost a century later following the invention of the hydrogen–oxygen fuel cell by Francis Thomas Bacon in 1932. The alkaline fuel cell, also known as the Bacon fuel cell after its inventor, has been used in NASA space programs since the mid-1960s to generate power for satellites and space capsules ...
Alkaline fuel cells consume hydrogen and pure oxygen, to produce potable water, heat, and electricity. They are among the most efficient fuel cells, having the potential to reach 70%. NASA has used alkaline fuel cells since the mid-1960s, in the Apollo-series missions and on the Space Shuttle. [1]
UTC Power was a fuel cell company based in South Windsor, Connecticut. It was part of United Technologies Corporation; it was purchased by ClearEdge Power in February 2013. The company specialized in fuel cells for buildings, [1] buses [2] and automobiles. [3] It has also developed fuel cells for space [4] and submarine applications in the past.
Three of these fuel cells supplied electric power to the spacecraft on lunar flights. Electrical power was produced by three fuel cells, each measuring 44 inches (1.1 m) tall by 22 inches (0.56 m) in diameter and weighing 245 pounds (111 kg). These combined hydrogen and oxygen to generate electrical power, and produced drinkable water as a ...
As fuel and oxidiser are burned in the rocket's engines, helium fills the resulting empty space in the tanks, maintaining the overall pressure inside. Because it is non-reactive, it can safely ...
Fuel cells have been used in various kinds of vehicles including forklifts, especially in indoor applications where their clean emissions are important to air quality, and in space applications. Fuel cells are being developed and tested in trucks, buses, boats, ships, motorcycles and bicycles, among other kinds of vehicles.