Has anyone here come across Luke's work?
This is his crowdfunding page.
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-groundbreaking-technology-after-arson-attack
QuoteA targeted arson attack
Our fuel cell development facility housed at the Bridge site in Liverpool was petrol bombed destroying critical production facilities and tools, fuel cells, operating systems, sensors and stock where entirely destroyed.
Three separately sited containers on the community and social operated site were completely destroyed by three individual fires. This site is firmly rooted in community development and has been an important haven for people locally for over 10 years, supporting people into meaningful volunteering and work and providing vital inspiration, community and opportunity.
The impact of these fires on one container in particular is wide-ranging and can’t be understated. Luke Evans PhD student at the University of Liverpool and CEO of Scintilla CME Ltd, whose work is due to be submitted in March 2025, with 10 years of experimental work destroyed.
A bit more...
Interesting. I see one of the named persons (inactive) on the company register is Nicholas Abson, bit of an oddball who when I last came across him was alleged to have a fuel-cell factory in France.
This Nick Abson?
Quote from wikipediaFuel cell industry
In 1991, Abson started a series for the BBC centering on a Belgian fuel cell company, Elenco. After becoming engrossed with the technology, he rebuilt Elenco when it entered administration from 2 employees to 200 and re-branded it as ZeTek Plc. ZeTek would go on to become Europe’s largest fuel cell company pioneering fuel cell London Taxis in 1998 and a second generation fuel cell designed for automated production, ending the hand production previously required. The first planned expansion began in Porz, near Cologne, early August 2000 and the second plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2001, and a third in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, until it lost its investors immediately following the World Trade Center tragedy later that same year. He resurrected the company as Cenergie Plc and provided shares for all but a few of the 500 ZeTek shareholders. Following a series of cyber and other commercially driven attacks, Abson resigned.
Abson continues work on fuel-cell development by publishing papers while working pro-bono for a number of organisations and universities. Citing his experiences with Cenergie, he now writes and campaigns for greater scrutiny of UK money-laundering activities and industrial espionage.
I am pleased to say the hydrogen my tech produces meets or exceeds the EU standard for H2 for fuel cells by a large margin with only very basic treatment, activated charcoal filtration and zeolite bead drying/ No CO, No H2S or SO2. All clean and lovely..
I am pleased to say the hydrogen my tech produces meets or exceeds the EU standard for H2 for fuel cells
I know little about hydrogen. But here is something interesting I learned reading about the last British airship R101. When hydrogen is mixed with even a little air, that makes it much more explosive. Much more dangerous. I don't know about other impurities.
John Bockris was a big fan of using hydrogen gas for various purposes. The book "Tomorrow's Energy" describes his role.
I know little about hydrogen. But here is something interesting I learned reading about the last British airship R101. When hydrogen is mixed with even a little air, that makes it much more explosive. Much more dangerous. I don't know about other impurities.
Hydrogen and air is a dangerous mix. Hydrogen and oxygen in a 2: 1 ration is more deadly than dynamite. Also H2/Air mixes are flammable and potentially explosive down to a 2% mix with air.
The books about airships say they had to monitor how much air was in the hydrogen. I don't know how accurately they could do that in the 1920s and 30s.
The R101 disaster was not caused by air leaking in. It was caused by hydrogen leaking out, and then a crash into the ground. Several airships exploded. I do not know if air leaks contributed to these accidents.
The R101 was a classic case of technology pushed too far, and a project rushed to completion. I feel sorry for the engineers and technicians. It took a long time -- much longer than planned -- but when you read the details you see it was done on a shoestring and starved of funding the whole time. They could not do the tests they needed. They could not fix the problems that emerged when the ship was finally built. They had to stuff in an extra gas bag a month before they attempted to fly to India. They were essentially flying a prototype, which is like selling a customer the first working version of a program.
See:
Anderson, "Airship on a Shoestring"
Gwynne, "His Majesty's Airship"
See:
Anderson, "Airship on a Shoestring"Gwynne, "His Majesty's Airship"
I would add this one.
Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer is the partial autobiography of the British novelist Nevil Shute.[1] It was first published in 1954. Slide Rule concentrates on Nevil Shute's work in aviation, ending in 1938 when he left the industry.
The book begins with details of Shute's childhood and upbringing, his school years, events in the Easter 1916 Dublin Rising, where his father was Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, and service during World War I. Shute came into contact with aircraft while a student at Oxford, when he worked at the de Havilland aircraft factory during the vacations.
The rest of the book is divided into two parts. The first is about Shute's experiences working on the R100 airship project at Vickers. This was the private counterpart to the Air Ministry's R101, both designed as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme to develop airships capable of flying the Empire routes to India, Canada and Australia. Shute's job was initially that of Chief Calculator, responsible for overseeing all the stress calculations needed. On the resignation of the airship designer, Barnes Wallis, he became the project chief engineer. He was also a passenger on the airship's flight to Canada in 1930. He recounts the experience of a mid-air repair of a rudder over the North Atlantic, and of being caught in an up-draught over a thunderhead over Canada.
The R100 design was the project on which he mentions using a slide rule (a Fuller cylindrical model), only mentioned once in the book. The stress calculations for each transverse frame required computations by a pair of calculators (people) for two or three months. The simultaneous equation contained up to seven unknown quantities, took about a week to solve, and had to be repeated if the guess on which of eight radial wires were slack was wrong with a different selection of slack wires if one of the wires was not slack. After months of labour filling perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with calculations "the truth stood revealed (and) produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience".[2]
Speaks to the importance of storing paper documents and storage media in fire rated filing cabinets and data inserts. Anything less is asking for trouble.
Speaks to the importance of storing paper documents and storage media in fire rated filing cabinets and data inserts. Anything less is asking for trouble.
A lot of people on SocMed sites seem to be questioning the supposed lack of off-site digital backups (e.g. cloud storage) - but I think they are being a bit harsh. This was a shoestring operation, and it's easy to point out potential risks with hindsight.
I do agree that precautions over information safety (physical notes and digital data) should have been a priority. (e.g. When I was doing some postgrad study a number of years ago, I made sure copies of all my notes and reference papers were stored in at least two different online archives. And when in work I made a point of scanning handwritten notes to store in the cloud.) But I've no idea what type of connection there was between these containers and the wider internet. They might just have been relying on a 4G cellular connection, with limits on data, although there are often ways around that (e.g. taking a laptop to the university to do regular backups over their wifi).
A "fireproof" safe, for notes and other papers, sounds like a good idea - although the photos appear to show the aftermath from quite a ferocious fire.
The lab buildings and equipment (tools, instrumentation, and materials), of course, can't be "backed up".
A "fireproof" safe, for notes and other papers, sounds like a good idea - although the photos appear to show the aftermath from quite a ferocious fire.
Fire rated filing cabinets are generally good for an hour - even in ferocious fires. They’re built with business continuity in mind.
A lot of people on SocMed sites seem to be questioning the supposed lack of off-site digital backups (e.g. cloud storage) - but I think they are being a bit harsh. This was a shoestring operation, and it's easy to point out potential risks with hindsight.
You can always make a backup on a removable disk and store it at home or somewhere else. You don't need cloud storage. But cloud storage is very cheap. Microsoft OneDrive costs $6 for 1 TB. Google offers 2 TB for $10 per month. As it happens, I get offsite storage for free from my LENR-CANR.org ISP.
It seems the "lab" was a collection of containers on this council owned tip. By saying shoestring I could have been over-stating their operating budget....
Again, from the crowdfunder:
QuoteWe have the knowledge, but some of the test equipment and manufacturing equipment that was acquired through auctions, out of bins, donated by Universities and companies, is very expensive. The equipment had slowly been collected and purchased over 10 years and was now in a place where small scale production was possible.
The "lack of off-site data backup" isn't really the main problem.
It seems the "lab" was a collection of containers on this council owned tip. By saying shoestring I could have been over-stating their operating budget....
Again, from the crowdfunder:
The "lack of off-site data backup" isn't really the main problem.
The first IH laboratory in NC looked not much different.
