ESS-RGN

New perspectives arising from isothermal oxidation. The next chapter of this book describes the greatly altered perspective of the fuel cell industry, when Grove s ideas are updated. The second chapter describes the detail of Regenesys, or ESS-RGN. This system has changed hands, as noted above, and information is available from http //www.vrbpower.com/. (The initials VRB stand for Vanadium Redox Battery, a low-power alternative to Regenesys.) The new 2005 VRB Power Systems shorthand is ESS-VRB for 2.5 to 10 MW and ESS-RGN for 10 to 100 MW. In Chapter 2 the reader will be acquainted with ESS-RGN, one of the two VRB fuel cell systems (incompressible liquid based) which can be termed complete . The redox battery uses small pumps as circulators. 

Grove s proposal for a hydrogen economy, based on imperfect fuel cells and electrolysers using compressible gases, is therefore doubtful, and has become an unlikely competitor for ESS-RGN. 

Chapter 2 appears on the ESS-RGN of VRB Power Systems, Vancouver, formerly the Regenesys power storage system, both for its own sake and for the thermodynamic points it enables the author to make, reiterate or emphasise in relation to his thermodynamic theories. Here are fuel cells without oxygen, and certainly without combustion, but undoubtedly with charge transfer reactions separated by a potential difference. Moreover, here are fuel cells with incompressible liquid reactants and products. 

The one and only fuel cell being manufactured, which makes use of circulators, as in Figure A.l, is the power storage system ESS-RGN, formerly Regensys, which features liquid reactants which are incompressible in contrast to the gaseous reactants of all other fuel cell systems. 

The reader, even when reassured by the foreword, may still be reluctant, after reading Chapter 1, to forsake the ingrained notion that irreversible combustion is somehow relevant to equilibrium fuel cells. But here in ESS-RGN are fuel cells, with liquid reactants and products, and without oxygen Combustion cannot be relevant to the Regenesys system, as described below, and in the abb.com reference (Power Conversion Section, 2004) Electricity from the Store . 

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