Thursday, January 17, 2008

Odds and ends mostly w/o comment

1. NIH budget requires free access to papers written about NIH research. There can be up to one year delay.

2. ACS wants $1000 per article for open posting of articles. Here is more on these issues

3. German car manufacturers are moving to R744 for air conditioning to replace HFC-134A. That's CO2 in plainspeak. There are problems, it requires high pressure seals and don't work so good when it's real hot out. HFC-134a has to be replaced because of its global warming potential.

4. Other replacements are not looking too good. Dupont and Honeywell are pushing something called HFO-1234yf. More here

Eli has proposals to finish.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"That's CO2 in plainspeak. There are problems, it requires high pressure seals and don't work so good when it's real hot out. HFC-134a has to be replaced because of its global warming potential."

It's a pity no-one in the car industry is interested in developing safe hydro-carbon refrigerant systems because these use far less energy than CO2 or other systems, besides the gas itself having a low global warming potential. I'd really like to know why the man who did a lot of good research on this, Ian Maclaine-Cross, decided to do an experiment involving himself and other occupants in a car when he should have known the experiment was dangerous. It involved releasing nearly 700g of hydrocarbon inside a car which his own publications say would be dangerous. It may be worth emailing him if I can't find a report on it.

Chris O'Neill