The efficiency of solid oxide fuel cells, a type of hydrogen fuel cells that converts hydrogen into electricity, can be improved from 60% to 93% by recovering the heat they release. Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) operate at 850°C, while a series of endothermic chemical reactions can generate hydrogen out of water at lower temperatures. The only residual heat is then found in the water vapour released at 120°C.
In a more advanced version, heat pumps that consume part of the electrical energy generated by the fuel cell can be used to cool and liquefy the water released at 120°C while providing energy to one of the endothermic reactions, thus recovering heat just like our condensing boilers do, and improving the overall efficiency of the system. Other heat pumps can also be used to provide more energy from the ambient heat to the endothermic reactions temperatures ; raising the temperature from 20°C to 120°C, for example, costs about 28% of the heat released, while 93% to 100% of the heat-pumped energy can be converted to electricity.
On data security, innovations have come up under the brand Carrousel Digital and are aimed at being licensed out. They are trying to address the problem aroused by quantum computers and large super-computers that are threatening existing digital security infrastructure. Some new process proposed and published as patents by Carrousel Digital allow to circumvent these deficiencies. The weakness of data security infrastructure come from the fact that computer facilities could break the encryption keys used in our IT systems, from communication to websites to login procedures.
Our two main schemes allow, for one secure signatures, for the other one secure data transport. Those schemes are mad available through licensing.
The safe signatures scheme shall embed a random number in the e-document to be certified, allowing for its signature with a one-time keys i.e. a secret used only once and that cannot be recomputed.
The safe data transmission scheme uses entangled photons pairs to transport the information, coding many bits on each photon and making sure the photons have not been copied or hijacked during transportation.
Carrousel Digital has also come up with other procedures to allow the use of the one-time keys for signature, such as secure onetime key storage on memory and also such as safe distribution of pairs of one-time keys, using the internet. Contrarily to one might think of QKD, our data transmission scheme can also be organised centrally thanks to a photonic router that connects to all the terminals of a group with only one fibre, whereas QKD, so far, had to use a direct optical fibre between each member of the group.
Our one time key being small can also be used for offline security i.e; allowing devices to trust each other without having to connect to a server, therefore providing a mean for securing e-cash : cash on a card, and e-identity documents that can be resilient to networks faults.
We have also patented an architecture for a fixed antenna geo-localisation system that can be an alternative to GPS but that also works indoor, eventually providing more security for cash transactions, logins as well as an alternative to GPS.