In retail pricing, the CD Rs are being priced at Rs. 20 per piece for a pack of 50 CDRs. The CD-RWs would be priced at Rs. 50 per piece. The company has tied with Tech Pacific to distribute its products in the country. Tech Pacific has 900 outlets in 32 Indian cities.

Currently, the size of the recordable optical media market in the country is Rs. 400 crore which is expected to grow to Rs. 1,500 crore by 2005. The company's target is to capture 50 percent of this market by 2005.

Speaking at the launch, Deepak Puri, MD, Moser Baer, said, " India offers a huge opportunity for us and it was high time we made an entry in the market. The Indian buyer is no fool…is very tech savvy and knows what he is buying. We positioned our products after a great deal of thought."

The products for the domestic market have been specially manufactured with features that are suited for Indian conditions like being more resistant to humidity and high temperature, dust-resistant, as well as capability for more intense utilization. The products come from equipped with the company's patented dye technology called Protection Plus which makes its products sturdier.

Moser Baer is a Rs 1,000 crore company with OEM supplies to almost all the major optical media manufactures. It supplies to almost all the major optical media manufactures. It supplies to 10 of the top 12 optical media players in the world and has a 12 percent global market share. The company has experienced a CAGR of 60 percent over the last 10 years.

The company has six manufacturing units at NOIDA with a manufacturing capacity of over 1.15 billion units per year. It currently has an employee base of 4,000 people, which is expected to increase to 7,000 by the end of the current fiscal.

Courtesy : The DQ WEEK

Hydrogen fuel powered automobiles

ENGINEERS ARE a step closer to developing safer, low-pressure fuel tanks for the next generation of electrical cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

They have developed a new material that locks the hydrogen gas into cage - like molecules at room temperature. But the material slowly releases the gas easily when the fuel needed. Better still, the material could be customized to store vast amount of hydrogen safely.

Hydrogen gas-powered electric vehicles could cut pollution, but a host of problems will have to be overcome before they become monplace.

One of the biggest challenges, apart from making the hydrogen gas without creating the greenhouse gases, is working out how to store the gas.

Today most vehicles that run on fuel cells store their hydrogen in heavy cylinders at more than 300 times atmospheric pressure.

To make them safe the need to be made of layers of carbon fiber, aluminum and steel, and the cylinders weigh between 7 and 20 times as much as the fuel they can hold. "This is the main problem", says Maria Maack, environmental manager of the company Icelandic New Energy.

So engineers around the world have been trying to develop new ways to store the gas. Earlier American researchers worked out a way to use an icy material called a clathrate but it has to be cooled with liquid nitrogen.

Most other research has tried to use either metals like lanthanum and nickel or organic compounds like carbon nanotubes to trap the hydrogen. Some metals will chemically bond hydrogen on their surface. But the metals that hold the most hydrogen also bind it strongly, so it takes more heat to get the hydrogen out.

And while carbon nanotubes are light and hold a lot of hydrogen, it is hard to mass-produce them in a uniform shape and size, making it tough to control gas capacity.

Now a team of materials chemists led by Omar Yaghi at the University of Michigan has found that the cubic, cage-like molecules called metal organic frameworks (MOFs) would combine the best qualities of the metals and organics of hydrogen storage. The MOFs the team is using are made of zinc and oxygen-based metal complexes linked by benzene-based organic molecules.

Instead of binding the hydrogen tightly as metals do, the MOFs only lightly adsorb hydrogen molecules on the metal complexes and their organic connectors.

This makes it easy to get them in and out at room temperature and at low pressure. Twenty times atmospheric pressure is enough to do the trick - about twice the pressure in a cigarette lighter's fuel reservoir.

When the term used a benzene-based compound called 1,4 benzenedicarboxylate as a link between metal complexes, the cubes held about nine hydrogen molecules each. But the researchers doubled and quadrupled that figure just by slotting extra carbon rings into the connectors. So far, MOFs cannot beat the hydrogen capacity of metals, but further tinkering of the organic links could improve them dramatically.

Courtesy : The Hindu