Hi guys! Saw this article on BMW saying, hydrogen is the next best thing – from electric cars.
Can anyone ova here, explain in a nutshell how hydrogen cars work? How it’s stored? How it’s made / refined heard its (h2o something)?
The safety of it, in case of an accident?
The transportation of the liquid?
Also, can hydrogen cars accelerate as quick as the Tesla’s? 😯
Thanks!
In: Engineering
Hydrogen cars typically use a hydrogen fuel cell.
The fuel cell combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and releases electricity. This technology has existed on a basic level since the 19th century and was used in the Apollo spacecraft.
The electricity from the fuel cell in turns powers an electric motor and can charge a capacitor bank or battery.
From an ecological perspective this is good because if Hydrogen is primarily made from seawater moving forward (it presently isn’t) the waste product would be the same as what you started with so it would be a closed loop. What we would lose is electricity to split the water molecules into Hydrogen and Oxygen, which would have to be produced somehow. Solar is likely, but Fusion power is of course the holy grail solution for this. Using traditional forms of power generation like coal or oil for this wouldn’t exactly be that helpful.
There’s arguments that all that water vapor being released by cars could also be bad for the environment, but water from a car can very easily be collected and disposed of safely.
Another problems is that fuel cells need rare earth catalysts like platinum, and platinum mining is very bad for the environment. Alternatives are actively being looked for.
An alternative to fuel cells might actually be staring at us in the face. Hydrogen can be used in a piston engine just like gasoline. This has the advantage that we already have very good understanding of piston engine technology and it wouldn’t be much of a leap to design one. They are also made out of cheap and readily available materials like aluminum and iron.
The downside being that hydrogen is far less energy dense than gasoline so you need a lot more of it for the same amount of horsepower. But a counter argument is current hybrid technologies can easily make up for this (adding batteries to the equation again).
This all has the advantage over electric cars that you can carry a tank of fuel that you can fill up in minutes just like a gas car. The downsides being that Hydrogen is way more dangerous than gas and not presently being made in industrial quantities.
Hydrogen is also the fuel of the future. Developing Hydrogen technology will be very important for future space flight and colonization.
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