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 and Oxygen can be combined into water in something called a fuel cell, and this will release energy that we can harness as electricity. It’s essentially still an electric car, but the electricity is generated in a chemical reaction rather than a battery. And the hydrogen is created in a reverse process, starting with Water and splitting it into Hydrogen and Oxygen (the Oxygen can just go freely into the atmosphere since it’s so abundant).
It has two key benefits over electric cars. The first is that there’s no battery weight. A Tesla Model 3 has over 1000 pounds of batteries. That’s about 40% of the weight of a similar sized ICE car.
The second is that you can refill your fuel much faster. You can fill up a hydrogen tank relatively fast compared, in a similar timeframe as filling a gas car.
This might actually be what long haul trucking uses for electrified vehicles because of these benefits.
There’s a great Physics Girl episode on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY
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