I have basic idea of working of hydrogen fuel cell but why just hydrogen? Isn’t there any better or maybe cheaper alternative?
(I know it’s bit complex for but I would appreciate your answers)
In: 346
There are definitely alternatives.
One benefit about hydrogen is that it’s fairly easy to produce using electricity with electrolysers, and compared to other methods, it’s one of the highest efficiencies at around 70%(but higher is possible, even 99% is possible with solid oxide at some point).
Hydrogen can also be very easily converted back into electricity with fuel cells at a high efficiency. Fuel cells are basically electrolysers but in reverse, which makes them also very efficient (around 60-70%). Burning any other chemical fuel leads to efficiencies around 30% for smaller engines and maybe 50-60% for large plants.
Hydrogen can not really be considered a fuel though, it’s more of a inefficient chemical battery, because there’s very little hydrogen you can just naturally extract from the ground or something like that, so you have to make the hydrogen with electricity.
There’s lots of downsides to hydrogen though, it is extremely low mass density so you need either big space or very high pressure to store and carry it around. High pressure means you lose a ton of energy pressurizing it.
Hydrogen can be used to make other fuels though. If you want to make methane(natural gas) you just take hydrogen and add some co2 + energy and you got it. If you want to make other fuels like jetfuel you can also do that with hydrogen + co2 + energy. Basically hydrogen is a building block for any bio fuel you want to make.
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