Slashdot Mirror
Hybrid Powertrains and Hydrogen Fuel Cells
An Anonymous Coward writes "Nice article from cars.com detailing a panel dicussion with reps from Chrysler Group, Ford, General Motors and American Honda agreeing that hybrid powertrains and hydrogen fuel cells are the future of automotive propulsion, and discussing their companies' different approaches in both areas."
Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.
So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale). The advant of a clean and cheap way to get massive amounts of hydrogen is I understand a ways off.
Love to get links / info to the contrary.
- August
[Refering to what includes Hydrogen] Examples include petroleum, natural gas and biomass -- a nice way of saying plant and animal waste.
Finally! I can power my DeLorean off a rotting banana peal, coffee grounds, and a quarter can of malt beer.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Please oh please, whatever you do just don't make them like this
Starsucks
It may be interesting to some of you that Honda is releasing (for its 2003 model year) a hydrid version of its Honda Civic, named Honda Civic Hybrid. It is a four-door sedan with gas mileage in the upper-40s / lower-50s.
This proves that electric hydrids are not only available technologically-speaking, but that they are commercially viable. Now imagine what would happen if a tax break (perhaps coinciding with George W. Bush's huge breaks) were offered for electric hybrid vehicles. It would stimulate the economy _and_ lower taxes. Of course, the oil industry wouldn't be too happy because of lower profits. Boo-hoo. Gas mileage has been going _down_ since 1986, when it peaked in the upper-20s (about 29).
BTW, you might want to read a review of the Honda Civic.
Heh. This mildly amusing, and mildy insulting, bit of spin-doctoring aside, it's good to see that the American auto makers aren't actually light-years behind their Japanese counterparts anymore. They've closed the gap to just a few generations. :-)
Am I the only person who finds this hilarious?
"Hydrogen is like electricity. Neither can be mined or found by exploration. The upside is that you can make hydrogen from almost anything -- out of any material that has hydrogen in it."
Hydrogen is in all sorts of stuff. To get it out of stuff like gasoline, you reform it. You are using gasoline up in that case. To get it out of water, you need to use electricity of electrolyze it.
Getting hydrogen is just like getting electricity. The energy has to come from somewhere.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
What are the estimates for the cost per mile of running off of hydrogen?
Right now, hybrid automobiles cost more per mile because the initial price of the vehicle is more expensive.
So when we factor in the costs of making hydrogen powered vehicles, and making hydrogen (probably most cheaply from hydrocarbons -- fossil fuels), what will be the final cost per mile? Has anybody seen good figures?
Even if we do change over, where are we going to get the energy to liberate the hydrogen from where is is sitting now? Fossil Fuels, maybe?
T( H)GSB Apr 21-27
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
Sure, everyone's in a love fest for H2, which will be fantastic when its viable, but no one in America wants to talk about passenger diesels. My Golf TDI gets 40MPG even under my lead foot, will outperform any gas/electic hybrid, has much more cargo space (and passenger space). As far as emmissions go, the hybrids are much greener, but the modern passenger diesel emits less greenhouse gasses then the average gas car. Sure it emits more NOX, but with better fuel and better pollution control systems coming in 2006, this will become a non issue.
On Tuesday I bought a Toyota Prius, mentioned in the article. Very nice car for the dollar. Hybrid gas/electric car, uses the gas engine only when needed. In fact, I still haven't gotten used to the fact that the onboard computer will actually turn off the engine while driving, when it is not needed.
Gas mileage on the sticker is very impressive. 52 city, 45 highway. No, that is not a typo. It actually performs better in traffic, mostly because slow acceleration is almost exclusively under electric power. Coasting and deceleration use regenerative braking to recharge the battery, meaning you never have to plug the car into an external power source.
This car is the perfect geek toy -- many functions are performed via the touchscreen LCD screen, and all the other displays are 100% digital. Sound system is very good for a stock system, and you gotta love the static cling sticker on the back: Eat my voltage.
Sticker price was about $21k, and from my experience, has been worth it. I'm currently getting about 42MPG according to the consumption display. More pics are located here.
The byproduct of fuel cells is water, which would be spat back out into the atmosphere, which would increase local humidity, which would increase cloud formation, which would increase the planet's albedo, which would cause the surface to cool and a new ice age to start.
And we ain't got no woolly mammoths left to eat round the campfire.
From what I gather, using Hydrogen would be equivalent to having batteries. We could then make hydrogen from all sorts of fuels, such as coal, gas, nuclear, wind, ethanol, corn or even solar? If this is ineed true, then we should jump on this technology like a hot potato. This may give us the energy *flexibility* we will need in 10-15 years. It may be in 20 years "microwave" power from the sun or some other strange technology may power our vehicles... without requiring a huge retooling of our consumption and distribution system.
Is what I think you're looking for. I saw the same article-- now THAT is a hybrid that would sell in the states. 400hp at 42mpg!!!
:)
Now, cut it in half and make me one that gets 200hp at 84mpg and I'm sold.
While I like these ideas, projects like this make me think that we haven't even approached the limits of efficiency in fossil fuel engines. This thing might be a concept, but VW made it now, it runs on normal diesel fuel, and gets nearly 240 MPG. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore in the near-term. While I think that pie-in-the-sky exotics are sexy, I also think that they won't be ready for production or have a working support infrastructure for years - here is something we could do now to cut our fuel usage.
A friend of mine who is a big F1 fan told me that hybrids were actually tested by several teams, but have already been banned from the rules. The system was a little different from that of consumer cars-- a tiny battery and a beefed-up alternator that could provide a short boost to the car's power. A system like this would provide a fantastic way to convert braking power into a useable kick when accelerating out of a slow turn.
Anybody know if there's any truth to this?
This one company I have been keeping my eye on called Millennium Cell has a technology called Hydrogen on Demand that seems pretty cool. They invented a way to store hydrogen in a borax solution and extract it only when needed to generate energy. The cool thing about Millennium Cell's technology is that they figured out a lot of other issues competing fuel cell companies have not. For example, they can retrofit an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen, and it's exhaust would be 100% free of carbon monoxide. They also even worked in gas stations into the equation and have figured out how to retrofit them to "refill" the hydrogen fuel cells. Also of note is that their fuel cells have a range similar to that of a full tank of gas, and takes up slightly smaller area of space. Definitely some cool R&D going on out there...
--Jon
Chrysler had a working gas turbine engine system. See here: http://www.turbinecar.com/turbine.htm
:) So, it would seem to be a natural stopgap for hydrogen. One could easily construct a pumping system that could use gas or hydrogen (or just have dual pumping systems feeding injectors at the same location.) In either case, you have a car that is perfectly capable of running on gasoline or hydrogen.
Now, this thing could run on anything that burned... even tequila
Works for me.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Any half-intelligently designed pure electric or fuel-cell electric car is going to do exactly the same thing, and therefore your in-practice efficiency is going to go up - I'd hazard a guess to the point where the energy-efficiency is about the same.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The main reason is that turbines don't rev like normal engines do. They're designed to be kept at a constant speed for long amounts of time.
They also accelerate to a higher speed slower, as well as decelerate slower (an innate characteristic of turbines)
Recent advances of CVT's (continously variable transmissions) can help ease the inherent problem with turbines, but its hardly worth taking time and research away from the hybrid and fuel cell cars, which are truly the future of automobiles (electric motors are vastly more efficient and powerful than combustions), to go back to something that was tried and failed already.
-
Who makes hybrid gas/electric cars right now? Toyota and Honda.
.
Who showed hydrogen concept cars early this year? Ford and GM. When do they expect to be ready for market? 10 years.
Which technology is really better? They're comparable
What did President Bush decide to do? End support for hybrids and spend money on fuel cells instead.
Connect the dots?
At the current state of the art, gasoline automotive engines are cleaner than most power plants. The exceptions are natural gas fired power plants. California has mostly natural gas and some nuclear electricity, so electric and/or hydrogen cars would make sense there. But the rest of the country runs on coal (or hydro, but that has its own problems). State of the art coal plants are pretty clean, but not as clean as gasoline motors. And most coal plants are nowhere near state of the art.
The new hybrid Civic is like a 4-door Insight. I believe the main difference in the drivetrain is that it uses a 4 cylinder motor instead of a 3. It has a CVT transmission, and I assume a manual too. You can read more about it at www.evworld.com.
"Hydrogen can neither be mined nor found through exploration.": Wrong.
Recently NASA discovered that large concentrations of hydrogen gas exist in the earth's rocky crust (as much as several hundred pounds of hydrogen in a cubic meter of rock). It can be mined, and as NASA has proven HAS been found through exploration. Mind you, not the same variety as "Lets blow a hole in the ground and see what comes up", but still far more available than previously believed. Essentially left over gasses from the formation of the solar system.
Mining can still be environmentally damaging if not inefficient, but still can be much more economical than existing means of hydrogen extraction.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Specifically in this very article: http://slashdot.org/science/02/04/15/1628207.shtml ?tid=134
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This sounds pretty trollish, but I'll bite...
What you're basically saying is that because banking, cars, and real estate has been a viable business in the past, we should guarantee their viability?
I personally don't like job loss, but its better for unnecessary jobs to be cut, and people find new ways of making money than to have deadweight bringing our economy down
Need a Catering Connection
We should think of hydrogen not as an energy source, but as an energy storage medium, like a battery. But batteries are too bulky and heavy, and don't have the capacity we need (low energy density). They're expensive, with a short service life, and present a huge disposal problem. Flywheels are very expensive to build, with delicate moving parts, and a dangerous failure mode. So in comparison, hydrogen looks pretty good. Plus, it comes closest to matching our existing infrastructure- vehicles, filling stations, pipelines- and producers. The trick is convincing Big Oil to become Big Hydrogen.
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
:)
(not my site, just the first mirror I could find)
I'm sure some of you have seen this, but most of you haven't. It's a device which uses aluminum as the 'storage medium' for energy. It was patented back in 1988 in Cornish, England. The original website (layo.com) no longer exists, but you can find many mirrors to the pages.
At first glance, you'll think the process is straight hydrolysis, but it's not. Pure aluminum wire (abundant in supply as welding wire today) is fed against a spinning aluminum drum. An 18Kv differential is maintained across the interface between the wire and the drum. The entire apparatus is immersed in plain old H2O.
From my admittedly lacking understanding chemically, the aluminum and the O2 bind, liberating H2 as a gas. Here's the formula they give at the websites:
2al+3h2o ---- A12 + 3H2
I know the numbers don't add up, and I know the oxygen seems to disappear, but I'm sure it's a typo. Certainly there's some slashdot expert out there can correct it.
The apparatus was supposedly test by none other than BMW back in 1981 with positive results:
"The unit as present assembled in a 2000cc car produced sufficient gas to power the engine continuously.
The aluminum consumption averaged out at 180 cm per minute over a 70 minute test run."
This device may solve the energy storage problem with excellent safety aspects, since only a small amount of H2 gas is maintained in the device at any time. The world is very experienced at taking refining aluminum, so it could easily be recycled back into the process at fueling time. Basically, you would put a wire canister and some water in your car to 'fuel up'.
I've tried for a while to find a way to develop this as a product, but I simply don't have the time. Therefore I urge the slashdot community to develop this, OPEN SOURCE even.
Zondar
Just curious.
Several people have pointed out that electric cars simply shift the point where pollution is generated from the car to the power plant. But there's a big difference between electric and hydrogen in this regard: Hydrogen can be shipped.
With wall-powered electric cars, the power generation has to occur relatively nearby - say, within a few hundred miles. With hydrogen, the power generation can occur anywhere in the world. Hydrogen canisters can be transported via container shipping.
What this means is that if the U.S. were to convert to hydrogen power, it would allow all the power generation (and therefore pollution) to be moved offshore. In essence, all the pollution from the U.S. automotive fleet could be shipped to the Third World, in exchange for hard currency - which is the traditional method used for getting rid of the rest of the "not in my backyard" unpleasant underside of the affluent U.S. (and for that matter Western European) lifestyle.
Economically, it's a win all round - though of course environmentalists will probably disagree.
-Graham
There are numerous other technical difficulties with putting turbine engines in mass-produced automobiles. There simply isnt enough reward into researching how to make it work. The best bet right now is electric motors. You do not need a transmission when you have those. If you use an entirely electrical car, you have very few moving parts anywhere.
Of course the trick is, how to generate the electricity for it...
-
So far, its the most impressive car i've seen in a long time. All the other hybrids like the insight and prius are hardly even usable and just make interesting conversation pieces. But the civic hybrid is a REAL car.
On the downside though is its $4000 added cost. When you consider the current price of gas or so, you'd have to drive it nearly 200,000 miles to get any kind of savings based on its high gas mileage.
-
Yes, there have been many high mileage cars in the past. My Rabbit diesel got 45mpg city, 50mpg hwy, and as much as 70mpg when driven at a steady 45-50mph (on a long interstate trip in a snowstorm). The 80s' CRX HF did well over 50mpg too. But both of these cars weighed barely 2000lb. They wouldn't even come close to meeting modern crash standards. They were cheaply and lightly built, lacked modern amenities like decent seats, nice stereos, and AC that works, weren't very reliable, and were slow, slow, slow. The Rabbit took 18 seconds to go 0-60, while the CRX was practically a screamer at 14. The cheapest Korean POS sold now would beat the pants off either of these cars in any category, including cost per mile.
The Insight, Prius, and now Civic are high quality, very sophisticated cars- probably the most sophisticated vehicles ever produced. They are indeed very efficient for what they are- good performing, comfortable, well-equipped, refined, smooth, quiet, and safe. And though only time will tell, probably very reliable too.
" I know gasohol turned everyone off of it, but alcohol is the best fuel to use.
:). Produces pollution (fuel cells only produce water as a byproduct). Still requires a noisy combustion engine. And it would drive the price of alcohol up, which is bad.
Just don't run out of gas between 2AM and 8AM. Or before Noon on Sunday (or Sunday at all in some states).
Seriously, though, alcohol is a lousy source of fuel compared to fuel cells. Highly flammable (well, okay, so is hydrogen
Nothing to see here. Move along.
By alcohol I am refering to rubbing alcohol. It is not taxed and not limited as to what time it can be sold. Secondly, it's cheaper than gasoline, cleaner, and when demand increases, prices will actually drop due to more production, and competition.
Secondly, alcohol is here right now, and has been for some time. Fuel cells are incredibly expensive, and are in small supply. Not to mention that there isn't a electric motor out there that can compete with a combustion engine as far as power and speed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
- http://www.toyota.com/html/shop/vehicles/prius/id
e x.html, Toyota Prius, currently available
- http://civichybrid.honda.com/, Honda Civic Hybrid, due out RSN, starting to be available for test drives
- http://www.hondacars.com/models/insight/index.htm
l , Honda Insight, currently available
- http://rav4ev.toyota.com/, Toyota RAV4 EV (it's not a hybrid, sorry), only available in CA currently
- http://uktoyotaestimasite.tripod.com/, Toyota Estima, hybrid minivan. Not currently scheduled for release in the US
- http://hybridford.com/, Ford Escape, SUV, planned to be available in 2003. Ford licensed the Toyota HEV system for this
There's a good amount of information available about clean vehicles at:The thing is though, as you continue adding weight (people, cargo, air conditioning and other amenities) the mpg curve decreases in a non-linear fashion.
So yeah, 240 mpg sounds nice, but put that motor in a real usable car and it wont get anywhere near it. It's just a showoff thing.
-
Your implied criticism is entirely unwarranted. Christine Sloane obviously gets the idea that hydrogen is an energy storage system, much more than it is a new fuel. She calls attention to this fact in the statement you quote by emphasizing that before you can use hydrogen, you need to make hydrogen, and the energy for doing that has to come from somewhere else.
It is not the least bit trivial (from an energy standpoint) to "make" hydrogen out of water. You always have to put in more energy that you will get back when you use the hydrogen. So when she says "you can make hydrogen from almost anything" she is making a statement that is reasonably accurate but hopefully won't confuse the masses who don't have a good knowledge of thermodynamics and simple chemistry.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Alcohol from corn was a subsidy program for Archer/Daniels/Midland. There was a huge subsidy program for this for years. Overall, the energy required to grow the corn, make alcohol from it, and get rid of the huge amount of waste produced seems to be about equal to the energy obtained. Some people claim the process loses energy. It definitely loses money.
...and until you can beat my three Formula Atlantic track records, don't tell me about performance.
You're forgetting the horsepower of the electric motor. I don't know what the actual rating is, but keep in mind that electric motors have a perfectly flat torque curve, with max torque available from zero rpm to redline. In the real world, horsepower should be veiwed as area under the curve rather than peak or instantaneous (ie, at a certain rpm). With this in mind, the hybrid meets or exceeds the output of its predecessor, just as Honda intended. And if you drove the hybrid, you'd see that this is true.
This is not true in practice. The Hybrid Civic's electric motor generates 13.4 horsepower @ 4000 RPM. The 1.3 L VTEC engine generates 85 @ 5700 RPM. If you were getting maximum output from both sources at once, you'd have 98 hp. This is significantly less of the 117 output by the gasoline-only Civic (with a 1.7 L VTEC-e) in my comparison. Honda doesn't even claim 98 hp, however, rather they claim 93 net hp. Perhaps the horsepower doesn't add linearly, or there's other loss.
In any case, you're wrong - this vehicle does not come close to exceeding the power of the predecessor (although non-Hybrid Civics don't seem to be going anywhere).
I'm not a smorgasbord.
Well, with the 350 N-m/258 lb.-ft. @ 0-400 rpm of torque available from my Prius' electric motors from a stop, there isn't a car that can pass me from a standing stop (say, a red light) unless I let it...
A common adage is horsepower sells cars, but torque wins races...
Info about my Toyota Prius (including MPG charts and such): http://www.kluge.net/~felicity/prius.php
-mrv
No, it doesn't add linearly, which is why I said it's the area under the curve that matters, not the peak.
Don't forget the hybrid has a CVT too, which allows peak torque or horsepower to be applied over a much wider range of road speeds.
The net result is that the hybrid meets or exceeds the performance of the Civic HX, while delivering better fuel economy.
Don't forget the hybrid has a CVT too, which allows peak torque or horsepower to be applied over a much wider range of road speeds.
As I said, the Civic HX has a CVT as well. No advantage here. The hybrid continues to fall short of the performance of the HX.
I'm not a smorgasbord.