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BMW Shows Off World's Fastest Hydrogen Car
loid_void writes "According to Reuters and others BMW unveiled the world's fastest hydrogen-powered car at the Paris auto show on Wednesday, dubbed the H2R, capable of exceeding 300 kilometers (185 miles) per hour. The are also working with Shell on hydrogen dispensing stations.
'"Our drive toward the future is called hydrogen," BMW management board member Burkhard Goeschel said before the tarp slowly slipped off the teardrop-shaped body of the sleek race car.' All I want to know, does it come with an iPod hookup?"
What I find moderately interesting about the hydrogen fuel idea is that, despite the fact that it emits only steam as a byproduct, it still takes a lot of energy to produce hydrogen. As a result, it pretty much will cause pollution regardless.
Don't get me wrong, this still reduces our dependence on oil, and will be a huge help to city pollution, but I think we need to quickly figure out some way to make hydrogen cheaply and cleanly. Maybe nuclear powered hydrogen production plants? Just thinking...
Why couldn't we use Wind-power to extract Hydrogen from water? That seems like an infinite supply of hydrogen right there...
A hydrogen car that uses an ICE misses the whole point. It doesn't improve efficiency much, given that it is still limited by the thermal efficiency of a heat engine. Moreover, although burning hydrogen doesn't produce carbon emmisions, producing hydrogen does. Finally, the higher combustion temperature increases the formation of NOx pollutants.
The reason for all the effort to create a new hydrogen fueling infrastructure is to take advantage of fuel cells/electric motors. A car with a hydrogen burning ICE is just an ordinary car that you can't refill at a gas station.
Hydrogen is obtained either from fossil fuels such as natural gas or by applying electrical power to water molecules. Ecologically, the problem of finding a regenerating source of primary energy remains. This is the single most ignored fact about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Too many people think they will solve our dependency on petroleum based fuel. They won't. On the other side of the picture, there may be advantages and economies of scale in terms of pollution in the manufacture of hydrogen. However, this issue needs to be carefully studied, instead of jumping on the magical solution bandwagon, to determine if hydrogen fuel cells are a feasible solution.
Yes it is true that the Hindenberg had rocket fuel -coated skin, which did burn rapidly and transmitted the fire throughout the structure. However, recent research has hypothesized that the skin played little role in actually starting the fire. The probable cause is actually leaking fuel from the engine fuel tanks, due to previous damage caused when they were experimenting with catching and releasing airplanes from the underside. This leaked fuel would have got into the lower areas, near the hydrogen gas. Once the fire started, it spread rapidly through the damaged areas and eventually ignited the hydrogen bags. Apparently if you examine the footage, you'll find the fire starting out on the bottom of the ship.
Apparently the new Zepplin airship is due to be launched in the next few years. While it is helium-based (to satisfy the paranoid public), it is still three-times the size of the original Hindenberg. Should be a cool ship to see. If they could find a way to still use some hydrogen, though, they'd be able carry much more cargo, although the specs without hydrogen still allow it to carry 3 times the cargo of a 747.
I wouldn't worry a bit about hydrogen in cars for day to day driving. However, paramedics and accident response teams will have to be aware of procedures for dealing with these things, just like with electric cars.
Let's not be cynical. This BMW vehicle is a significant accomplishment. It shows that a high-performance vehicle running solely on hydrogen can be built.
Now, let's just entice Honda to apply Japanese manufacturing technologies to reduce the cost of the vehicle by a factor of 1000. Please remember that the Americans invented the videotape recorder (VR), and it started out at more than $10,000 per unit. Then, Japanese companies took it and shrank the price to $50, the current price.
We should applaud this German accomplishment in automotive engineering. The BMW vehicle is certainly more amazing than the ridiculous solar-powered vehicle, which will "never" be practical. Yet, solar-powered vehicles seem to entice more interest than hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Go Deutschland!
Ford
General Motors
Shelby Cobra
[google, of course, is your friend]
And if you think there is a 'real' difference between, say, Ford and Toyota, or Chrysler and Mercedes, or GM and SAAB....You're sadly mistaken. They share designs all over. The car companies are the epitome of 'multinational'. And it's wise to let the smaller companies pioneer a new concept. They can do it faster. And if it pans out....embrace and extend.
Marketing.
This particular hydrogen vehicle is less efficient than a conventional petrol or Diesel vehicle so we're not exactly taking acheivements here.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
" I wonder how much heat it takes out of the engine? Would it be enough to see the end of water cooling for the engine?"
They would probably use water from the cooling system to vaporise the hydrogen. Propane powered cars (LPG) use this method. Using the liquid H2 to directly cool the engine would probably cause the engine block to crack.
Hydrogen can easily be generated with a solar panel, a couple of precious metal electrodes, and a big-assed water tank.
Incidentally, this is probably the most energy-efficient chemical conversion that we currently know of, as, with the exception of a small amount of impurities in the water, every single electron pumped off your negative electrode goes into breaking up one water molecule. There's no extra heat generated, there's no light, explosion, nothing. Just pure hydrogen generation.
And the other byproduct, oxygen, would be the least harmful factory byproduct of anything we currently make that could be dumped into the air, water, land, or food supply.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Get your facts straight. Yes the main source of hydrogen is natural gas (not oil like you stated, a dead giveaway that you don't know what you're talking about) but there are many other viable sources that could and will be scaled up if necessary. Hydrogen producing algae, biomass, and electrolysis are 3 examples.
Yes, because bronze is obviously non-conductive, eh? Are you sure they didn't switch to bronze because it's more corrosion resistant?
"You can also manufacture hydrogen through the electrolysis of water. This takes electricity. You get your electricity from burning fossil fuels, which like you suggest, will run out." Except that clean energy will never solve the problem of finding oil. If we discover a true source of clean energy then we still havent solved the problem of finding an alternative to oil. Two scenarios. Let's say we are running on oil based ICEs. If we find a clean source of energy, we haven't fixed anything. Let's say we are running on hydrogen based ICEs and we find a clean source of energy. Then we HAVE solved a problem. In other words, hydrogen based ICEs DO solve a problem in that they solve part of the problem that cars pose.
Really, picking on cars for emissions is by now a dead horse. The exhaust from a modern, emissions-controlled car is so clean that it is difficult to kill yourself by leaving the car running with the garage closed. There are bigger fish to fry, like tractor trailers, that emit far dirtier emissions than any modern car.
It's not even like hydrogen-burning cars are entirely clean. Sure, you can drink the water from the exhaust, but any compression engine will produce oxides of nitrogen unless they also carry a tank of pure oxygen (which would clean up a gasoline engine in much the same manner). Fuel cells are much cleaner, but I don't think they're developed enough yet for the mainstream.
The use of hydrogen makes cars more dangerous, too. To put it simply, a compressed fuel is a dangerous fuel. Any accident that breaches the H2 tank turns the vehicle into a fuel-air explosive. I don't think the public will stand for too many fireballs on the highway. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, cars almost never explode and rarely catch fire in accidents.
Worse still, a mass changeover to hydrogen as our vehicle fuel would cause huge economic upheaval. Hydrogen consumes huge amounts of power to produce, and it adds no energy to our system; it merely acts as a relatively convenient energy storage vessel. Petroleum, on the other hand, consumes very little energy to reach its refined state and contributes a large portion of our total energy use. If it were mandated today that hydrogen must replace gasoline for vehicles, energy prices across the board would probably triple.
Hydrogen makes nice PR, but it will never power vehicles until oil has become so expensive due to scarcity that we've already migrated to other, renewable energy sources.
I think the concept of an overpressure release valve is well understood by automotive engineers... so the worst case would be that you come back to find your tank empty.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Ok, so you're splitting water to get the H2 then liquifying it. Anybody care to comment on the cost per mile (km) of running on H2 vs gasoline, assuming idealized production & distribution of H2?