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?"

Comments

Isn't -

[thewldisntenuff]

Hydrogen pretty dangerous stuff? I mean, I know it's quite explosive....(From what I recall from freshman chem :) ) Does anyone remember the Hindenberg?

Which brings my question - how do you stablize hydrogen so it's not so explosive?.....A car accident could spell disaster if not properly contained...Or am I wrong?

-thewldisntenufff

Re:Isn't -

[DavidTC]

That's the gag. You have a gas leak while your car's sitting in the garage, you might have a mess and possibly a flameout.

You have a hydrogen leak, and someone walks in and flips on the light switch...

I hope, if they're going to do this, they're at least going to have the sense to perfume the hydrogen, like they do natural gas, so we can go 'Oh, crap, hydrogen leak' and run like hell.

I don't really understand the logic of hydrogen cars. If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant?

I mean, I'd understand if we had some magical source of hydrogen, and we didn't want to lose power though the overhead of power transfer and batteries...but we don't. We have absolutely no way of getting hydrogen, outside of fossil fuels, that doesn't use up more electricity than we put into it. I've never heard of any way even proposed to get said hydrogen.

The entire concept is completely illogical, it sounds like someone realized you can burn hydrogen and get water, slept through an enviromental film, and built a 'clean' car. Hey, I can build a car that takes a continual supply of D batteries, by that logic it's a clean car.

And I have to point out the same applies to anything, thanks to thermodynamics. Everything on earth either exists at the lowest energy state, or at least will stay there if we make energy from it. We can't go around breaking up H20 and burning the H to get power, and anyone who's ever had any physics will easily explain why.

The only exceptions are things that are ultimately powered by the ouside, such as solar, wind, water, and tidal power. (Although geothermal, while a closed cycle, is not incredibly likely to run down in any measurable time. And the same with fussion and fission.)

Not if well designed and tested

[stryders]

I wouldn't compare a giant bag full of hydrogen to a modern car engineered by a company well known for its safety engineering. Here's an older article that discusses their safety (scroll a bit) on CNN

How to keep it cool?

[Dog's_Breakfast]

From the BMW web site:

"...the specially insulated 140-liter tank for the liquid hydrogen provides a range of 400 kilometers....By cooling hydrogen to -253 degrees Celsius, hydrogen is shrunk to a thousandth of its original volume. 70 layers of aluminum and fiberglass sheets between the exterior and interior vehicle walls insure that the liquid hydrogen remains at extremely low temperatures."

What I don't understand is how they manage to keep it at such a low temperature. If the tank warmed up to the normal temperature of the surrounding environment, the pressure inside the tank would be 1000 times greater than sea level. Wouldn't that pose a danger of explosion?

Mazda has a hydrogen-powered rotary

[ikekrull]

Mazda's rotary engine is well suited to the combustion of hydrogen, not least because it completely separates the intake, combustion and exhaust stages - with a piston engine there is a lot of potential for catastophic backfire, and high performance without any valve overlap (which would somewhat prevent this) is difficult to acheive.

The renesis (side-ported intake and exhaust - 'normal' rotaries have peripheral exhaust and often intake ports and intake/exhaust port overlap is employed to maximise performance at high revs, resulting in the characteristic 'brap-brap-brap' pulsing idle of a race or drag rotary engine and incredibly poor fuel economy at low revs) rotary engine doesnt suffer from this problem, allowing high-revs, aggressive induction and exhaust port profiles, along withthe light weight and excellent power-weight ratio rotaries inherently possess.

The current hybrid engine in the RX-8 only produces about 120hp when operating on hydrogen which isn't exactly stunning, but bear in mind that the original RX-7 produced less than this, while the last model to roll off the production line produced in excess of 280.

400+ HP is relatively easily acheiveable with proper porting, fueling and turbocharging of the 1.3 litre 13B engine on petrol, and with further development (or even tuning for hydrogen-only operation) it is not too far fetched to imagine the hydrogen-powered rotary performing on par or better than conventional fuels.

More info can be found:

http://rotarynews.com/?q=node/view/216

and a hydrogen--powered RX-8 looks like:

http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/frame.php?file=pi c. php&imagenum=1&carnum=1792