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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?"
When you run head-on into something at 185 will the hydrogen fireball be a different color than a gasolene one?
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.
;)
let's see now if you can develop the world's cheapest car
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
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
My MythTV HowTo
German engineering and hydrogen.
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
I'm going outside right now to change the VTEC sticker on my Civic to read "HTEC".
Let's see how long it takes before some Slashdotter uses this opportunity to "accidentally" inform us that he drives a BMW.
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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...
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.
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?
In the unlikely event that the car's structure was intruded enough to damage the tank, the leaking hydrogen would escape upwards and dissipate extremely rapidly. This makes it rather difficult to be ignited by, say, sparking from electrics or hot components in the engine compartment. There is no environmental impact and no cleanup- the hydrogen harmlessly dissipates up into the environment.
In a car accident with gasoline, the gasoline pools on the ground and vapors are heavier than air. That makes them very easy to ignite. Gasoline(especially with MTBE) is cancerous and must be cleaned up, and it takes a while to do so because it's so easily ignited.
Hydrogen also requires a much higher fuel/air ratio; ie there has to be a higher concentration.
The main safety problem with hydrogen is that it is molecularly so small that hoses and seals are very hard to make for it. A balloon full of hydrogen would deflate even faster than one filled with Helium...
The REAL problem with hydrogen as a transport fuel is (repeat after me, kids!)...
HYDROGEN IS A NET LOSS FUEL. IT TAKES MUCH MORE ENERGY TO PRODUCE THAN YOU GET BURNING IT.
Oh, and the fact that the main method of production cited by our really smart President is- surprise- natural gas! Well, guess what folks- you gotta use chemicals to get the H2 out of the complex hydrocarbon of LNG, and you gotta put those leftover Carbon (and other elements) into something. Expect to see hydrogen plants which dump lots of waste in the form of toxic catalysts and leftover byproducts. Or just toss it up a smokestack and make it the problem of whoever is 5,000 miles away.
Please help metamoderate.
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!
While the coating compenents were potentially reactive, they were separated by a layer of material that should have inhibited the reaction from starting.
Alas, the Wikipedia article forgot one aspect: the mounting bolts for the canvas covering were made of steel, which allowed a static discharge to move through the canvas covering VERY quickly. Because the Hindenberg had flown near a thunderstorm just before the explosion, there was a buildup of static electricity on the entire airship and when it discharged the mounting bolts transmitted the static discharge, causing a large portion of the canvas covering to literally explode on the initial explosion.
That's why on the short-lived airship Graf Zeppelin II (LZ 130), the Zeppelin engineers switched to bronze mounting bolts for the canvas covering, so the static discharge would not be transmitted through the mounting bolts.
By the way, the Zeppelin company actually produced an internal report about the Hindenberg explosion and that report cited issues with the potential flammability of the canvas covering doping compound. Alas, that report was quickly surpressed by the Nazi government for various reasons.
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.
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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=p
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Wait a minute...
Google "hindenburg survivors" perhaps? I mean, come on, there are links on the first results page! They might not give you the number of survivors, but they definitely confirm that there were some.
For the lazy:
http://www.airships.net
http://www.vidicom-tv.com/hindenburg/making_of.htm
http://www.authentichistory.com/audio/1930s/histor y/19370506_Hindenberg_Disaster_Herb_Morrison-short .html
-Alex
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.
Car companies keep showing us all theese incredible looking prototypes, but why won't they sell us a car that looks the same? By the time a new car makes it to the salons it looks almost exactly like all the other damn cars you can choose from, and attaching a baboon's but to the rear end is considered to be a bold new design direction. yech.
The simple facts are that hydrogen is not a source of energy, but rather an energy carrier, like electricity. And hydrogen is a rather poor energy carrier at that; it's far less efficient than the electric power grid, which already exists and goes almost everywhere. Hydrogen isn't even a good energy storage medium in a car, due to its extremely low density.
The fact is that there's nothing a hydrogen fuel-cell car can do that isn't already done better, more efficiently and more cheaply by a battery EV. Just when new battery technologies like nickel metal hydride and lithium-ion were starting to prove their worth in EVs, CARB pulls the rug out from under them.
Call me cynical, but that seems to fit the facts.
Compression ratio.
A normal 8:1 compression small block Chevy V8 from the mid-80's will generate 25-50% less power on hydrogen than on gasoline. The reasons for that 8:1 compression are emissions, preignition due to octane rating, and a few other things.
Hydrogen doesn't have the preignition problems of gasoline, though, so you could run an 18:1 compression ration in the same SBC, provided the crank and main bearings can take it. This should give you close to the same power output as 8:1 on dead prehistoric things, but wouldn't be able to be run on gasoline, anymore. Nothing short of jet fuel, anyway....
The problem becomes, no after-market manufacturer makes piston/head combinations for SBC's to go over about 13:1 compression. So, without a turbo, supercharger, or ram-air, you can't get the "required" amount of power.
If you're ok with a slower car, with near-zero emissions, go for it. Otherwise, you're going to need to get engine components custom-made, which is prohibitively expensive for most hobbyists. (I know...I've already looked into doing this for a 3.8 Buick-powered 1984 Pontiac Grand Prix.)
The other alternative would be to start with a diesel engine, which will already have an appropriate compression ratio. You'll need to do some interesting machine work on the head, though, as the diesel has no spark plug holes. I don't know if a diesel fuel injector could be replaced with a standard spark plug, or whether the threads/diameter wouldn't match, though, so this could turn out to be only a minor problem. Also, diesel engines are more expensive than gasoline, due to their heavier construction. This wouldn't bother some people, but I don't have a diesel engine sitting around to experiment with.
The next thing would be to somehow connect a spark ignition system to a diesel engine block, which was never designed to use such an animal.
etc.etc.etc.etc.
Suffice it to say, there are problems with this approach. Not insurmountable, by any means, but not something average Joe Schmuck is going to do in his back yard.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
In Holland about 5% of all cars on the road (and the ones that get the most mileage) run on Liquid Petrol Gas (LPG). My car is one of them. LPG is used in the rest of Europe as well.
I have never heard of an exploding gas tank, the tanks are apparently so solid that they crush everything around them but stay intact themselves.
Forgetting to unplug the nozzle while filling up happens relatively often. There's a special weak spot in the tube that breaks in such cases. Also you have to keep a button on the gas pump depressed for the pump to operate. Release it and the gas flow stops. Driving away without unpluggng is harmless (except to your wallet). I've never heard of accidents with pumps.
There have been some accidents with LPG delivery trucks that supply the gas stations. I believe there was big one near a camping ground in Spain quite a while ago.
I can understand driving with a gas tank in your car may seem scary to people who aren't used to it, but we do so without worrying over here.
Of course, I don't know how Hydrogen compares to LPG for these purposes. That might well be a whole different story.
X.