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How to Reach 200 MPH on Hydrogen Fuel Cells
the_manatee writes "Ford's 999 hydrogen-powered speedster is making waves for its upcoming speed record attempt in the Bonneville Salt Flats, but details on what's actually going on under the hood have been scarce. As it turns out, there are NASCAR-style brakes, steering, and suspension components, along with 16 Ballard Mk902 fuel cells that produce 350 kW of electricity. All that juice spins up a 770-hp motor and the rest is (hopefully) history. One final ingredient: 400 lbs of ice for cooling, which will melt in seconds once the car gets up to speed."
An AC induction motor has the highest power/weight density of all electric motors. Brushless DC motors are only competitive for very small motors. Even so, they could probably get a better power/weight number by burning the hydrogen in a modified internal combustion engine or in a jet engine.
I for one welcome our new ice-cooled overlords.
Grammar Nazi
Why does the same link need to be posted twice in the summary?
I'll have photos up on Jonesblog in the next couple of days on this effort and others out at the Bonneville Salt Flats here .
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
350 kw = 469 hp. Why the 770 hp motor?
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Lessee here. 1 kW = 1.34 horsepower. So if they're generating 350 kW, that's 456 horsepower. Where is the other 300 coming from?
Stupid tech journalists strike again.
-=rsw
From TFA:
The pressurized helium/oxygen mixture allows the fuel cells to generate more power than ambient air because of its higher oxygen content, and high-pressure storage eliminates the need for an air compressor
Nice. I expect the common press to make that kind of mistake, but you'd think that Popular Mechanics would get it right.
Frankly, I don't consider this "details". "NASCAR style brakes, suspension and steering" doesn't say much, unless they're literally identical to the NASCAR stuff Ford uses in their "Fusion."
FYI, that car is no more a "Fusion" than a NASCAR "Fusion" is; they're both entirely tube-frame chassis cars with shells that are approximately the same shape, and then overlaid with graphics to fool the eye into thinking they're shaped more like the car they're claiming it is.
There isn't a single component in the car in common with the production Ford Fusion. Hasn't been true in over a decade or more in NASCAR.
Please help metamoderate.
I guess in a way, it's showing that alternative fuels can do good things, but it just seems to be about making alternative fuels too difficult to use.
Someone reading this might thing "Wow, looks like there's a LONG way to go because Hydrogen Fuel Cells can be useful on a consumer vehicle. Oh well, I'll just buy an Explorer."
If they actually cared about alternative fuels or electric vehicles, they'd be making ones that are practical and could be mass produced.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
According to an article published at Popular Mechanics last summer, the cost to make hydrogen is $3 per kg on a GE's 10' x 20' machine. It looks pretty easy indeed.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Strap a rocket to the back, duh!
I would think that at these high speeds, you should be able to duct a little bit of air over the battery and get all the cooling you could possibly need.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's all over for H2 when I see a mushroom cloud over the salt flats.
Why do they need ice to cool the car? 350kW is not so different from some other high-performance cars and fuel cells should produce less waste heat than other engines. Certainly they could cool this car with an ordinary radiator.
Idiot. N2. O2. CO2. Yes
H2 no. It's a bit reactive in the presence of oxygen. That's kind of related to the fact it stores energy and all.
Did I mention idiot?
How do you make a hydrogen fuel cell car move 200 MPH?
;-)
Get a regular hydrogen fuel cell car and drop it out of an airplane!
As it turns out, there are NASCAR-style brakes, steering, and suspension components...
Piloting an experimental vehicle with this kind of power / weight ratio @ 200mph requires some pretty serious steering and braking equipment.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There is not any significant quantity of H2 in the air, for at least two reason: it reacts with Oxygen (suprise!), which there is a lot of, and it would tend to drift to the top of the atmosphere and escape into space (even Helium does this to some extent).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
AC, how many cold boxes have you designed? Mine are in Dallas, Wabash, Seoul, Flin Flon, Hamilton and Inchon.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0 428148420070705?feedType=RSS&rpc=22&sp=true
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This shows that what is needed is more research on higher capacity batteries, from the capacitor type which charges in seconds, to having exponentially more energy density per pound.
Its a lot easier to engineer a power distribution and charging electrical system, compared to having multiple systems to handle highly explosive gas as well as an electrical system. Its also a lot easier to generate electricity, pipe it into a charging system, compared to the energy used to split water into H2 and O2.
I used to like fuel cells, and thought a H2 based economy would be a good thing, but I'm having second thoughts now, because once batteries are able to carry a respectable energy density, there is pretty much no need for carrying H2 around anywhere.
I studied my bit of physics as EE major, but can't one of you smart young things figure out how to make use of heat as energy, rather than wasting extra energy to cool them off? Heat is a energy in a purest form, and why are you double-wasting it by: not making use of it as energy source, and why spend extra energy to get rid of it?
Go ahead and try to score a speed record like this. You will have to go in the opposite direction after a short time, and the average speed of both runs will count for your record attempt.
Now, filling a balloon with the hydrogen might get you up...
How do you make a hydrogen fuel cell car move 200 MPH?
I'd rather have a hydrogen fuel cell car that did 200 MPG.
We are all just people.
Wow, putting 400 pounds of ice too get this thing up to 200MPH is so completely retarded, is this what passes for engineering at Ford?. Like, wow, look we got our oh so powerful GM four-cylinder up to 200mph we just needed 400 pounds of rocket propellant to keep the ride "hot".
In this case by the 300 mph hydrogen fuel cell Buckeye Bullet.
http://jalopnik.com/cars/alternative-energy/300%2
I have bottles of it on my desk right now .. in the ratio of 2 hydrogen to 1 oxygen .. whats it called again? di-hydrogen monoxide or something.
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Two words:
Car Cannon.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Here's a question...
The exhaust of a hydrogen car is mostly warm water vapor - the same output as a humidifier.
If the whole planet switched to hydrogen, what would be the overall effect of running a billion humidifiers on our roads? Would Arizona suddenly become as humid as Florida?
Seems like a liberal reading of the various articles. $8 / kg with a goal of $3 / kg was in the GE article. The 'traditional' costs were $1k / kg. Whereas the Hydrogen Fuel Cell in the Pop Mech article showed to be the most expensive annual cost of all available options. Compressed Natural Gas was half way between petrol and electricity. If the projected advances in Hydrogen synthesis reduce costs, and containment technology advances as well, I take Pop Mechanics to project Fuel cells at 68% of gas prices..
Of course a lot has changed since this article.. They show petrol at $2.34/gal, whereas I'd say it's more like $3.0 for all intents and purposes of current and future projections. They also rank electricity costs at $0.10 / KHW, whereas in my area it's $0.06 to $0.09 depending on time-of-day and time-of-year. Granted this is because of the regulated monopoly so this is really much below market rates.
All things considered, a plugin-in hybrid (where the hybrid part can be bio-diesel or E85 gas or whatever) makes the most sense to me.
I'm very much against growing fuel though. Currently in the US this means taking US subsidy dollars to product corn which is of the lower efficiency crops from which to produce fuel.. Corn prices world-wide rise as a result. But so do fertilizer costs and other costs of agreculture.
-Michael
The Southern California Timing Association will have the results of this year's Bonneville trials on-line, along with many photos. Today is the first day of the trials, so no results are in yet. There's still daylight out on the flats.
The article mentions using a 6-speed manual--the same transmission used in the Ford GT. I would have a few questions about this: ;-)
Why go manual instead of automatic? (I'm guessing because it's a race car
Can the transmission handle the torque? In my understanding, electric motors generally have an even amount of torque throughout the rpm range.
Can this transmission handle the extra juice on startup? I have no idea how much torque a Ford GT has in comparison to what this thing can output.
How about the clutch?
This thing looks so cool!
If the point of $ per kg and per gallon is to establish some sort of direct comparison between fuels, I suggest making sure that a kilogram of hydrogen fuel is comparable to a gallon of gas in terms of distance.
I hear it is not.
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Open Source Sysadmin
you forgot to mention idiot ;)
I should report you to HomLanSec for possession of that stuff. But then again, they would likely not be able to tell the difference between that and regular Water. It's probably safe if it's cut with fluoride.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The kg-gallon comparison is based on energy. The fuel cell's efficiency is about 2-3 times higher than the efficiency of gas internal combustion engines.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Parent post is so nonsensical that it must be a troll.
i on.htm
Luckily, hydrogen is easy to produce. You just suck in atmospheric air, distill the contents and, voila! H2.
Let's check Wikipedia. What's the atmosphere made out of?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere
Oh, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor... and 0.002% "other". Even if almost all of "other" was H2, that's a ridiculously small yield. And every other gas will liquefy at a higher temperature than the H2, so you will have to deal with everything else first and only at the end get the H2.
Let's double check. Look up "Hydrogen" in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
Oh look, less than 1 part per million of the atmosphere is H2, and practical methods for producing H2 don't mention chilling the atmosphere.
Let's triple check. Google search for "methods hydrogen production". Here's one result:
http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Hydrogen/Product
Nope, still not listed.
I suppose it might be possible to use a "cold box" to produce some hydrogen, but I'll bet the electricity costs would be far higher than simply buying some hydrogen from a gas company. If you wish to claim otherwise, please provide references.
But it sure looks to me like you are just trolling, in which case: shame on you.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Hey champ, what do you think "water vapor" is made from?
WATER! And what is water made out of? Oxygen and __________
It will be fun, I'll let you fill in the blank.
An AC induction motor has the highest power/weight density of all electric motors. Brushless DC motors are only competitive for very small motors.
Er, no. A "brushless DC" and a "variable-frequency synchronous AC" motor are the same thing. Smaller motors tend to be called "brushless DC" and are driven by "motor controllers", while larger motors are called "variable-frequency AC" and are driven by "drives" or "inverters". The threshold is around 1KW. The difference in terminology comes from different industries.
All motors are AC at the windings, or they'd reach a steady state position and stop. "Commutation" refers to the means provided to switch power to the windings so the motor continues to chase the minimum position for the magnetic field. Commutation can be performed with brushes and a commutator (which is just a drum of contacts), with external electronics, or simply borrowed from the power line frequency. "Brushless DC" and "variable AC" motors are driven by external electronics. They're usually at least 3 phase devices; this allows starting from a stationary position without the possibility of being stuck at a neutral point.
This concept scales up just fine. Here's the General Electric AC6000, the most powerful locomotive in the world, driven by 3-phase AC variable-frequency motors. The software, written in C++, locks all the wheels together as if they were geared together, even though there's a separate motor for each axle. This allows more tractive effort without wheel slip than any previous locomotive. There are thousands of these locomotives (mostly the smaller AC4400, but a few hundred of the big AC6000) in use today.
its been a while, but I believe one advantage is that AC motors can be both brushless while not needing a permanent magnet.
Wow, that's even stupider than the original idea. Put air in a cold box, extract the water as dew, and then separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. Instead of, you know, just getting some water and then separating it. Oh it's too simple to just get some water, let's set up a refrigerator and get our water from the AIR! Thanks for this brilliant idea!
One final ingredient: 400 lbs of ice for cooling, which will melt in seconds once the car gets up to speed.
Not really the most ... practical ... automobile, is it?
"Excuse me, but could you forklift that ice block a little faster? I'm late for work!"
Anyone who has a basic knowledge of physics knows hydrogen is stupid. If you have electricity, use batteries - you can skip the 400 pounds of ice and twenty five other major problems with trying to convert good electricity into hydrogen and back again. It will never work for terrestrial applications. See: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2005/12/hydrogen-a gain-tweedle-dumb-and.html
and
http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp
Hydrogen is dumb. Hydrogen is a bad idea.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
Just objectively, the Buckeye Bullet 2, made at the Center for Automotive Research at OSU (where I work) will soon beat whatever record this car creates. This car is designed for speed, rather than using some bulky Ford Focus shape. I have seen it in person; it is very large and very powerful. The engine is simply massive, and the fuel cells are the size of V8s.
http://buckeyebullet.com/vehicle.htm
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
and all the ricers out there ran to the bathroom and bust a nut.
And the energy density of gasoline should be very much higher.
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Open Source Sysadmin
Just use your hydrogen fuel cell to ignite your solid fuel rocket engine... done!
Kinda like having a 250 HP engine in your car when you only need to drive 20 MPH. In other words, your engine has the potential to provide maxium HP when needed even if you never use it.
No... It sounds more like a car salesman claming the car can reach 200mph when it physically cannot move faster than 70mph.
A 770hp engine cannot put out 770hp unless it has at least (really more than) 770hp (power) from some other energy source. In other words, the engine is tested and found to put out 770hp, then it is called a 770hp engine.
Fossil fuels are the 'fruit' of millions of years worth of energy absorbed by plants and animals and this energy source is near its end since we are using it a million times faster than it can renew itself - hundreds of millions of years worth of it has been used in less than 200 years of modern industry... claiming that oil has a net positive energy balance is very short-term thinking... even more so when that particular energy source has less than a century left to it.
Ethanol is the new craze but producing it requires both surface area and a significant energy investment... most of the energy comes from the sun but the machinery that runs the plant also needs power to regulate production parameters and process the algae (a fairly new approach expected to have better yields) until it becomes usable fuel. The problems with ethanol is that it cannot sustain a worldwide switch (I guesstimate we currently need about one square mile per 60k people... so that's ~150k square miles for a full-scale ethanol switch) and on the pollution side, ethanol requires perfectly tuned engines to burn cleanly or it can quickly become worse than biodiesel in the nitrous monoxide department.
The problem with batteries is that they are no match for the range and power currently taken for granted with the combination of internal combustion engines and liquid fuels. While hydrogen does kind of suck in terms of energy/gallon, it looks much better in terms of energy/weight compared to batteries and gasoline.
Another "new" energy source I have issues with is the "renewableness" of geothermal energy - surely there is a limit to how much energy can be extracted from the planet's core before bad/unexpected things start to happen. If we started poaching geothermal energy like we poached fossil fuels, I wonder what sort of surprises we are going to run into... I (almost) can't wait for the first GW-class geothermal power plants to find out.
That's because he's wrong. There is an insignificant amount of free H2 in the atmosphere. Wot wiv it burning with oxygen (none of that around ey?) to be become water. I think he's an idiot.
They come up w/an impractical, overpriced & crude application of the work they put to better use in a testbed van.
,http://www.fuelcells.org/info/library/fchandbook. pdf
Yep, somewhen in the middle 60's Ford made a experimental Econoline van that was powered by fuel cells.
Need some sleep? Try
TFA (yes, I actually read it, but skipped the video) left me wondering about a couple of things...
Why use a 574 kW (770 hp) motor when the fuel cells' output is only 350 kW? Or do the cells have a peak rating that high? Or perhaps they're planning ahead for an upgrade?
Another thing, why put a manual transmission in line with an electric motor, seeing how sophisticated AC motors and drives are these days? There are trains accelerating from zero to 200 mph with AC motors, at most they have a fixed gear ratio between motors and wheels, and all speed control is done electronically.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
It's not HARD to produce hydrogen, but it consumes energy. A fair amount. In fact, by the time you make hydrogen, and then transport it, store it in various locations, then convert it back to energy, you would have been lots better off just using the electricity to charge a battery and then using that power directly.
Hydrogen is only being pushed because if we go to hydrogen, the companies that own the infrastructure of refining and transporting fuels get to stay in business. If we eventually go to batteries, they're largely out of business. They're not stupid, they know they only have a few decades of fossil fuel absolute dominance left, and it takes that long to develop an entire new economy and fleet of vehicles, so they're funding research on something that looks like it will keep them in business.
Hydrogen is only being pushed because if we go to hydrogen, the companies that own the infrastructure of refining and transporting fuels get to stay in business.
Nice conspiracy-sounding words, but there are real engineering reasons. The existing North American pipeline network cannot handle hydrogen. A liquid hydrogen road tanker costs over a million dollars because of the materials needed and the complexity. GH2 tube trailers are not quite so expensive, but then you are dealing with the concept of very high pressure.
If you have excess energy, you can employ peak shaving and generate H2. The only practical way to do this in North America (besides Quebec with its abundant Hydro power) is to use nukes.
There is no one easy solution to energy supply issues and wishing/complaining doesn't make things happen.
If it flips over, it'll be the
666
True that is a bit of apples to oranges. The GE hydrogen box talked about KG of hydrogen.. Whereas the Pop Mechanics article talked about Gallon-of-Petrol equivalent (matching energy densities). The flip side in the P.M. article is that the Petrol equivalence in energy density showed tremendous MPG advantages for the non petrol methods. So really you have to exclusively look at $ / mile, as that's the only practical comparison (at least from an Economist's perspective).
They took 3k miles as a base-line for all their comparisons, and showed what the total dollars would have been for each fuel-type. In my blog-entry, I took the G.E. statement that they can currently product at $8 / xxx and eventually want to produce at $3 / xxx.. This implied a total reduction of $ / mile all else being equal. The P.M. numbers show raw Hydrogen synthesis is more expensive end-to-end than petrol, but if the ratio of efficiency achieves projections, it will become 32% cheaper than petrol end to end. This will become moreso if Petrol prices rise (which they must eventually) - assuming Hydrogen synthesis is independent of Petrol.
One important thing to keep in mind.. My understanding is that we do NOT use electrolysis for Hydrogen synthesis at the moment. There are cheaper non-renewable methods.. So the actual costs of Hydrogen synthesis as they exist today will NOT scale to meet the current petrol demands! Prices will definitely rise in the medium-run if Hydrogen use grows. If you don't accept this assertion, I can go research it - just so I'm not completely heresay.
-Michael
http://buckeyebullet.com/2 0.php
http://www.osu.edu/features/2007/bullet/
http://engineering.osu.edu/news/archive/2007/0704
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_Bullet_2
Go Bucks!
Their run Saturday was listed as "no start". Hopefully their luck will improve before the trials end. The article doesn't talk about it, but using #999 is historically significant for Ford. Henry Ford I built and sometimes drove Ford #999 more than 100 years ago. He set a land speed record in its twin, "Arrow". Ford built a replica of #999, which now in the Motor Sports Hall of Fame collection.
I don't suppose anybody can figure out how 350kw can generate 770 hp, since 350kW is only 469.4 hp at 100% efficiency. Maybe they have their facts wrong, or does half the power come from magic?
There is no one easy solution to energy supply issues and wishing/complaining doesn't make things happen.
I'm not just wishing, I'm personally doing more to cut energy consumption and CO2 emission than almost anyone else I know, but I wish the government wouldn't push the most hype and dollars towards one of the less promising technologies.
Thankfully there's at least a LITTLE sense creeping back in; they're at least TALKING about building new nuke plants again. I'll believe it when I see it though; the same NIMBY idiots that have been stopping wind development will certainly try to stop nukes.
No relation to Galaxy Express 999?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
All this stuff looks reasonable. You seem to know what you are talking about. So why the hell did you write the nonsense about distilling atmosphere for H2 using "cold boxes"? Did someone else type on your keyboard or what?
I once calculated that a 3 gallon-per-minute shower involving a 40 degree C temp. boost (the intake temp. in the Canadian winter is not high) draws about 32kW (mostly extracted from the giant heat resevoire known as a hot water tank). If my math was correct, this car provides enough power to heat ten shower stalls on an instantaneous basis.
% 2F+gram+*+3+gallons+%2F+minute+*+1+kg%2Fliter+*+40 &btnG=Search&meta=
Hells bells, I got the same answer again:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=4.184+joules+
why the hell did you write the nonsense about distilling atmosphere for H2 using "cold boxes"?
Because I've seen highly-rated posts claiming that this was one way of "producing" hydrogen. My replies (and no one else's) refuting this never got modded-up, just as this one never will.