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UK's Loughborough Uni Demos Hydrogen Motorcycle
rolandw writes "The Beeb have a piece about Loughborough University's hydrogen motorcycle and one of the UK's first hydrogen fuel pumps (presumably all developed by their excellent Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering department). Offering 50mph, the ENV will have a range of 100 miles on a 3-minute refill of hydrogen. By-products are warm air and 'drinkable' water. It will be interesting to compare these hydrogen powered vehicles with the hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles as pioneered by such as the Morgan prototype 'Lifecar' in the near future."
LUFBRA for the win!
No, it is't pronounced "Loogabarooga".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What are the byproducts of producing the hydrogen?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Or... How propaganda and political meddling manage to send science research down blind alleys for 10 years.
Sorry. The Hydrogen infrastructure not only isn't going to happen, it would be a disaster if it did.
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that someone has figured out a way to run an internal combustion engine on fuel and oxygen?
I'm flabbergasted.
I have a motorcycle that runs on red herring, slated to be the replacement of fossil fuels and answer to all our portable energy needs.
How do they keep it from floating away? Won't someone think of the humanity?!?!
(Kidding, I know it won't, I'm assuming the hydrogen is compressed and won't provide lift as a result, and have heard all about how the hindenburg burned because of rocket fuel paint, so don't start)
One of the biggest problem with non-gasoline powered vehicles is making them reasonably convenient. It's going to be very, very hard to get people to switch to electric cars that they must charge overnight and plan their daily miles accordingly. This bike looks to be just as convenient as a scooter and almost as good as a normal motorcycle. Getting 100 miles to a tank is close enough to what most riders are used to, so I don't see that being an impediment. Ditto for 3 minutes to fuel up. The 50 mph top speed is low for a motorcycle, but normal for many scooters. Given how much more popular scooters have been recently, there is definitely a market for a vehicle like this. Plus, this is a prototype, so I bet that making a bike that tops out at 80-90 mph and is capable of sustained freeway speeds is not a huge stretch.
The only question left is how much does it cost in dollars per mile traveled? I know this is hugely dependent on how the hydrogen is created and therefore the cost of electricity, but all the green thoughts in the world mean nothing to the masses if it is much more expensive than gasoline.
And then limited even lower? Half of my commute is a 60 limit.
Riding gutless motorcycles at speeds lower than the surrounding traffic is plain dangerous and damned scary, whether they're powered by hydrogen, petrol, or whatever. Impatient traffic tailgates you trying to intimidate you into going faster, or tries to overtake, forcing you into the gutter. One of the main safety features of a motorcycle is that they're quicker an nimbler than almost anything else on the road - if things look as if they're going wrong, it's common to accelerate away from the source of danger. With this bike, there's no escape route.
Hydrogen vehicles aren't going to get anywhere until they're a fully fledged road user, rather than a second class citizen.
There has been a natural gas powered motorcycle for a while. http://www.poopreport.com/Images/Fun/Farttoy/farttoy2.jpg
See, there's this thing called electricity. You get it from wind and solar panels. And if you run it through plain water, you get hydrogen and oxygen.
I piss off bigots.
How is all this hydrogen stored? From what I've seen elsewhere it's still the carbon canister kind of technology. I wouldn't feel all that peachy with that between my legs.
Or... How propaganda and political meddling manage to send science research down blind alleys for 10 years.
Sorry. The Electricity infrastructure not only isn't going to happen, it would be a disaster if it did.
...that hydrogen was measured in minutes. So, if we get 100 miles per three minutes of hydrogen, that's 2000 miles an hour! Awesome.
Can we please have a warning that we're going to be sent to a BBC flash player site?
I don't know why, but it never plays, and manages to crash my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu) reliably 90% of the time when I go to close the tab.
PDF and youtube links pale into insignificance beside whatever the BBC have managed to do to the interwebs with this abomination of a player...
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Vehicle not carrying extra protective carapace gets great fuel economy. Film at 11.
If we all drove motorcycles, we would be able to power them off gasoline, because they regularly get two to three times as many miles per gallon as cars. Except that they're wildly dangerous, because they offer no protection in a crash, especially when everybody else is driving cars.
We see the same story in cars all the time: they build a car that's little more than a motorcycle, and by taking away all of the protective (and heavy) metal, it gets huge MPG. Even if there is some sort of useful advance in the engine technology it's dwarfed by just getting rid of all the metal.
So you can build a hydrogen motorcycle. So what? We knew it could be done. All you've done is to offer us a motorcycle that's very safe because you can't refuel it anywhere so you can't actually get it out of the driveway.
Given the price of hydrogen and the pollution it creates when produced I think I'll stick with petrol thanks.
Before long, however, we'll do electrolysis of water using electricity from nukes and clean sources.
Fossil fuels are done -- get used to it. In 100 years we're gonna seem like the Victorians with their enthusiasm for steam (and lung disease), and science fiction writers will be writing "petro-punk."
I piss off bigots.
it is combusted in oxygen which forms everyones favourite molecule H2O.
Dihydrogen Monoxide? That needs to be banned! It is found in CANCER cells! OIL COMPANIES use it! NUCLEAR COMPANIES use it! Even HALIBURTON uses it!
This menace must be stopped!
Don't mean to troll here on the coolness factor of running an engine on water which was a previously bad thing to add to the fuel line. Can anyone point me to any discussion about this in the public debate?
Something like this? Looks like it's rather similar to existing vehicles to me.
If we all drove motorcycles, we would be able to power them off gasoline, because they regularly get two to three times as many miles per gallon as cars.
Better fuel economy, wildly more pollution.
Every car built since 1975 has a catalytic converter.
Cats on motorcycles are a relatively new and uncommon feature.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Did anyone notice the front forks, brakes and wheel? Looks like they were taken from my downhill bike! Safe at 50mph? Hmm..
Er, yes it is, actually. What you have here is a very small, slow bike, much slower than the one I learned on as a teenager, and by the look of it with skinny tires and reduced mudguards to reduce weight and wind/rolling resistance. But the tank is the size of a large bike tank. You are in effect asking for a machine with about 4 times the hydrogen capacity, and this is a very big scale up indeed. How close do you want to be to a large tank full of compressed hydrogen?
The known problems of hydrogen as a fuel are:
.By contrast, the all-electric Vectrix is already commercialised and really needs no more than a conversion to lithium batteries to be fully practical. At this point, EVs are already way ahead of hydrogen on ALL the problem areas noted.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well it's no surprise that there's accidents if everyone is trying to control two vehicles at the same time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm waiting to see whether Vectrix manage to get any traction. The Vectrix scooter has quite a lot of low down acceleration, a 62mph top speed, and lots of bodywork which make it look big on the road. To a car driver it just looks as if colliding with it would be a bad idea. (In fact it would, the battery pack is heavy.) It also has big disk brakes and proper motorcycle tyres. I can imagine myself commuting on one quite happily, but not on the overgrown pedal bike in the article. I'm afraid this hydrogen thing, like the Morgan-based thing referenced elsewhere, is vaporware. Battery electric vehicles are already being commercialised after a few false starts, and people are starting to invest in them. Hydrogen is popular with the oil companies because it looks like it keeps their business model alive, but not with anyone else.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."