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Toyota Names Upcoming Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car
An anonymous reader writes Toyota has announced the name of its new hydrogen-powered car: Mirai, which means "future" in Japanese. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said: "Today, we are at a turning point in automotive history. A turning point where a four-door sedan can travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, can be refueled in under five minutes and emit only water vapor."
To put this in perspective, California is aiming for 100 fueling stations by 2024 and as of May this year only 9 actually existed.
"California, Oregon, New York and five other states pledged to put more than three million zero-emission vehicles on their roads by 2025"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...
I can guarantee that the combustion products will not leave the engine at -40.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This car is going to have a major problem with most people because
The first time there's' a catastrophic failure the 24 hour news stations are going to be showing old films of the Heisenberg. Hydrogen will become the really scary new (again) bogyman. "Oh, the humanity"
But no one will think of all of the gasoline powered cars that came equipped with exploding gas tanks. Chrysler Jeeps being the most recent I can think of.
Why would they show films of the Uncertainty Principle?
Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it
How many batteries can be completely recharged in under five minutes?
Compressed gas? Cryo-slush (unlikely!)? Metal Hydrides?
And, of course, hydrogen - like batteries - is just a storage mechanism. The power still need to be generated somewhere, and there are the typical transitional losses.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Toyota is currently considered as one of the best companies and great strategic planners. Pioneers too. I did follow the development of this innovation and it is worth saying that Toyota has invested billions of dollars into this project. The same way they have invested in gas-hybrid prototype currently known as Prius.
There will be Hydrogen energy skeptics, the same way there was a reasonable skepticism towards electric cars. Most of the skeptic comments coming from the opponents of electric cars are actually, valid. Such as electric cars are being charged with the coal burned electricity.
The key risk will be mentioned that Hydrogen is extremely volatile and combustive. BMW has developed hydrogen powered cars long time ago. Toyota has actually solved the issue by developing fuel cell. Fuel cell basically is a sponge of certain minerals which chemically absorbs hydrogen so that it is not that volatile.
I am taking a risk and predicting that in ten and fifteen years there will be marketed systems that will convert photovoltaic energy to hydrogen, which will be used to fill Hydrogen cars.
Do not listen too seriously to those who say that there will be no hydrogen refill stations. A decade ago there were not too many electricity recharge stations (though you could recharge your car home). I am sure Toyota has a plan in their sleeve to be in the hydrogen business.
While former criticism for current EV cars was valid, there will be valid complains for Hydrogen cars, let's not forget the key thing: competition is actually a good thing. Embrace it, because even if you are driving a gas car, hydrogen cars will keep the price of gas down due to lower oil demand. Win-win.
I meant the "exahust" out the tail pipe. Where I work it would be great to power our equipment with fuel cells in the Arctic/Antarctica, but there's no way to get rid of all of that water vapor exhaust. It will eventually build up into a big chunk of ice. And if everyone starts using this you can't just let it drip on to the road in cold climates, or the road will be covered with ice, and you can't keep it in some tank where it will freeze. I guess there will just have to be some oil-buring heater add-on that evaporates it. :)
seriously, folks, I gotta tell ya, it drives 300 miles, period. there is one fuelling station in the country, out in the toolies, because of zoning rules. 400 miles from the dealer.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I think he meant that he was uncertain about the name.
"Prius" is Latin for "before" while "Mirai" is Japanese for "Future." Kind of sets a bold statement; an old language for hybrids and a new language (Japanese roughly dates back to the 8th century) for the purported future of cars ... which still has yet to be determined.
Contrast this with Nissan, another Japanese automobile manufacturer, which has invested so deeply into battery technology that if the Leaf were to fail, it's quite likely that they'd become a battery company. (A while back, I read (or watched?) a really compelling article/documentary on Nissan's battery research. It concluded that Nissan was gambling so heavily on both its own future with the Leaf and the future of automobiles as being electric that the company would likely stop making cars if the Leaf were to fail. Sorry I can't find a good citation to that.)
The presumption that Hydrogen Fuel Cells will be the "next" car fuel (after either gas or after electric) is still quite a strong one. I've seen it painted (iirc, by the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?) as something the oil companies latched onto because it competed with electric cars (which are ready now) and because hydrogen fuel cell cars are still quite a distant future prospect.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Standard Oil was already huge when ICE cars started being made. Most of the infrastructure for refining and delivering gas was already in place.
Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.
Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).
There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.
On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.
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Hydrogen is still a stupid idea.
Look, either go full 100% electric and just put in chargers everywhere, or use CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and just forget this nutty hydrogen idea. Hydrogen is hard to obtain and store and there is no existing distribution infrastructure to speak of.
Does anybody here know where we get most of our industrial hydrogen gas? From Natural Gas. Guess what? We already have a distribution infrastructure in most of the States for Natural Gas. We should just cut to the chase and go to CNG which burns very clean with a minimum of modifications to existing engines. All this hydrogen talk is just hype..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yes, but batteries aren't a cryogenic liquid that embrittles everything it touches. Ooops.
You think hydrogen stored for use in commercial fuel cell vehicles is stored cryogenically.
Cute.
I can see why you didn't log in.
How many batteries can be completely recharged in under five minutes?
How many people really care?
If your battery can take you 300 miles before needing a 30-40 minute charge, that would be absolutely fine for most people. Maybe a slight delay compared to what they would normally do (a five minute stop, not very good from a safety point of view...) but that is offset by the advantage of being able to charge at home or at work, meaning time saved not going to the petrol station once or twice a week. They money saved on fuel would also pay for a rental if they were really desperate, and live in a country with poor rail infrastructure.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Isn't the temperature a result of high pressure? As in, if you jam enough atoms into a space eventually they have less room to move and get colder? I'm sort of basing this off observation of my air compressor relief valve and not science. Air duster canisters can generate frost. That kind of thing.
So pressurizing a bunch of hydrogen would mean if it ruptures and someone touches the canister, instant frostbite.
What about the "destroying everything it touches" part?
ps: I am a different AC than OP.
The Ideal Gas Law determines what happens to a gas under pressure: PV = nRT
Pressure is proportional to volume, so if you compress a gas it shrinks in volume until eventually it liquefies - but the point at which it does depends on the phase diagram for that particular gas. The properties change depending on the molecules.
If you release pressure quickly then it expands very rapidly and cools down. This is a function of thermodynamics. Similarly, if you compress a gas it will heat up for the same reason. This is common to all gases. Jamming the molecules in ever tighter will increase the temperature. Your air compressor heats up when it is compressing air because of this. When you let the pressure out, the temperature of the air drops rapidly.
Where things like hydrogen are special is that you can't liquefy them by simply pressurising it. You need to cool it down too - the triple point of hydrogen is about 22 K and the critical point is about 32 K - hydrogen simply can not be a liquid at any pressure unless the temperature is between these two values (22 K is -251 C or -420 F - cryogenically cold temperatures).
Any gas under pressure is a hazard - cylinders of nitrogen are pressurised to 300 bar and if one of those ruptures you're in a world of hurt, despite the fact that nitrogen itself is inert, but we routinely handle high pressure gasses in industrial and commercial environments. You take more precautions with a hydrogen cylinder (or any cylinder of flammable gas), but the handling procedures for flammables overlap a lot with the non-flammables like nitrogen and argon.