Very good engineering overview of the challenges, hurdles, and performance considerations involved in the development. Hydrogen combustion technology is not going mainstream anytime soon if ever.
It's a silly idea anywhere where except in aviation, and even there liquid hydrogen is voluminous enough to call for much more bulbous aircraft than the one we are used to.
For vehicles, electrolysing water to hydrogen then burning it in an engine delivers about 25% of the electrical energy you used up in creating it. Batteries and the like give you back about 85% of what you stored.
Hydrogen just seems like it needs an impractical infrastructure. Not that it couldn't have been done 100 years ago, but that it's not realistic to start from scratch today. Can hydrogen be moved by pipeline to distribution centers? Can hydrogen be moved by truck in sufficient quantities to filling stations like gasoline? I don't know much about it. Maybe it is practical to produce on a smaller scale. If a home size production capability from solar can be developed practically that would be a great energy storage medium. I seem to recall there are ways of producing H2 that are more efficient.
The gasoline infrastructure works as well as it does because we've had 100 years to adapt it to us and us to it. I don't know about hydrogen.
Then even if burning it does emit hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides are still an issue, no? I suppose it is OK to burn a rich mixture of H2 to minimize the NOx since a bit of unburned H2 is not a big deal... is it?
It just seems like EVs are such great cars in many ways! The market is still developing rapidly, but in just a few years there will be dozens of very practical EVs to choose from. So the window of opportunity of hydrogen cars will be closing quickly.
The answer to hydrogen storage, and truck or rail transport, is NOT liquid, nor gas, it's solid. Intercalation compounds store the most hydrogen per cubic meter, and have self-limiting characteristics if a leak develops.
Hydrogen aircraft are known, but got a bad reputation due to a newsreel featuring the Hindenberg, of course...
As for pipeline possibilities, that might take some new technology. Coal slurry, liquid petroleum, gaseous petroleum, town gas, all are pipe-portable, how hard can it be to add hydrogen to the list?
Evidently hydrogen is very hard to pipe to places because it is very hard to keep it from leaking.
I believe there is also a problem with hydrogen embrittlement of steel.
Not that that was problem when town gas was "water gas"
There's techniques to do it. Helium under pressure is harder (the 'weld it' technique works for helium).
That's a pity, because the environmental damage from EVs is going to be catastrophic.
It is? Care to explain?
Do you mean like this?
Very hard. It'll leak where other gases won't.
Saying something absurd will get you noticed, but you do it much too often. If you went to trouble of telling us where you'd got your silly idea from - preferably not from Zero Hedge, who are just as potty as you are - it would be more useful, which isn't saying all that useful.
Well, Bill Sloman's got involved now and all he wants is a long, protracted, drawn-out argument intended to exhibit his non-existent superior intelligence. So I'll decline to expand for that reason. Just you mark my words, though.
That is quite the oblique dodge. You can always ignore noise.
Your words have not been marked, rather they have been the opposite of marked, forgotten.
Cursitor Doom lacks the intelligence to realise that I wanted a one line cite - like one the three above - which would let me briefly dismember Cursitor Doom's claim to have any intelligence at all. Nobody argues with Cursitor Doom - he couldn't construct or recognise a coherent argument to save his soul (if he had one, which is unlikely).
A transparent lie. Cursitor Doom doesn't like coping with reality and prefers to pretend to have access to gratifyingly esoteric knowledge - which the rest of us know is fatuous nonsense designed to appeal to idiots like him.
All your words carry an implicit marker labeling them as fatuous nonsense.
Same mark as amways 0/10
Bro have you seen what the communists are up to:
Leakage of H2 isn't as much of an issue as leakage of greenhouse gases though.
Maybe newer pipelines such as Russia's NordStream II will be used to transport clean H2 from Russia to consumers in Europe.
How will they make the H2? From CH4?
ISTM that Toyota want to sell EVs and are doing some expensive marketing to show that at least one alternative is ineffective.
If you dispense with the crankshaft in a four stroke suck-squeeze-bang-whoosh engine and use a linear motor/generator to extract electrical energy you may stand a better chance.
With clever enough control electronics and a small battery, the motor/generator can dynamically alter the force on the piston without wasting energy, other than SMPS-type inefficiencies. You're no longer constrained by the mechanically-enforced almost sinusoidal motion. On ignition, for example, in a conventional engine the bang starts more or less at TDC where the piston is hardest to move - there's no reason why this should be optimal, it is a consequence of the rotary mechanism and inertia.
It /may/ be that it's better to start with eg a lower force and use a different force profile. At the end of the stroke, the MG stops the piston and drives it back using battery power with a profile optimised for exhaust. The induction and compression phases likewise, and these of course don't need to be the same length as the ignition and exhaust strokes. It /may/ be advantageous to suck slowly and squeeze quickly - I don't know, but it seems unlikely that an enforced sinusoid is necessarily optimal.
The piston comes to a halt four times during this cycle when it changes direction with no inertia from connected mechanics. At the end of the exhaust stroke, for example, it may be advantageous to keep the piston stopped if the energy demand is low.
So rather than varying the speed of the engine to vary the power output, a cycle may take a fixed optimised time but with pauses, only running continuously when needed.
I hereby donate this idea (which has probably been thought of many times before) to humanity.
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