Rasa, a hydrogen-powered city car for the masses

[RedDevil]

I am quite interested in hydrogen powered cars from a technological viewpoint.
I see more possibilities on the fuel cell side than on the feeding an ICE with hydrogen gas side, especially when those fuel cells can also use methane or alcohol or glucose, you name it, as an intermediate fuel source. That would fix or circumvent some of its problems.
It would allow for a true EV/hydrogen hybrid, which may be the best of both worlds.

[Astro]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

So which comes first? The road or the cars? I won't buy the car if you don't have a charging road. Who is on the hook to build and maintain the road charging sections? So, you want to put charge pads under roads that need repair. How about the little used roadways that will be decades in the backlog of repairs? How about the long private roads that lead to private homes and businesses?

Sort of like hydrogen cars without hydrogen available at every service station.
There will always be early adopters of technology.
But unlike hydrogen there is already large numbers of all electric vehicles out there.
Just as drivers of petrol cars paid to convert to LPG or go dual fuel so to will electric car drivers retrofit road charging to their vehicles if the road they commute on gets charging installed. Car manufactures could offer road charging as an option on new vehicles.
It doesn't need to be an all or nothing deal. Just because every road doesn't have road charging it doesn't mean nobody will buy it.

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

So you say you can "pulse charge" a capacitor with enough charge for a few kilometers. Have you calculated the energy transfer needed? What will be your current and voltage to provide such an energy pulse? What will be your air gap? What happens if another vehicle is in close proximity to such a pulse? What will be the effect of the resultant electro-magnetic radiation on your vehicle systems? Have you had this discussion with other EEs and Physicists as I have?

I am not an EE or a physicist but i don't think they are all knowing either. EE's not involved in the technologies development may have questions and may even have their doubts but i don't think they would say it was impossible or dangerous without first studying in detail the technology. And probably not until they had actually tested the equipment.
If the EE's involved in the development of the road charging systems believe they have a marketable and safe system then who am i to question them. There is more than enough bureaucracy in place to ensure the technology is safe before being allowed on the roads. Actually considering the possible fears that could easily be placed in the general public i would imagine the technology would need rigorous testing to allay those fears.
I have a friend who will not eat micro waved food because it has been exposed to radiation and they don't want radiation poisoning. These are the sorts of people that the proponents of the technology need to convince. I don't envy them their task.

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

What happens when a travel disruption leaves you stranded between charge points for a period of time such that your secondary loads drain your power systems? I'm thinking of the stretch from Baker to Las Vegas in the middle of summer.

Tricky question as i don't know precisely what load the secondary systems place on the battery system. I can make a bit of a guess. If you are stationary then the drive train is not consuming. I imagine as you sit in traffic you would be using your air conditioner and the radio/sound system.
Say you were driving a road charge enabled Leaf. A quick check of wikipedia gives me a table of EPA tests. One of which is the heavy stop go traffic scenario with the air conditioning running. They list a speed of 10km/h and a drive time of 7 hours 50 minutes. I am guessing if you were totally stationary then the drive time would be even longer.
7 hours 50 minutes seems like a long time in traffic to me. I would imagine many of the ICE drivers sitting in their vehicles with the engine idling to keep their air conditioning going may have ran out of petrol by that time and may be looking enviously at the Leaf with the nicely air conditioned cabin.
Then once the travel disruption clears you continue on your way, powered by the road charging system and your batteries start recharging as you go. Meanwhile those ICE drivers that haven't ran out of petrol nervously look for the nearest petrol station and then get to queue up for an extended period due to the large number of vehicles involved in the traffic disruption that are now also looking for fuel.

[Astro]

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

Think about all those people "stranded" in their vehicles during recent SNOW storms with HEAT (rather than A/C) blasting...7 hrs 50 minutes might not be LONG enough

True, the electric car will not ensure success in every scenario just the same as any other car. At least if you had been travelling on a charging road your tank (batteries) are likely at 100% charge which should help weather some of the storms.
There would have been people in petrol powered vehicles in those snow storms who were planning to get off at the next exit for petrol when they got stranded.

[Astro]

With hydrogen fuelled vehicles the issue of whether hydrogen is fossil fuel derived or sourced from a green source is a significant one.
There may be technology on the horizon which will make green hydrogen a more efficient and cost effective fuel but the sceptic in me doesn't trust the oil companies. Am i alone in that?
I don't think they will let people off the fossil fuel hook until it is pretty much all used up. And they will develop clever ways keeping the public hooked.
I can see them marketing the greener hydrogen, with say 10% sourced from green sources. Then a few years later announce the even greener (and more expensive) 20% green hydrogen. And onwards and onwards with 100% green hydrogen being cheaply available just as the last few drops of fossil fuel have been refined.
I would be very happy to be wrong.

[sendler]

In road charging of personal EV's on the fly at highway speed is quite a pipe dream. The only place I see an application for in road charging would be for busses at stops and even then the cost/ benefit isn't practical. It would be much cheaper and better to just have the driver hop out and plug the bus into a dc charger at major stops. Large batteries in busses could probably be designed to use a proprietary large vehicle format dc charge at 800V even if they run the motors on 400V.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by Astro

With hydrogen fuelled vehicles the issue of whether hydrogen is fossil fuel derived or sourced from a green source is a significant one.
There may be technology on the horizon which will make green hydrogen a more efficient and cost effective fuel but the sceptic in me doesn't trust the oil companies. Am i alone in that?
I don't think they will let people off the fossil fuel hook until it is pretty much all used up. And they will develop clever ways keeping the public hooked.
I can see them marketing the greener hydrogen, with say 10% sourced from green sources. Then a few years later announce the even greener (and more expensive) 20% green hydrogen. And onwards and onwards with 100% green hydrogen being cheaply available just as the last few drops of fossil fuel have been refined.
I would be very happy to be wrong.

I am a firm believer that the solutions of the future will be a combination of solutions.

I make discussions with you Astro, not for simple argument but to hopefully educate and prod the reader to think. I appreciate the back and forth.

I will first answer the sourcing of hydrogen as being green - or not. It is not green at this point as it is sourced mainly from natural gas. However, this is due to the cost. It is very low cost. At some point, fossil fuels will become exceedingly more difficult and expensive to extract and costs will rise allowing alternatives to compete. Unless we tax fossil sources to account for the environmental burdens they impose it may be a few decades for this to happen. But, if electricity becomes dirt cheap, there are several pathways that would allow us to continue with our modern, energy intensive culture though efficiency should always be underlying every move as that in itself is a "source" of energy.

I have made mention of the limits imposed on battery chemistry, but that does not kill battery power for many solutions. Hydrogen will have it's niche. I can see regions where cheap electricity already abounds that would allow basic electrolysis solutions to produce hydrogen. I live in one of those regions. And, there is already one local company that leverages these resources. My business lies along the Palm Springs energy corridor and the wind farms produce mega watts of electricity. The base loads are covered by a series of geothermal plants just east of us. The geothermal plants are best run at high loads as modulating their output is difficult. The wind farms taper and feather their output based on demands. We are right in the middle of the windiest time of the year. Many of the wind machines are idle as the load doesn't require them. A local company buys electricity at a greatly reduced rate from the excess electricity available to the power company. They use a high pressure electrolysis machine to produce hydrogen and oxygen for industrial uses in the medical and tech industries. Of course this is an aside to the their standard condensation of air to gain other gas types. And, it was a way to get a state grant. But it underlines what we can do to use excess electricity that often is dumped or the capacity is not used.

As to under road charging schemes - they have their place and their problems. I do have a background in electrical engineering overlaid on my industrial and mechanical engineering as I eschewed the doctoral path to gain broader knowledge instead of deep specifics. It does allow me to talk with a large number of people in various fields with some basis of understanding. Under road solutions will have to struggle with various problems. Economics is just one of them. The idea of the road charging technology is to extend the range of electric vehicles. But fast chargers will mitigate that advantage as several people have mentioned already. As costs of batteries drop, more battery range can be added to a vehicle. But, if you add a road charging system you will incur a significant weight penalty to mount the sympathetic coils under your car. Why not just use the weight to add more battery range? Also, alignment of the coils is critical. How do you drive straight and true? Yes, automated driving aids are already here, but roadway smoothness becomes paramount as proximity between the source coil and the sympathetic coil becomes important. A few centimeter difference can mean the difference between 85% energy transfer efficiency and 60%. Yes, this is for AC induction coils in the tens of hertz. You can extend the coil distance by going to the kilo hertz region and if you use the idea of Tesla's resonant coils as MIT did in some studies done a decade ago, you can go to the mega hertz region and transfer energy over meters distance. But now interference becomes a real issue as numerous devices use the KHz and MHz bands. Pacemakers are affected in the low Hz range. Charging roads are being tested and these issues are being addressed, but by the time they are addressed other solutions may become more plausible.

South Korea has a charging road that has a 7.5 Km length allowing a set of test buses to transit it's length in about 10 minutes charging a small battery pack that allows sufficient energy to complete a set loop. However, several cities have similar buses with similar capabilities running similar loops but that are charged with fixed underfloor induction coils in the 10 minute rest period allotted for driver breaks. These charge pads are a fraction of the 7.5 km under road charging section. On the other hand, an automated charging arm can do the same thing at the fraction of the cost of a charging pad. For personal vehicles, I think you can see some of the same arguments and solutions coming into play. Why pay for the large costs of an under road charging section when a charging pad will do the same thing at a fraction of the cost? Why use a charging pad when I can use an inductive paddle and ditch the weight of the under body charging coils and go from 125 Km range to 175 Km range? At that range, I'm going to stop anyways and let the wife out to run around and buy a 32 ounce drink that will force me to stop again in a couple hours. Just make fast chargers available at these stops and I'm good with the whole situation.

Back to fuel cells.

I was connected with Ballard back in the late 80's and one of the things that irked me was their insistence of myopically focusing on pure hydrogen fuel cells. These cells need pure hydrogen as they are easily poisoned by various compounds. I was a proponent of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC). They can use various fuel sources and are less sensitive to poisoning. They are less efficient due to the high temperatures they run at, however, new material technology as well as catalyst advancements are pushing the operating temperatures of SOFC down to the targeted 600 degrees C and below. At those temperatures, more common materials can be used for structure and reliability increases tremendously. At that point, heavy payload vehicles can use Low Temperature SOFC (LT-SOFC) in a hybrid configuration with a reasonably sized battery pack and using hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis trapped in a hydrocarbon such as methanol or ethanol with the carbon coming from carbon dioxide trapped flue gasses or distilled from the air.

All the above is plausible with the only trip up being the primary energy source. Since not all regions have cheap hydro, wind, solar or geothermal energy, a primary distributed source is needed. That comes down to our Western Societies overcoming the fear of nuclear power in all guises. I am a supporter of nuclear power. We have nuclear power technologies that bear investigation. Solutions such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) I have mentioned in the past. Even if we don't build them here in North America, the Indians and certainly the Chinese will as they have no choice but to investigate all avenues for future power and they do not have the opposition blocks we have here in the west.

Hydrogen is an energy carrier. It in itself is not going to solve our energy problems. But if we combine clean primary sources with hydrogen entrapped in hydrocarbons with carbon sourced from biosphere sources, we can cover all our current needs. The electricity stored in batteries powers our local needs. SOFC power our heavy payloads. The concentrated energy of hydrocarbons will power our heavy air loads. And yes, there will be a place for road charging solutions.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by Astro

With hydrogen fuelled vehicles the issue of whether hydrogen is fossil fuel derived or sourced from a green source is a significant one.

Last time I checked it would take at least $7 worth of hydrogen to replace the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline. And that is using the cheapest most efficient method of hydrogen production, which uses natural gas.
If you were to use electrical power to produce hydrogen the price, best case scenario at least doubles. Realistically the price triples.
Worse yet that is only counting the cost of the electricity.

Hydrogen can be made from wood, but that is only about as green as all the paper made and wasted each year.

It appears to be a lot cheaper and maybe even more efficient just to get a battery powered car or fuel a vehicle with compressed natural gas.

The only thing green associated with the hydrogen car concept is all the money.

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Last time I checked it would take at least $7 worth of hydrogen to replace the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline.

It appears to be a lot cheaper and maybe even more efficient just to get a battery powered car or fuel a vehicle with compressed natural gas.

The only thing green associated with the hydrogen car concept is all the money.

And $7 worth of natural gas would drive you 7x as far as that $7 worth of hydrogen.

And natural gas tends to burn as cleanly in most cases

I rather have 3600psi of natural gas under my rear than 10000psi of hydrogen.

[oil pan 4]

Yeah $7 worth of natural gas, when I figured up those numbers would have been about 2MMBTU (if you could fill at home). Natural gas pumps at gas stations charge some where around $1.50 per gallon of gasoline equivalent. Natural gas sold at $1.50gge makes the price something like $12/MMBTU. Which is a little expensive, but a lot cheaper than getting your car towed home so you can fill it.
To make enough hydrogen to replace 1 gallon of gasoline (lets say 125,000BTU) you start with something like 2 or 3 times that amount of BTUs in natural gas.
So if you powered a car with the natural gas directly, not only would it cost a tiny fraction of the $ to power it, you would be making far less CO2.
Any CO2 anyone thinks they are saving by using a hydrogen car, has already been produce and released, 2 or 3 times over. Ironic, isn't it?

"The most efficient process for making hydrogen from natural gas" isn't really that efficient.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Yeah $7 worth of natural gas, when I figured up those numbers would have been about 2MMBTU (if you could fill at home). Natural gas pumps at gas stations charge some where around $1.50 per gallon of gasoline equivalent. Natural gas sold at $1.50gge makes the price something like $12/MMBTU. Which is a little expensive, but a lot cheaper than getting your car towed home so you can fill it.
To make enough hydrogen to replace 1 gallon of gasoline (lets say 125,000BTU) you start with something like 2 or 3 times that amount of BTUs in natural gas.
So if you powered a car with the natural gas directly, not only would it cost a tiny fraction of the $ to power it, you would be making far less CO2.
Any CO2 anyone thinks they are saving by using a hydrogen car, has already been produce and released, 2 or 3 times over. Ironic, isn't it?

"The most efficient process for making hydrogen from natural gas" isn't really that efficient.

But if throw away electricity is available, why not use it? Batteries may or may not give me the performance I need. I outlined a scenario where locally, I can justify a clean and possibly low cost sourcing of hydrogen.

Most of the North American power grid is still fossil fuel. We have argued this point in other threads. Electric cars are cleaner but do shift the emissions. That is all that happens in most municipalities. What it does do is allows us to clean those primary power sources over time.

Hydrogen is a carrier of energy. If that energy comes from low cost renewable sources, it can be stored as a plastic hydride pellet or a hydrocarbon liquid. Iceland produces hydrogen gas via electrolysis because of its considerable geothermal power. If they could store it in a hydrocarbon, it becomes transportable world wide. The pathways are there. The choice to do so is the only question.