Toyota’s Hydrogen-Burning Racecar Soon To Hit The Track

May 13, 2021 by Lewin Day 90 Comments

With the rise of usable electric cars in the marketplace, and markets around the world slowly phasing out the sale of fossil fuel cars, you could be forgiven for thinking that the age of the internal combustion engine is coming to an end. History is rarely so cut and dry, however, and new technologies aim to keep the combustion engine alive for some time yet.

Toyota’s upcoming Corolla Sport-based hydrogen-burning racer. Credit: Toyota media

One of the most interesting technologies in this area are hydrogen-burning combustion engines. In contrast to fuel cell technologies, which combine hydrogen with oxygen through special membranes in order to create electricity, these engines do it the old fashioned way – in flames. Toyota has recently been exploring the technology, and has announced a racecar sporting a three-cylinder hydrogen-burning engine will compete in this year’s Fuji Super TEC 24 Hour race.

Hydrogen Engines?

The benefit of a hydrogen-burning engine is that unlike burning fossil fuels, the emissions from burning hydrogen are remarkably clean. Burning hydrogen in pure oxygen produces only water as a byproduct. When burned in atmospheric air, the result is much the same, albeit with small amounts of nitrogen oxides produced. Thus, there’s great incentive to explore the substitution of existing transportation fuels with hydrogen. It’s a potential way to reduce pollution output while avoiding the hassles of long recharge times with battery electric technologies. Continue reading “Toyota’s Hydrogen-Burning Racecar Soon To Hit The Track” →

The Future Of Hydrogen Power… Is Paste?

February 6, 2021 by Al Williams 142 Comments

We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus or a truck, it becomes problematic with smaller vehicles, especially ones such as scooters or even full-sized motorcycles. The Fraunhofer Institute wants to run smaller vehicles on magnesium hydride in a paste form that they call POWERPASTE.

The idea is that the paste effectively stores hydrogen at normal temperature and pressure, where it stays chemically locked until mixed with water. The researchers note that it will decompose around 250 °C, but while your motorcycle may seem hot when parked in the sun, it isn’t getting quite to 250C.

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Saw Through The Stars

December 15, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

We as humans are limited in the ways we can look at things ourselves, and rely on on the different perspectives and insights of others to help make sense of things. All it takes is one person to look at a data set and find something completely different that changes our fundamental perception of the universe.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium, at a time when astronomers thought that the Sun and the Earth had no significant elemental differences. She proposed that hydrogen wasn’t only more common, but that it was a million times more common.

This outlandish conclusion was roundly dismissed at the time, and she aquiesced to tone down some of the conclusions in her thesis, until her findings were widely confirmed a few years later. Truly groundbreaking, the discovery of the prevalence of hydrogen in stars paved the way for our current understanding of their role as the furnaces for the heavier elements that we know and love, and indeed are composed of.

Meteorites, Comets, and Bee Orchids

Cecilia Helena Payne was born May 10th, 1900 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, England. She was one of three children born to Emma and Edward, a lawyer, historian, and musician. Her father died with she was four years old, leaving her mother to raise the family alone. Continue reading “Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Saw Through The Stars” →

Fuel Cell Drone Aims For Extended Flight Times

October 31, 2020 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The RC world was changed forever by the development of the lithium-polymer battery. No longer did models have to rely on expensive, complicated combustion engines for good performance. However, batteries still lack the energy density of other fuels, and so flying times can be limited. Aiming to build a drone with impressively long endurance, [Игорь Негода] instead turned to hydrogen power.

The team fitted a power meter to the plane, aiming a camera at it to measure power draw during flight.

With a wingspan of five meters, and similar length, the build is necessarily large in order to carry the hydrogen tank and fuel cell that will eventually propel the plane, which uses a conventional brushless motor for propulsion. Weighing in at 6 kilograms, plenty of wing is needed to carry the heavy components aloft. Capable of putting out a maximum of 200W for many hours at a time, the team plans to use a booster battery to supply extra power for short bursts, such as during takeoff. Thus far, the plane has flown successfully on battery power, with work ongoing to solve handling issues and determine whether the platform can successfully fly on such low power.

We’re eager to see how the project develops, particularly in regards to loiter time. We can imagine having a few pilots on hand may be necessary with such a long flight time planned — other drones of similar design have already surpassed the 60-minute mark. Video after the break.

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Fuel From Water Using Only An Arc Welder

April 26, 2020 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Water, high currents, blinding balls of plasma, and a highly flammable gas that’s toxic enough to kill you in three minutes if you breathe enough of it. What’s not to love about this plasma-powered water gas generator?

In all seriousness, [NightHawkInLight] is playing with some dangerous stuff here, and he’s quite adamant about this one being firmly in the “Don’t try this at home” category. But it’s also fascinating stuff, since it uses nothing but a tank of water and an electric arc to produce useful amounts of fuel very quickly. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that he’s talking about the electrolytic splitting of water into the hydrogen-oxygen mix HHO, but this is something else entirely.

Using a carbon electrode torch connected to his arc welder, a setup that’s similar to the one he used to make synthetic rubies, [NightHawkInLight] is able to strike an underwater arc inside a vessel that looks for all the world like a double-barreled bong. The plasma creates a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen which accumulates very rapidly in the gasometer he built to collect the flammable products produced by a wood gasifier.

The water gas burns remarkably cleanly, but probably has limited practical uses. Unless you live somewhere where electricity costs practically nothing, it’ll be hard to break even on this. Still, it’s an interesting look at what’s possible when plasma and water mix.

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Are Hydrogen Cars Still Happening?

September 4, 2019 by Lewin Day 318 Comments

Potentially coming to a service station near you.

In every comment section, there’s always one. No matter the electric vehicle, no matter how far the technology has come, there’s always one.

“Only 500 miles of range? Electric cars are useless! Me, and everyone I know, drives 502 miles every day at a minimum! Having to spend more than 3 minutes to recharge is completely offensive to my entire way of life. Simply not practical, and never will be.”

Yes, it’s true, electric cars do have limited range and can take a little longer to recharge than a petrol or diesel powered vehicle. Improvements continue at a rapid pace, but it’s not enough for some.

To these diehards, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may have some attractive benefits. By passing hydrogen gas through a proton-exchange membrane, electricity can be generated cleanly with only water as a byproduct. The technology holds a lot of promise for powering vehicles, but thus far hasn’t quite entered our daily lives yet. So what is the deal with hydrogen as a transport fuel, and when can we expect to see them in numbers on the ground?

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A Hydrogen Fuel Cell Drone

May 6, 2019 by Pedro Umbelino 37 Comments

When we think about hydrogen and flying machines, it’s quite common to imagine Zeppelins, weather balloons and similar uses of hydrogen in lighter-than-air craft to lift stuff of the ground. But with smaller and more efficient fuel cells, hydrogen is gaining its place in the drone field. Project RACHEL is a hydrogen powered drone project that involves multiple companies and has now surpassed the 60 minutes of flight milestone.

The initial target of the project was to achieve 60 minutes of continuous flight while carrying a 5 kg payload. The Lithium Polymer battery-powered UAVs flown by BATCAM allow around 12 minutes of useable flight. The recent test of the purpose-built fuel cell powered UAV saw it fly for an uninterrupted 70 minutes carrying a 5 kg payload. This was achieved on a UAV with below 20 kg maximum take-off mass, using a 6-litre cylinder containing hydrogen gas compressed to 300 bar.

While this is not world record for drones and it’s not exactly clear if there will be a commercial product nor the price tag, it is still an impressive feat for a fuel cell powered flying device. You can watch the footage of one of their tests bellow:

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