Toyota hydrogen testing

When you say combustion most people think of typical gasoline type combustion. That's what i was thinking.

 

yes this is what’s on the market but hydrogen internal combustion using metal hydride storage instead of compressed gas cylinders is currently being developed - https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/2004-01-0699/

 

^That paper is from 19 years ago. Automakers haven't gone in that direction with hydrogen.

 

Combustion for a hydrogen vehicle is the least efficient way, and makes even less sense. A fuel cell can get good efficiency, but still has the hit to generate the hydrogen. Modern hydrogen cars use fuel cells not combustion engines.

 

Toyota have developed a hydrogen powered ICE but they admit it's just for playing around in a racing circuit.

https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/35209996.html

https://youtu.be/O0yM5RlD7Zo

https://youtu.be/2dgzKW8EKMc

 

^Yep because burning hydrogen is subject to similar inefficiencies as burning gasoline, constrained by the laws of thermodynamics (efficiency is proportional to combustion temperature): https://www.greencarreports.com/new...er-idea-than-fuel-cells-engineering-explained

A Mirai with its three hydrogen cylinders get 350-400 miles of range depending on trim level. Theoretically the same car with hydrogen combustion engine would get 120 miles and be woefully uncompetitive against battery EVs.

 

Also a hydrogen ICE will need engine oil, trans fluids etc. I'd rather do FCEV or BEV not an H2ICE

 

Tend to disagree but that's OK. It is not easy to do and it is being worked on. Perhaps red hydrogen systems will help advance the supply even faster.

 

Agree it does not fit the generally accepted current definition of green, but nothing really is, even batteries and electricity generation - natural gas included.

 

i don’t care about green I just want cheap POWER.

Aluminum was previously worth more than gold. It was considered a precious metal - this is why it was used to crown the Washington monument. However scientific advances in mining and purification of ores made aluminum exponentially more plentiful. Because of this the price on aluminum crashed and engineers were able to use aluminum in places they would never have dreamed of before. Think of everything you have that is made of aluminum - it would have to be iron or plastic if it weren’t for this.

I want to see what we come up with when a similar breakthrough happens with power - when the price completely collapses on energy because it is so plentiful and we no longer have to worry about efficiency. Solar and hydrogen can do this. I don’t think purely electric systems can because chemical batteries are an old extremely well researched technology that is pretty close to the ceiling.

similarly if Elon Musk and others can make asteroid mining happen, we will see precious metals become ridiculously plentiful which will crash the price and open us up to computer chips that use 100% rare metals or other uses we can’t even dream of currently. There is more gold easily available on the surface of (or just below it) some nearby asteroids than has been mined from the earth in all of human history. This is because rare metals tend to sink to the lower layers of planets and only trace amounts are near the surface. We have been mining those trace amounts but many asteroids are exploded planets where the deep core chunks float around with all the rare metals accessible.

so anyways it’s not about “green” or “global warming” panic for me - I just want to see what humans come up with to improve our lives when materials that were previously rare/expensive become plentiful/cheap.

 

As long as there's capitalism, this is going to be tough.

 

Your grandkids will not be happy.

 

What about nuclear?

 

Well there you go adding logic and sense into a TW post ... I think that's a bannable offense!

Nuclear already exists, but fear keeps it rare... Better to talk about pipe dreams instead.

 

Once we start up fusion reactors with Helium-3, I think fear will diminish.

 

Except helium is a gas that we already have too little of.

Re-refining the spent fuel would be efficient... Too bad the fear of highly enriched nuclear material prevents us from doing it.

 

The moon has plenty

 

Nuclear is great, but still isn’t easy/cheap enough. Once the RD improves enough on solar we will be able to crank out high efficiency panels in volume for cheap and most of the new designs being researched use perovskites which are pretty common materials.

I want power so cheap and plentiful that engineers no longer consider efficiency. Imagine the breakthroughs we will have when we aren’t limited by the costs of energy.

 

the problem with fusion is it’s been 25 years away for nearly 100 years. We have spent trillions on research and we still aren’t even close to a self-sustaining reaction that doesn’t turn into a runaway. It seems it either uses more energy than it puts out or it turns into a bomb.

fission is a good stop gap if you are worried about CO2, but I’m not I just want huge powerful motors, computers, etc that don’t care about efficiency because power is so cheap.

 

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