Ref the Wankel engine, and as a lover of them conceptually, they 'might' work on hydrogen but as a petrol engine they are lousy. Even if they fixed the sealing there are so many problems with getting the combustion to work efficiently.
The Boris Bus uses batteries. Sadly when the batteries die (as they mostly have) the resulting diesel only operation is slow and smoky. Good one Boris!
Where I live we have a mix of electric hybrid and CNG powered buses.
The Boris Bus uses batteries. Sadly when the batteries die (as they mostly have) the resulting diesel only operation is slow and smoky. Good one Boris!
Where I live we have a mix of electric hybrid and CNG powered buses.
I have pictures of the bicycle lanes in Beijing from 1999 and then only 10yr later. Literally 100's down to one or two. Beijing's main streets were set up for at least 20 abreast on bicycles and the lanes were still there later but empty. The picture tells it all.
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How efficient is this? When I was a kid I devised a perpetual engine based on this, I was convinced I had discovered something and, of course, it was 110% efficient 🙄
🙂 Good question... Not sure they are saying...
Hydrogen Bus Project
The council's financial record is pretty dire so.....
Hydrogen Bus Project
The council's financial record is pretty dire so.....
Terribly low efficiency. I'm forgetting the actual amount, but remember it making sense in places where there's a (potentially) huge amount of renewable energy that is extremely variable, i.e. wind installations in South Dakota or similar. Then the intermittent excess capacity can be rapidly shunted into hydrolysis.
Why not into pressure-buffering?
Pumped-storage system - Bogorodsky Andrey Gennadievich
Bogorodsky Power | buffering of pressure
It's not either/or for me. I'm a pragmatist -- whatever works best, works best.
My 2st 2 cars were Mazda R100s with a tiny 900cc rotary engine. I loved it. A little rocket. I do hope Mazda keeps improving the engine.
dave
Exactly. A total show-stopper, and this is conveniently ignored by 99.9% of all the lurid prose on hydrogen-fueled cars of the future.
The other thing that is equally ignored is that it's hard to get better than 20% efficiency out of an extremely complicated internal combustion engine, while it's quite easy to get 80% efficiency from an extremely simple electric motor. With the drivetrain being four times more efficient, the battery could store four times less energy than gasoline, and still get the same range.
Unfortunately for us, batteries are still more or less a hundred times worse than gasoline when it comes to energy density, so we're still a long way off from the utopia of gasoline-equivalent batteries.
If you stand well away from the problem and squint sideways at it, things start to look very different. I cannot help but notice that, despite four billion years of evolution, there are no two-tonne animals on earth that spend their time rushing around at 100 kilometers per hour.
The reason isn't hard to figure out - there isn't enough sustainable and accessible energy to support that kind of prodigious wastefulness. Remember that almost all the energy animals use ultimately comes from the sun, which grows the plants, which feed the entire food chain.
So we have rather small animals which have very energy-inefficient lifestyles (hummingbirds), and big animals which are quite conservative with energy (hippos). But we have no hippo-sized hummingbirds. An animal that required that much energy would starve to death even if it ate continuously.
We humans have gotten away with that sort of mindlessly excessive energy waste for much of two centuries, but only by using up millions of years worth of stored solar energy, in the form of fossil fuels. In the process, we have done an incalculable - and irreversible - amount of damage to the only planet we can live on.
I think we (in the collective) are really being silly to imagine that we can continue to be as prodigiously wasteful forever into the future.
This is about the point at which someone will say something about free, unlimited solar power. So it might be worth noticing that, after four billion years of trying, nature has managed to create solar powered plants and trees - which are incapable of moving about freely as most animals do, and take years to generate enough energy to lift their own weight up to their full adult height.
Nature has also created solar-powered jellyfish (in Palau, Golden Jellyfish | National Geographic ), which take half a day to very slowly pulse their way from west to east across a small lake; and solar-powered worms which more or less lie motionless in one spot ( https://www.livescience.com/53823-plant-animal-worms-are-social-sunbathers.html ). Notably absent are any solar-powered, two-tonne, animals that fly / run / swim around at 100 kmph. Also missing are hippo-sized, solar-powered, hummingbirds.
Another way to look at solar power: there is roughly 1kW of power per square metre of sunlight on the equator. The solar cells we can afford now convert a tenth of that to power, 100 watts per square metre. There are only about six good hours of sunlight on a sunny day at the equator, so if you average over 24 hours, the effective output from that square metre of solar cells is only about 25 watts.
To put that in context: the starter motor in many cars will draw up to 200 amps from the nominally 12-volt battery. That's 2400 watts. In full sunlight, it would take a hundred square metres of solar cells to generate enough electricity to run the starter motor in your V8 Dodge Charger.
a 100 square metres is about 1100 square feet - if you took a good-sized urban apartment and covered the entire roof in solar cells, you'd have just about enough electricity to continuously run the starter motor in your car. Not the car itself.
I think we are going to have to learn to live on a lot less energy per person. Clearly, we won't do it voluntarily, so it will eventually be forced on us by the unforgiving laws of nature. That's assuming we still have a habitable planet by then.
With that cheery though, I'm off to play some guitar, and do some amp-tweaking. That will let my slightly modified ape-brain forget all about the future that we're all staring at - one that is likely to be quite bleak.
Oh, yeah: my valve guitar amp draws over 50 watts from the wall. That is about half the energy output of a human slave, (working at a continuous 100 watts output). I'm using that much energy just to be able to play my electric guitar.
-Gnobuddy
The answer is, hydropower. Not only power of rivers; they are already harnessed. We have wast length of an ocean shore. We can harness ocean waves to lift water up to reservoirs, to get reliable source of a hydro power. Wind turbines can also lift ocean water up into reservoirs.
Yes, I am affiliated with Bogorodsky Power Corporation. But I speak for myself, because I believe in the future of a new hydropower. 🙂
Yes, I am affiliated with Bogorodsky Power Corporation. But I speak for myself, because I believe in the future of a new hydropower. 🙂
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will not have an internal combusion engine, Fuel-cels currently run 40-60% efficient and are likely to get better.
You can be sure there are chemists out there that are working on solar cels using the photosynthesis as a model. This is a very efficient way to convert photons to electrons.
dave
It is certainly something I have my eye on, but it is obviously a very tough nut to crack. Attempts to extract reliable tidal and/or wave power go back many decades, but they have not yet achieved the turnkey production status of current windmills and solar power.
-Gnobuddy
How about using 'Boron' as an energy carrier as proposed by Tom Blees in 'A Prescription for the Planet'?
The molten salt Thorium reactor 'will' have to be employed if we are going to save our collected big mistakes and stupidiity. Read the above book for free online or maybe listen to some YouTube video's by Kirk Sorenson who promotes the immense advantages that Thorium reactors offer.
The molten salt Thorium reactor 'will' have to be employed if we are going to save our collected big mistakes and stupidiity. Read the above book for free online or maybe listen to some YouTube video's by Kirk Sorenson who promotes the immense advantages that Thorium reactors offer.
That depends on which politician you happen to be listening to, and in which decade. 🙂
Ten or fifteen years ago, a California republican famous mainly for his ability to flex his muscles in front of a mirror, heavily promoted hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines. Curiously enough, he also purchased and vigorously promoted an AM General H1 Humvee, which got about nine miles to the gallon of gasoline.
Apparently politicians in 2017 have a different story, and hydrogen is now going to power fuel cells to drive electric vehicles. Let's look at that a little closer in a minute.
So let's look at the energy conversion chain.
If you get your hydrogen from electrolysis, it goes like this:
Step 1: Make lots of electricity somehow.
Step 2: Waste lots of that electricity as heat and to create chemical byproducts while trying to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Step 3: Use magic pixie dust to store vast volumes of this hydrogen safely in tanks small enough to fit in automobiles. Inevitably, lose some hydrogen along the way.
(The pixies aren't talking about how this hydrogen storage is to be accomplished. Magic metal hydrides? Liquid hydrogen at unbelievably low temperature? Insanely high pressures at room temperature?)
Step 4: Waste 40% to 60% of this hydrogen by running it into a fuel cell to create electricity.
Step 5: Run this electricity through an electric motor to run your car.
The obvious question is, why not just go from Step 1 to Step 5 via a rechargable battery? Why on earth would one even think of including all the wasteful, expensive, and unnecessary steps using nonexistent technology in between?
Only politicians and fossil-fuel company pitchmen seem to know the answer to that question. And that's probably because there is only one other way (other than electrolysis) to get lots of hydrogen - it happens to be a by-product of the petroleum extraction and refining process. Hydrogen, of course, is the "hydro" in hydrocarbons.
That's very convenient, as after our new clean hydrogen-fueled-cars revolution, we would still be dependent for our new fuel on exactly the same people and corporations who provide our unsustainable fossil fuels today. And the clean new fuel would come from exactly the same unsustainable source - buried petroleum deposits from ancient fossils.
Anyone else smell a hydrogen-powered rat here?
That is certainly true. 10% efficiency leaves a lot of room for improvement. Solar has some great advantages - no moving parts, almost nothing to wear out once installed, continuously falling manufacturing costs. But the huge downside is that solar energy has pretty low areal density.
On the other side of the coin, keep in mind, I quoted numbers for extremely sunny areas of the planet (preferably in the tropics). Up here on the southern edge of Canada, solar power is a very iffy proposition for many months each year. It gets even worse if you happen to be really far north. Which is why even the Boreal forest eventually disappears as you head north, giving way to only the occasional bit of lichen or moss...there's not even enough sunlight up there to support big plant life, never mind energy-hungry human technology.
Solar power is wonderful, and I am glad it is exploding all over the world in recent years. But I seriously doubt we're going to see solar-powered passenger aircraft that fly around at 500 mph, or solar-powered cargo ships that ferry hundreds of millions of tons of consumer products from China all over the world, or solar-powered trains and trucks that carry those consumer products to thousands of cities once the ships have docked at the nearest port.
-Gnobuddy
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