Posted on 07/31/2019 3:57:54 PM PDT by amorphous
Worked awesome then right?! Oh the yuge manatee.
It’s not the 30’s.
Currently Toyota sells Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell car.
Expansion from liquid to gas only about, what, 800 to 1. Pffftttt. Or BOOM!
There is also the Honda Clarity.
Much prefer fuel cells via hydrogen to batteries.
The “we love batteries” folks never consider where and how is all the electricity for recharging the batteries coming from. It’s not going to be wind and solar.
Thanks. I didn’t know Honda had one on the market today.
I knew they’d had one a number of years ago.
About the same that can go wrong using gasoline.
Liquid hydrogen under a constant 150 psi in a consumer environment will make an overcharged Tesla seem like a child’s 4th of July sparkler.
Is this a passenger transport or a personal transport vehicle?
If it's a passenger transport, I seem to recall an existing craft called a helicopter.
If it's a personal transport, this is just the most recent flavor of the decade.
I have lived with 6 decades of flavors/promises. Hasn't happened. The biggest problem isn't the equipment. It's the nut behind the wheel.
As seen all the time on our roads and highways, most people can barely operate an automobile in 2 dimensions. Vanishingly few are capable of operating a craft in 3 dimensions, let alone the necessary 4th dimension of time.
The human problem is the major problem to be solved to make personal aircraft viable. The rest has been in our grasp for some time.
You first...
Wouldn’t a turbojet engine burning hydrogen instead of petroleum be more efficient. Lockheed tested an L-1011 with hydrogen fuel decades ago.
The answer to the problem between the seat and steering wheel is a computer. Of course they also fail from time to time as the numerous fatalities in the news, involving autonomous vehicles, attest.
Here in the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs area), the local bus company has been using several hydrogen fuel cell buses for the last several years. All the other buses have run on natural gas for well over 15 years now.
The solution will be an autopilot and a robot copilot — who will slap the hand of any human who reaches for the controls.
400 nautical miles range - big whoop! Barely enough for Chicago to Toronto.
Completely agree that the reason we don't have flying cars is because most people aren't capable of flying.
Two Aggies are flying in an airplane and the engine dies.
One of them says, "Oh no! We're out of gas!"
How high up are we?
10,000 feet!
Nobody's ever gonna find us up here!
Aside from most people not being able to fly, the problem of not maintaining vehicles would be a disaster.
Generating the hydrogen via water electrolysis takes a large amount of electrical energy as well. In fact the overall cycle for hydrogen fuel cell energy storage is considerably less efficient than that of modern lithium-ion batteries, so that for a given energy output it takes more energy to "recharge" a hydrogen fuel cell.
The advantage of the fuel cell is that the active material (hydrogen) that your vehicle has to carry is very lightweight compared to that of batteries, and one of the materials (oxygen) that you need you can just grab from ambient air, so you don't have to carry it at all. And the conversion unit, the actual fuel cell itself, is quite compact and doesn't weigh anywhere near as much as batteries with equivalent power.
The most successful use of hydrogen fuel in history, as far as I know, would be when used to power the Space Shuttle's three main engines.
IIRC, heavy lift rocket motors are now are being designed to burn liquid methane. But carbon atoms in the molecule gums up fuel cells.
I’m curious as to the economics regarding cars and small aircraft, hydrogen v good ole fossil fuels?
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