The future will travel by hydrogen

Kortabitarte Egiguren, Irati

Elhuyar Zientzia

In each house there is a car, two and even three, and the tendency to catch the car is spectacular. In most cases we are used to driving cars with gasoline. Although driving a car that is going to move through a hydrogen powered pile can be considered a utopia today, experts in the field are working to do so in the future.
The future will travel by hydrogen
01/09/2008 | Kortabitarte Egiguren, Irati | Elhuyar Zientzia Komunikazioa
(Photo: Tecnalia)

The Tecnalia Energy Unit presents a quiet and cheap car prototype that works with a hydrogen fuel-cell. It is named after H2CAR. It has an electric motor and electricity is generated by a fuel cell that uses hydrogen. In addition, it has an auxiliary battery. According to its creators, this is the main novelty. That is, a mixed car that uses the battery and hydrogen.

Cheap and quiet

Like all automatic vehicles, it only has accelerator and brake. The trunk has a bottle of hydrogen to feed the fuel cell that will produce the electricity necessary for the operation of the vehicle. The battery will provide you with an additional acceleration force. The battery is charged in a few minutes in a 220 V jack, just like mobile phones.

The current prototype can travel 200 kilometers with each load and is not yet able to exceed 60 km/h. As for the cost per kilometer, Luis Pedrosa, director of the Energy Unit of Tecnalia, stressed that "filling the tank, that is, charging the battery of the electric vehicle and the fuel cell, costs between 6 and 8 times less than filling the car that uses gasoline to achieve the same autonomy". Hence he has been literally baptized. Silent, why? The usual sound of rolling and light sound emitted by the electric motor cooling system and the fuel cell are perceived during driving.

Besides being cheap and quiet from the environmental point of view, the H2CAR exhaust does not emit carbon dioxide but water vapor. In fact, when hydrogen is combined with oxygen in the fuel cell and electricity is obtained, this reaction only emits water. In this process "we can say that at least 80% of the vehicle's emissions from conventional cars are reduced," added Pedrosa. And it is that there have been emissions both in hydrogen and electric generation production plants.

The automotive industry does not doubt that the vehicle of the future will be electric. However, the generation of this electricity by a fuel cell that uses hydrogen must solve the current problems of hydrogen.

The problem of hydrogen

By the exhaust of H2CAR water vapor is emitted and in the trunk there is a bottle of hydrogen to feed the fuel cell that will produce the electricity necessary for the operation of the vehicle.
Tecnalia Tecnalia

"Hydrogen can become an opportunity, but there are still many challenges to face to make hydrogen a reasonable alternative: efficient large-scale production, storage, safety...", explains Javier García-Tejedor, deputy director of the Tecnalia Energy Unit.

"At present, most of the hydrogen is obtained from hydrocarbons. In the future, hydrogen should be produced from water." What is clear is that it must be produced. "Because hydrogen is not a source of energy, since it cannot be taken from nature," said García-Tejedor.

With this prototype vehicle, Tecnalia wants to demonstrate the viability of the electric hydrogen vehicle as a real transportation alternative. Now he wants to develop the technologies necessary for practical use and hope that at some point on the roads only cars with hydrogen fueled fuel cells will be seen. But there is still much to do. Hydrogen is not expected to expand by 2020 or 2030 for normal use.

Eleven lines of work for the future
The vehicle is still a prototype and Tecnalia's employees are seriously working on improvement. There are eleven lines of work in the future. On the one hand, new hydrogen storage tanks, such as light deposits that store hydrogen in 800 bars, want to develop a pressurized direct hydrogen refueling system in the vehicle. On the other hand, they want to increase the performance of the batteries incorporating batteries of last generation. The possibility of efficiently recovering the energy used in braking is also being studied. The transformation of this kinetic energy into electricity could increase the autonomy of the vehicle. It also aims to add an information interface to the driver that allows the driver to know at all times the condition of the vehicle and its surroundings (traffic, signaling, road status, etc. ). And many more.
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