Interesting design

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Jose Pinto
Innovation is always good!

The key here is fewer moving parts, smaller end lighter engine, higher compression ratios.

Hidrogen, like electricity, can't be found in nature and are always more complex to produce and store than burning some sort of fuel.
Gasoline (while there is some), Alcohol, or LPG, natural gas, etc there are a number of choices out there to exploit, and better engines will be needed.
Alcohol can be produced out of sugar cane grown in farms, those compete with food crops for space.
Electricity is good for trains and mass transit, where an overhead wire can be used to feed the vehicles, avoiding the need for heavy and expensive batteries.
There is not an easy solution, the more options the better!

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Archeo-peteriX
The problem with all those fuels(except hydrogen) is that no matter what engine you use; they all produce CO2 and other pollutants.

Hydrogen production is becoming easier and less expensive. It's not there yet but if the money is spent to do the research and roll out the infrastructure, hydrogen will be viable as a fuel. Of course then it will make more sense to use it in generating electricity via fuelll cells than burining it in internal combustion engines ;-)

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Bob P 325is 88

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Archeo-peteriX
The problem with all those fuels(except hydrogen) is that no matter what engine you use; they all produce CO2 and other pollutants.

Hydrogen production is becoming easier and less expensive. It's not there yet but if the money is spent to do the research and roll out the infrastructure, hydrogen will be viable as a fuel. Of course then it will make more sense to use it in generating electricity via fuelll cells than burining it in internal combustion engines ;-)

The problem with the fuel cell generating electricity is that the cells must be extremely large to produce the same amount of energy that 'burning' hydrogen does.

Salut, Bob P.

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Jose Pinto
Untill you have hidrogen produced out of inexpensive nuclear fusion electricity, H2 will be the most expensive fuel there is.

Today, producing H2 will leave CO2 and other pollution, just as burning wood or gas or anything else.
There is no such thing as "clean energy". There is cleaner options than others, and technology must address the problems and bring better solutions for the future.

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Archeo-peteriX

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Bob P 325is 88

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Archeo-peteriX
For the automotive uses, no where near as much power is required when the vehicles are propelled by electric motors. We have to stop thinking in terms of huge amounts of horse power for cars that is rarely if ever used.

Yes, and when we do that we can use highly efficient 50HP internal combustion engines and cut out the middle 'electric motor'. The reason that the fuel cells are not much larger than the size of a 4-6 cylinder engine is because the fuel cell's effective 'HP' is only about 50HP. Why not just install a 50 HP gasoline engine instead, since we are willing to take the 'cut' in performance because it is a fuel cell, or battery operated electric motor.

Electricity is really only an energy transfer system. Batteries don't 'store' electricity nor energy - they are a source of potential chemical energy which is manufactured through a chemical reaction process and transfered into electricity to be used in a device. This Just in Time manufacuring rate is not very fast, thus the low outputs of batteries.
Re-charging the battery isn't like replacing the energy, it is reversing the chemical process by consuming energy. This has to be taken into account when looking at the total energy spent to finally power the driving device.

Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements existant - unfortunately it is combined with everything to form compounds, the two most common are water and Hydrocarbons. You need energy to release the H2 - where does that energy come from?

Presently the H2 that is produced comes predominantly from Hydrocarbons, even fuel cells, so where is the logic in separating the H2 from the hydrocarbon and then 'burning' only the H2. Might as well burn the hydrocarbon - albeit better and more efficiently than we are doing now.

Peter, all of this is moot, if, as you said, we are ready to accept lower power demands from all our devices - we don't need all of that wasted energy.

Salut, Bob P.

Salut,

Bob P.

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Bob P 325is 88

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Archeo-peteriX

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Bob P 325is 88

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Archeo-peteriX
For the automotive uses, no where near as much power is required when the vehicles are propelled by electric motors. We have to stop thinking in terms of huge amounts of horse power for cars that is rarely if ever used.

Yes, and when we do that we can use highly efficient 50HP internal combustion engines and cut out the middle 'electric motor'. The reason that the fuel cells are not much larger than the size of a 4-6 cylinder engine is because the fuel cell's effective 'HP' is only about 50HP. Why not just install a 50 HP gasoline engine instead, since we are willing to take the 'cut' in performance because it is a fuel cell, or battery operated electric motor.

Electricity is really only an energy transfer system. Batteries don't 'store' electricity nor energy - they are a source of potential chemical energy which is manufactured through a chemical reaction process and transfered into electricity to be used in a device. This Just in Time manufacuring rate is not very fast, thus the low outputs of batteries.
Re-charging the battery isn't like replacing the energy, it is reversing the chemical process by consuming energy. This has to be taken into account when looking at the total energy spent to finally power the driving device.

Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements existant - unfortunately it is combined with everything to form compounds, the two most common are water and Hydrocarbons. You need energy to release the H2 - where does that energy come from?

Presently the H2 that is produced comes predominantly from Hydrocarbons, even fuel cells, so where is the logic in separating the H2 from the hydrocarbon and then 'burning' only the H2. Might as well burn the hydrocarbon - albeit better and more efficiently than we are doing now.

Peter, all of this is moot, if, as you said, we are ready to accept lower power demands from all our devices - we don't need all of that wasted energy.

Salut, Bob P.

Some good points Bob.

But fuel cells are not motors and thus don't produce output horsepower, only electricity to be used by a conventional electric motor.
My point was that that lower hp electric motor has gobs of torque, starting at zero rpm, that the internal combustion engine just doesn't have until it is revving and sucking in fuel.

We've seen over and over how electric powered cars blow the doors off of monster internal combustion engines on the 1/4 mile drag strip. This is all done at a fraction of the hp that the fuel bruning engines waste trying to catch up. It makes no difference that the internal combustion powered cars eventually catch up and pass the electric vehicles...real world driving is not about jack rabbit fast and terminal speeds; it's about getting comfortably from point A to point B at the least cost and the most fun.

Granted, a Toyota Prius is not a sprinter but there are cars like the Tesla for those who have to feel the G-forces. Once the car companies unhitch their wagons from the oil companies there will be a whole selection of electric vehicles with similar ranges to current fossil fueled cars.

I don't particularly care if it takes the same amount of fossil fuel to produce that electricity because it will be produced at a central location and any hydrocarbon outfall can easily be managed...unlike 100s of millions of hydrocarbon fueled engines spewing uncontrolled all over the globe.

Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the same amount of oil would be required to produce the electricity as powering the cars directly. Why not produce the electricity in one place(or several) as opposed to the alternative? The oil companies still win; unless the utilities don't put up with the same crap that consumers do