I came across an article about BMW’s Eco Luxury on Technology Review, which mentions that it is an amazing concept, but the process of hydrogen fuel generation is the biggest challenge, which may put an end to the entire concept of hydrogen powered cars .
Beginning with Eco Luxury first; it is a car that can switch between Hydrogen and Gasoline on the click of a single button. Also dubbed as the Hydrogen 7, BMW is planning to produce 100 units and then rent them out to carefully selected personalities from the automotive industry.
Eco luxury can run on hydrogen and simultaneously feel like a conventional sedan as it produces a lot of horsepower, the only major difference being the sound or rather the high-pitched grunt. It has a 12-cylinder, 6-liter engine that produces 260 hp as compared to the 400 horses it produces when running on conventional gasoline. The comparison may be harsh when compared to prior hydrogen-combustion engines, but the focus here is not on the productivity rather the technology incorporated.
The hydrogen storage tank, which it seats, is about the size of a full-size beer keg and gulps half the tank space. To keep Hydrogen in the liquid form is the biggest challenge as it requires an extremely low temperature of -253 degree Celsius and that is where the BMW engineers have excelled. They designed a double-walled stainless-steel tank weighing 129 kilograms specifically for this purpose.
Between the two stainless steel walls are a Vacuum and multiple layers of insulation developed to reflect heat, which makes BMW boast ‘you can put a snowball in it and it wont melt for 13 years’. This stunning car only emits vapor as a byproduct.
Until now, all this may sound amazing to you as it did to me but Technology Review has brought about a point, which generates radiance to an effect, that all this sounds like a dubious concept. To drive a hydrogen-based car you surely need hydrogen but have you people ever pondered where that Hydrogen will come from.
You will have to either extract it from the hydrocarbon fuel, which means defeating the entire green concern, or else produce hydrogen from water, using electricity for which you will either have to burn the fossil fuel back or drain away the renewable electricity from the power grid.
Read More at : Technology Review
