NASA Tests Hydrogen-Fueled BMW 420
Rio sends us word that NASA has completed an 8-week test of a fleet of BMW luxury sedans powered by liquid hydrogen at Kennedy Space Center. The new BMW Hydrogen 7 sedan uses the same fuel that powers the space shuttle and reduces CO2 emissions by 90 percent, according to a news release. Its engine can burn gasoline or liquid hydrogen and can switch seamlessly between the two. From the article: "One hundred BMW Hydrogen 7s have been built, and 25 are used in test programs in the US. The cars have already covered more than 1.3 million miles in test programs around the globe."
We're in the minority (Score:3, Interesting)
FTFA:The V12 cylinder engine delivers 260 hp; the top speed of the Hydrogen 7 is 143 mph and acceleration 0-60 mph is 9.2 sec.
I had a similar question: "What are the operating costs?"
But unfortunately for those of us who are more interested in efficiency are in the minority; so car makers market to the folks who consider automobiles to be a status sort of thing instead of a piece of machinery.
I can care less how fast it can go or its acceleration.
Internal Combustion! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention i rather like my rough loud piston engine... sometimes. Granted, I will be weined off and eventually learn to like the quiet boring (but REALLY high torque) electric motor.
It was weird enought driving the company hybrid with CVT transmission, no shift points and odd engine RPM sequences makes driving less-than-intuitive. I find myself having to look at the speedometer far more with that than any other car.
How do they get the hydrogen? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, you're presumably using rather a lot of oil, coal or natural gas, in order to make these things run. Is that actually helping our environment at all? Or are they looking at some other reason to do it, like making them able to go really really far?
Yeah, I know there's nuclear, solar, geothermal, and wind power available. Fact remains that these are all way more expensive than burning fossil fuels, otherwise we'd have switches _ages_ ago.
Re:How efficient are they? (Score:2, Interesting)
The reductions in C02 must happen very soon. Very soon as in human time not planet time. This vehicle will make a zero impact on C02 pollution because it can not be afforded by 90% of the population. hybrids that will slow down C02 production can not be afforded by 85% of the population and high efficiency small cars are not being produced and marketed. The Smart is FINALLY making it to the USA but at a price that makes it unaffordable. It needs to be sold at $9000.00US or less to make it so that the top 40% of the US population can afford it, the bottom 60% of the population has a $5000.00 car or less as their max affordable price. That means used and worn out gas guzzlers that also spew extra hydrocarbons because the also burn oil as well.
These BMW's are "neat" concepts and great examples that the technology can in fact work well. but it's 100% useless if they cant produce a sub $9000.00 RETAIL price car and figure out how to get all the old cars off the road.
Honestly until the figure out how to get all existing cars to be clean and high efficiency within a 5 year period, all these engineering attempts are nothing more than High IQ circle jerks.
at least they can make the Hydrogen BMW's capable of having AC that can withstand 85 DegC outside temperatures while keeping the interior cool so we can travel farther south than the 26th parallel without dying from the heat. Anyone have tires that can withstand continuous 100degC??
Joking
Re:Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
http://autos.msn.com/research/vip/overview.aspx?y
This is actually a smart way to do this. It will be expensive to manufacture new technology like this, so start with the sector of the market that is used to paying a lot of money, and as the technology is proven and commoditized, they can work it down into the lesser expensive lines.
-David
Solution to the H2 problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How efficient are they? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a bit like the electric motor. Sure, it's the most efficient kind of engine, converting more than 95% of the energy put into it into movement, but first of all someone has to generate that electricity to run it. And that means... 2nd thermodynamic law, it would have been probably more efficient and less waste heat producing to use the primary energy source to generate movement instead of converting it to power and then use an electric motor.
The 2nd Law says nothing about how efficient a process is, only that it will not be 100%.
A power plant is more efficient than an automobile ICE. Even if both are burning hydrocarbons dug up from the ground, the power plant will be more efficient and produce less pollution largely due to the scale. It's much easier to add expensive and heavy scrubbers to a coal plant smoke stack than to the exhaust system of a car. It's easier to make an efficient engine when the weight of the engine is not a concern.
So your 95% efficient electric engine times a 40% efficient coal plant is better than your 35% efficient ICE with much better emissions controls to boot. And that's using coal, which I'm certainly not a fan of.
Which leads me to the big advantage of electricity-based transportation (whether it's electric batteries or electrically produced hydrogen from water) which is that once you have decoupled power generation from transportation, when you bring online new environmentally friendly power plants you can use this new source seamlessly with no disruption to the transportation infrastructure. Already we're producing far more "green" electricity in this country than we are using "clean" transportation, and this has happened without you even having to be aware when you flick the light switch. We should be so lucky as to be able to do the same with transportation.
Basically what I'm saying is that electric/hydrogen power has efficiency and environmental advantages now, but also has the potential for vast improvements in the future and that's even if you keep the exact same car!
Solar power? Would be cheap, but the production of those solar cells is creating a horrible amount of waste and they're far from efficient. Wind power? Even worse. And pretty much everything else isn't CO2 neutral.
If you're going to look at the environmental cost of solar power, then you should include the environmental cost of acquiring oil. Adding every cost associated with ICE-based cars or coal power plants certainly do not make them look better compared to solar power.
And what's wrong with wind power again? It's not bird deaths, those were never any more than city office buildings produce, and new designs that discourage nesting on the turbines has put it in the noise.
Re:How efficient are they? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How efficient are they? (Score:1, Interesting)
So you know where I'm coming from: I'm by no means an expert, but I did spend four years working on turbine design in the wind power industry (I'm a Mech. E). I enjoyed it, I think wind power is a pretty impressive technology, but I'm pretty sure wind isn't the future of power generation, at least without some really breakthrough developments in the technology.
There are several problems with wind power. From an economic perspective, they're not cheap. Wind farms only boomed in the mid 90's when there were huge tax incentives associated with setting them up and operating them. They need certain average yearly windspeeds before they're profitable, and here in the US that's only about 12% of our geography. There are huge areas of the US (namely the southeast and southwest) where the farms can't generate enough electricity to pay for their construction.
Then once you do find a site for them, it's not an environmentally friendly process. The turbines can't be placed in each other's wind shadows (for obvious reasons), which means they have to be spread out, especially in sites where the wind changes direction often. Usually setting them up involves flattening acres of forest, cutting in roads and access ways, moving in heavy equipment and crews to dig holes, pour foundations, cranes to erect the towers and attach the blades, etc. When that's done they're more or less maintenance free until about halfway through their operational lives, where they need one costly overhaul that's usually worth a significant percentage of their total cost (20% to 50%, if I remember correctly). Then, once they've reached the end of their expected lives (usually 20 to 25 years) you have to bring all that equipment back in to tear them out and put in new turbines.
The main problem is that they can take thousands of acres to generate the same amount of power as a single small coal plant. The fact that they're so expensive to put up and maintain combined with the limited geography you have to put them really makes it a hard to exploit wind with current technology. You're right though, the bird-death thing was pretty stupid.
Re:How efficient are they? (Score:3, Interesting)
a) demand for natural gas skyrockets or
b) demand for electricity skyrockets
It will NOT go down...or at least, if it does it will be purely artificial and VERY short lived.
If we had natural gas in that kind of abundance, or electricity in that kind of abundance, we'd completely skip Hydrogen without question.
Turns out Hydrogen is merely an expensive battery.
Engine Wear? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does LOX effect these engines different than standard gas?
Re:Future dumb journalist headlines... (Score:2, Interesting)
Short term safety was my first question too, but when the Hindenburg exploded, the only people who died were those who jumped off the blimp. Hydrogen may burn fast, but how much more dangerous is it than gasoline?
A bigger question is long term safety. There are bound to be leaks. Does anyone know what hydrogen does if released into the atmosphere in large quantities*? At least CO2 is a someone significant naturally occurring component of the atmosphere.
* The answer is, in fact, no, we don't know what lots of hydrogen would do in the atmosphere. This concern was actually raised by a meteorologist I work with in a global warming discussion a few months back.