Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety

thecarchik writes "While electric-car advocates may avoid the issue, some buyers simply won't choose a plug-in car that can't travel unlimited distances. That's where the Chevy Volt-style range extender comes in, though the Volt adds unlimited range by burning gasoline in a conventional engine to generate electric power. Now, a new type of fuel cell offers the potential for a different kind of range extender, one that removes the enormous practical problem facing hydrogen fuel cells: the lack of a distribution infrastructure to fuel vehicles that require pure hydrogen to feed their fuel cells. Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to shrink the size and lower the operating temperature of a solid-oxide fuel cell by a factor of 10, meaning it could conceivably produce as much power as a car engine but occupy less space. The advances come from new materials for the solid electrolyte, as well as design changes, and the researchers feel they have further avenues for improvement left to explore."

Re:Yo Knee Grows

[Anonymous Coward]

Severely offtopic but much less racist than usual. Our trolls are getting a tiny bit classier.

Re:The missing bit from the summary

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Additives are going to kill it. The article is notably silent about the additives. In a lab they can feed the fuel cell "pure" gasoline or "pure" diesel and show it can work. Or feed it stock fuels, show it works and ask the graduate students slogging at minimum wage to dismantle the stack and clean it for the next demo. But in reality the fuel at the pump has detergents to prevent fuel injector fouling, anti-freeze to prevent water-contamination leading ice formation in the fuel lines, and a host of other additives to prevent evaporation etc etc. All these are not hydro carbons. If you don't burn them at high temperatures and flush them out using air flow, they will be deposited on the fuel cell surfaces.

Technically the pumps can store pure hydro carbons and mix them with additives at the delivery nozzle, the way the mix 87 and 93 octane fuel to create 90 octane. But it is still a major infrastructure upgrade.

Despite all this, if the technology bears out, it would be a great thing. But let us not raise our hopes prematurely, only to seem them smashed down, yet another time.

Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past?

[viperidaenz]

ICE can't be pushed anymore without using higher quality fuels. Tell me how much it'll cost to fill your car with methanol. You will be able in increase the compression ratio and add a turbo charger as well to increase the efficiency of your ICE. Its just not practical to use methanol in cars.

My car was designed to use 100 octane petrol that's available in Japan, but in NZ we don't have that. The ECU compensates for this by retarding the timing so it doesn't knock, lowering the efficiency of the engine.

You could switch to diesel and use stupidly high compression ratios and boost pressures. However the higher the boost pressure the larger the turbo, the more the lag. Its always a trade off between efficiency and practicality.

Re:Tex Richman won't allow it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is, if you have ever spent any significant time in many parts of the world (basically anywhere outside of The US/Canada and Northern/Western Europe), you would realize that American drivers are EASILY (and sadly) among the upper echelons of the world's drivers when it comes to knowledge and safety.

Try driving for a day among the "licensed" drivers of any country in South America, for example, and you will see what I mean.

Re:Um...

[petermgreen]

Go ahead and do the math to figure out the power that can be transferred in a common filling station fuel pump

According to wikipedia a standard pump does about 10 gallons per minuite and a gallon of gasoline contains about 132 megajoules per gallon. So we are taking a transfer rate of about 1320 megajoules per minuite wihch works out to 22 megawatts. EEK