Daimler Shows Off Long-Range Hydrogen Semi, New Battery Truck (forbes.com) 75
Daimler, which has worked on hydrogen technology for decades, is developing a fuel-cell semi with range of up to 600 miles per fueling and next-generation battery trucks amid intensifying competition to curb diesel and carbon exhaust from heavy-duty vehicles. Forbes reports: The German auto giant's truck unit showed off the Mercedes-Benz GenH2, a concept truck designed for long haul runs that will be tested by customers in 2023, at an event in Berlin Tuesday outlining steps it's taking to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Volume production of GenH2s starts in the second half of the 2020s. The company also debuted its Mercedes-Benz eActros LongHaul, a battery-powered truck for short- and medium-range routes goes about 300 miles (500 kilometers) between charges. eActros production starts in 2024.
Both trucks share Daimler's new ePowetrain modular platform to help hold costs down. They'll be available initially in Europe, though versions for North America and Japan will arrive around the same time, the company said. [...] A unique twist with Daimler's GenH2 truck is that the system relies on liquid hydrogen, rather than highly compressed hydrogen gas, the current standard. The benefit is that liquid hydrogen is more energy dense and uses tanks that are much lighter than those required for gaseous fuel, Daimler said. "This gives the trucks a larger cargo space and higher payload weight," while also improving range, it said. The combination of hydrogen and battery vehicles "enables us to offer our customers the best vehicle options, depending on the application," Daimler Chairman Martin Daum said at the event. "Battery power will be rather used for lower cargo weights and for shorter distances. Fuel-cell power will tend to be the preferred option for heavier loads and longer distances."
Both trucks share Daimler's new ePowetrain modular platform to help hold costs down. They'll be available initially in Europe, though versions for North America and Japan will arrive around the same time, the company said. [...] A unique twist with Daimler's GenH2 truck is that the system relies on liquid hydrogen, rather than highly compressed hydrogen gas, the current standard. The benefit is that liquid hydrogen is more energy dense and uses tanks that are much lighter than those required for gaseous fuel, Daimler said. "This gives the trucks a larger cargo space and higher payload weight," while also improving range, it said. The combination of hydrogen and battery vehicles "enables us to offer our customers the best vehicle options, depending on the application," Daimler Chairman Martin Daum said at the event. "Battery power will be rather used for lower cargo weights and for shorter distances. Fuel-cell power will tend to be the preferred option for heavier loads and longer distances."
Fuel Cells (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, ditch the fuel cells at the roadside somewhere. Fuel cells are a pain in the ass. I apologize, but there's no other way to put it. They need to work on their active accident avoidance technology instead. I can't believe they would even show their face in public after they shamefully admitted back in June that it would it will take them 5 more years to reach Tesla's 2017 level of self driving.
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Did you read what I wrote? The crap of what Tesla has today, level 2 self driving is what Benz will get in 2025. It has nothing to do with whether Elon Musk's promises came true. Tesla has level 2 self driving today, and that's what Benz will have in 2025. Supposedly.
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Level 2 self driving is pretty common these days even on relatively inexpensive cars.
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Yes, so then why did Benz announce in June that they will get to Level 2 in 2025?
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I have no idea, all they need to do is buy the tech from MobileEye and they can have it today.
Even mid range Nissans have auto steering and adaptive cruise control, aka autopilot.
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ProPilot is a joke compared to Autopilot.
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Whatever, but it's level 2 and available on 15k cars.
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ProPilot is hands-free and does lane changes etc, has done for a year now. In many ways it's superior to Tesla Autopilot.
https://youtu.be/iBnUucTD7uY [youtu.be]
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Wow, it changes lanes when you tell it to! Teslas have been doing that for half a decade. Today AP doesn't just do lane changes, not just uncommanded lane changes, but outright exits on its own, stops for stop lights and stop signs, can drive on its own through parking lots without a driver, etc. And AP always beats ProPilot in driving comparisons. Plus you have to reengage ProPilot after full stops (unless that part has changed recently). I'm yet to find a single person who's spent significant amounts
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It's better in two ways:
- Properly monitors the driver, can't be defeated with fruit etc.
- Limited to roads where it has been properly tested, not "beta good luck lol".
Re: Fuel Cells (Score:1)
That's like saying iPhones are better than android because iPhones won't let you install stuff from outside their walled garden.
I suppose some people might classify that as "better", but it's kinda embarassing that a Slashdot user would.
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If you install malware on your phone it mostly just affects you. If you take a nap at 150kph in your Tesla you might end up killing me and my family.
https://www.autoblog.com/2020/... [autoblog.com]
Re: Fuel Cells (Score:1)
Ah, it's all about you again. Well that figures.
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You really think a cryogenic fuel requirement is viable? On top of having to generate hydrogen in the first place, you have to do *a lot* of work to get it liquified and it then boils off at 1% per day. Hugely impractical and inefficient.
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The energy used to make hydrogen does not matter if it is clean and/or excess capacity. Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of diesel, so not needing the mass and volume of battery packs is a big selling point especially for this use case.
Re: Congrats Daimler! (Score:1)
That's one massive "if", and it's not true anyway. Even if your energy production is 100% renewable, a vehicle which wastes a lot of that energy is going to be less attractive than one which doesn't.
Re: Congrats Daimler! (Score:1)
Also this part is just complete bullshit:
Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of diesel
No. Liquid hydrogen has about one quarter the energy density of diesel. Basically every single part of your comment is wrong.
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Re: Congrats Daimler! (Score:3)
Might want to look again. Hydrogen does beat diesel for energy content like you mentioned. But that kilogram of liquid hydrogen occupies about 3.7 gallons of volume, which is significantly worse than diesel.
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Actually, the poster used the term "energy density" which ought to refer to [1]:
Energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume.
This is consistent with how "density" in physics is defined as [2]
- density: "The quantity of mass per unit volume of a substance."
The term we want is actually "specific energy", defined as [3]:
"Specific energy or massic energy is energy per unit mass."
Unfortunately people o
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The tankage mass on compressed hydrogen is ~15 times the mass of the fuel it contains, and ridiculously bulky. Check out the tankage [hackaday.com] on this Hyundai fuel cell truck prototype. That's just for 32kg of hydrogen, to get 400km / 250 miles range.
Hydrogen is such a joke as a fuel.
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it matters great deal, you're talking out of your ass. It takes 2 KWh to cool a liter of liquid hydrogen, which is about what you get when you burn it.... diesel has higher energy density, over 3KWh per liter. The power density of hydrogen-carbon bonding is immense.
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Not if you have excess energy.
Think of California during the day where everyone is generating solar power. So much that the demand is lower than supply, so what happens is you have excess solar energy being wasted since generation is being curtai
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I'm inclined to agree with you, that making hydrogen makes sense if you can do it with otherwise unusable renewable energy. Solar in particular, as there's no moving parts. There might be an argument that the wear and tear costs of letting a wind turbine rotate to generate hydrogen are high enough that it's not economically viable in combination with the energy/material costs of the hydrogen plant. But at least with solar, there's no moving parts, so the only costs are from running the hydrogen plant.
I t
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But I also think that a lot of the objections are that it's a combustion-based technology and not pure electric.
Battery fanbois don't like anything that might compete with their precious.
Fortunately a lot of much smarter people are working on this. Hydrogen as a fuel is not going to go away.
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I think generating some kind of hydrocarbon fuel from surplus renewable energy production will likely be a long-term reality, if only because there are applications likely to never be realistic for any battery storage electric power solution (aircraft) or where there's a need for long-haul transportation/storage of fuel.
The keys are probably better efficiency/techniques in getting electricity into a gas/liquid product and large surpluses of renewable energy.
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It will have to compete with biofuel, which doesn't have the storage and transportation issues of either compressed or liquid hydrogen. We'll have to see how the economics turn out.
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I don't think pure hydrogen will ever be that popular, it will almost always be some kind of reformed variant of natural gas or LP. It's still a pressurized gas, which has limitations.
I'm not sure how biofuels will compete unless they wind up being extremely low input variants grown in tanks or ponds. The current agricultural flavor doesn't seem at all sustainable unless you somehow manage to find/engineer an ideal feedstock that can be grown without fertilizer or ag chemicals or artificial irrigation and
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Yeah I'm thinking of algal biofuels, I agree the agricultural variety doesn't seem promising.
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Good, if that could replace natural gas that would be awesome. Aviation would need something different unless they can burn LNG.
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But a diesel engine is only max. 42% efficient and typical modlels only around 20% - 25%, while the hydrogen is not supposed to be burned but used in a fuelcell to produce electricity. And that is around 70% - 75% efficient.
Re: Congrats Daimler! (Score:1)
Nonsense. Large fuel cells can reach those efficiencies, but ones sized for cars and trucks are typically 40-60% efficient tops. That efficiency gain is offset by the energy lost by evaporating liquid hydrogen and/or the extra mass and volume required for tankage.
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Fuel cells for car and trucks are large! ...
The hydrogen can not evapour, it is in a tank
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Hydrogen is an extremely tiny molecule, and one of the problems that causes is leaks. It goes through seals. Liquid hydrogen tanks leak.
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If you store it for a long period. No problem in an air plane that plans to land with an close to empty tank.
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it matters great deal, you're talking out of your ass. It takes 2 KWh to cool a liter of liquid hydrogen, which is about what you get when you burn it.... diesel has higher energy density, over 3KWh per liter.
The poster gave no references when claiming that the liquefaction energy is 2 kWh/l = 7.2 MJ/l. Maybe a coincidence, but this is ten times the theoretical minimum liquefaction energy (0.2 kWh/l) I found in a 2019 DOE report [1]:
Liquefaction energy:
- 0.72 MJ/l (0.2 kWh/l) - theoretical minimum (reversible Carnot process)
- 2.5-5 MJ/l (0.7-1.4 kWh/l) for industrial liquefires reported as of 2019
The poster also claimed an energy density of about 7 MJ/l, which is consistent with [3] that gives 8.6-10 MJ/l (2.4-
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Link to the DOE report:
[1] https://www.hydrogen.energy.go... [energy.gov], accessed on 2020-09-17
I have no idea why it got borked in my parent post.
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Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of diesel, so not needing the mass and volume of battery packs is a big selling point especially for this use case.
No. This use case is big rigs. Big heavy trucks rolling down the highway hauling big heavy loads. Saving a few hundred pounds doesn't mean much.
The use case where weight and energy density becomes critical is flight.
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Hauling big heavy loads long distances not surprisingly requires big heavy batteries.....
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There are already a couple of hydrogen cars and light trucks on the road here. Perfectly viable from a technical standpoint. What I wonder about is the economics. At the moment, hydrogen is an expensive fuel, more expensive than gasoline per driven kilometer.... and that’s in the Netherlands, with excessive petrol taxes. (We pay around €1.60 / l)
The problem is, you have to make the hydrogen. Yes you can use electricity to make it, but at that point it's more efficient to just use the electricity itself than to convert it (with losses) into hydrogen, which then has to be stored (with losses), transported (with losses), and then converted back into electricity (with losses).
People need to stop thinking of hydrogen as a source of energy. It is absolutely not a source, but rather a storage medium.
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If you have a lot of wind power, you can use excess power to generate hydrogen. The advantages are that you can store energy at a large scale and over long time and that it is versatile. You can transport it using pipelines or trucks, use it for fuel, for industrial processes, or to generate electricity again. Some of this can be build on existing infrastructure for gas.
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If you have a lot of wind power, you can use excess power to generate hydrogen. The advantages are that you can store energy at a large scale and over long time and that it is versatile. You can transport it using pipelines or trucks, use it for fuel, for industrial processes, or to generate electricity again. Some of this can be build on existing infrastructure for gas.
You would use as much energy to keep the H2 cooled as it would yield at the end of the process unless you used the H2 immediately. H2 is a poor storage medium (not an energy source). It has the losses like heat but its expensive like a battery. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from heat based power is probably a much better solution for transport. Either geothermal or (mainly) nuclear would be the best way to do that.
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Actually we have wind power plants that produce hydrogen from surplus power and pipe it into the local gas grid, where it is mixed into the natural gas.
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You can see some more detailed breakdown numbers I referenced in my post: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
The numbers are from a DOE report from 2019, [1], that I stumbled upon while googling. They estimated about $14.25/kg at a retail station. Per litre that'd be (density = 0.0709 kg/l) about $1/l.
Huh.. that's actually quite a bit cheaper than the 1.60 EUR = $1.9. I wasn't expecting that at all to be honest.
For the United States, a quick googling indicates it's about $0.66/l.
[1] Current Status of Hydrog
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You're right, there's of course no point in only comparing price per volume.
At 2019 prices, it’s €0.12 / km for hydrogen, and €0.11 / km for petrol.
I'm curious how you get those numbers. At least for a petrol ICE, the efficiency varies quite bit ... e.g 0.03- 0.1 l/km, so what kind of efficiency is assumed?
[*]
And how did you assume the H2 is used, i.e. is it burnt like in an ICE, or is it used by a fuel cell / electric motor combo? (I have no idea about the efficiency of an H2 based power train in a vehicle).
Also, I may have misunderstood:
(We pay around €1.60 / l)
Does that refer to the price of petrol
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Meanwhile, here's the factory under construction [youtube.com] for "vaporware" Semi and "vaporware" Cybertruck.
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You really like linking your own posts rather than the person's your attacking because it sure makes it easier to straw man, doesn't it? As was pointed out in my reply [slashdot.org]:;
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Link [slashdot.org]
Link [slashdot.org]
I suggest they call the truck (Score:2)
Re:I suggest they call the truck (Score:4, Insightful)
Challenger.
It's a German company though. It would be much more appropriate to call it Hindenburg.
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US release delayed (Score:1)
Nullify recent fines and perhaps a US release is reconsidered.
Liquid (Score:3)
I assume this means cryogenic storage. How much energy does it take to cool the H2 down to temperatures at which is is liquid? Once the hydrogen has been cooled sufficiently, larger tanks would be more efficient, since energy required for cooling will be related to the surface area of the tank. Or, perhaps rely on some of the liquid H2 evaporating (either through usage or losses) to keep it cool?
Note that this will still require a battery, because fuel cells are not good at supplying the peaks of power required, so a battery provides a buffer.
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For as dangerous as high pressure gaseous hydrogen is, liquid hydrogen is even worse. To name a few:
* Air entrained in liquid hydrogen freezes out as a high-explosive slush, with burn properties similar to TNT.
* Boiloff has gaseous hydrogen's property of burning in almost any fuel air mixture with tiny ignition energies and readily undergoing deflagration-to-detonation reactions. But unlike gaseous hydrogen, which only pools under overhangs, LH2 boiloff/air mixtures pool first near the ground (from chillin
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The battery is more important for regenerative breaking ...
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If I owned one of these, I would certainly hope that my regeneration did not break!
But, yes, the battery is needed for regenerative braking
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I assume this means cryogenic storage. How much energy does it take to cool the H2 down to temperatures at which is is liquid? Once the hydrogen has been cooled sufficiently, larger tanks would be more efficient, since energy required for cooling will be related to the surface area of the tank. Or, perhaps rely on some of the liquid H2 evaporating (either through usage or losses) to keep it cool?
Note that this will still require a battery, because fuel cells are not good at supplying the peaks of power required, so a battery provides a buffer.
See my reply above, https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
But:
Liquefaction energy:
- 0.72 MJ/l (0.2 kWh/l) - theoretical minimum (reversible Carnot process)
- 2.5-5 MJ/l (0.7-1.4 kWh/l) for industrial liquefires in as of 2019
However, I think a fuel cell will do a poor job at converting H2 to energy, efficiency wise (50%???). It'd be interesting to see some numbers for the total energy round trip, e.g. from solar panels to liquid hydrogen, and then via a fuel cell as kinetic energy in a truck.
Two lessons (Score:5, Funny)
I learned
1) A "semi" is an articulated lorry, or the tractor section.
2) Do not use the Urban Dictionary as your first source for defining unfamiliar words.
What is the lifetime of a battery? (Score:2)
Just wondering. As the energy storage component of a vehicle it seems complex, low capacity, and disposable.
So it costs more to make esp. environmentally, doesn't store much energy, and represents and environmental hazard when it reaches end of life.
It's weird then that fuel cells haven't caught on.
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Fuel cells don't last forever either and their manufacture is energy intensive. Then you have to put fuel into them. So they're like batteries, but worse
Where's the Hydrogen Network ? (Score:2)
Easiest thing to slap together for a demo and dress up as innovation. A much more impressive presentation would be their plans for rolling out a hydrogen fuel generation and distribution network. That, would be something.
Just because (Score:1)
Trucking isn't the answer. (Score:2)
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