Hydrogen Fuel - The Fuel of the Future

                             


                                              
 As we often hear in our day to day lives, the availability of fuels is decreasing day by day and the biggest concern in automobile is pollution due to these fuels, so the new idea and search comes for zero pollution as well as the better availability, renewability and efficiency too. Although, many researches are going on for the alternate fuels but one of the most promising fuel source is Hydrogen which can produce an abundant amount of energy and that too with zero emissions.
Hydrogen may seem to be very abundant but pure hydrogen is not naturally available on earth in large quantity. So, electrolysis and steam-methane reforming processes are methods to produce hydrogen. In electrolysis, the electricity is passed through water to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Obtaining hydrogen from this process leads to low cost.
In steam-methane reforming process, hydrogen is extracted from methane and as its by-product's, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are obtained, which leads to global warming.
 Hydrogen fuel is having many applications from rocket-fuels to Hydrogen fuel-cells. Hydrogen fuel can be utilized to power the vehicles in two ways i.e., as a fuel for IC engine and the Fuel cell in electric vehicles. But the limitation of using hydrogen fuel in cars is its difficulty to be stored due to its low volumetric density.
Liquid hydrogen used in space-shuttles is more compressible than its gaseous form. It requires cryogenic storage to cool it down. The storage tank must be well insulated, but adding insulation increases cost. Liquid hydrogen has less energy density by volume than hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline by approximately a factor of 4.
Compressed hydrogen is stored quite differently, it has good energy density by weight, but poor energy density by volume against hydro-carbons, hence it requires larger tank to store.
Car manufacturers like BMW, Honda, Nissan etc have been developing and researching a solution to increase the storage density. BMW had released its model BMW Hydrogen 7 utilizing hydrogen along with gasoline as fuel in IC engine from 2005-2007. 

The model was based on BMW’s traditional gasoline-powered BMW 7 Series line of vehicles. The model was eccentric because unlike its competitors Honda, General Motors etc. which are using the Hydrogen Fuel-cell to power the electric drives, BMW hydrogen 7 channelled it to the engine.
       Many researches are going on to improve the storage technology for hydrogen. FCTO i.e Fuel Cell Technologies Office is an organization conducting researches to advance hydrogen storage systems technology. FCTO is aiming to provide adequate hydrogen storage to meet on-board light-duty vehicle, material-handling equipment and portable power applications.
Specific targets include:
                        1.5kwh/kg system (4.5%wt hydrogen)
                        1.0kwh/L system (0.030 kg hydrogen/litre)
                 Organizations like Hydrogen Storage Engineering Centre of Excellence and Advanced Research Consortium are constantly driving researches for understanding the interaction of hydrogen with materials. They are also working toward the formation and release of hydrogen from hydrogen storage materials and the analysis activities for material based storage system technologies.
Use of hydrogen is not limited to only cars and rockets. Hydrogen is also a fuel for driving the nuclear fusion reactors which can solve all the energy problems of the world. We’ll see about the first ever Nuclear Fusion reactor of the world in our next article.

Stay Updated till then……

    

    

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