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Fuel Cell cars are the cars of the future. A lot of exploration has been done with electric cars, but until the battery costs go down, the driving range goes up and the weight of the batteries goes down, this will not be an option for the ordinary public, not similar to the standard hybrid cars. A hybrid car has a gas engine and an electric engine. The gas may continually recharge the electric batteries. In a fuel cell car, the fuel applied is compressed or liquid hydrogen. A fuel cell converts hydrogen and oxygen to water, and formulates electricity. Due to ongoing difficultnesses with storing liquid or compressed hydrogen, currently, largely buses are using fuel cell technology. They may hold big tanks of compressed hydrogen on their roofs. The fuel cell uses a catalyst, which is a platinum powder or compound, to facilitate the reaction of hydrogen with oxygen. The catalyst is disseminate as a thin coat on a huge surface for greatest or most complete or best possible effect. Why are there troubles using hydrogen as a fuel? Except at high compression, and/or low temperatures, hydrogen is a gas. It is the lightest gas, and would tend to have high leakage through pipelines. Due to it is high energy content, it is also very explosive. There was the explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 in New Jersey. That was a hydrogen lifted dirigible which went on fire. Due to the use of heavy safety instrumentation to compress hydrogen, this is why fuel cell engineering science is primary being used in buses. Another option being devised is to use hydrocarbons that are hydrogen rich as the basis for hydrogen fuel cell technology. Hydrocarbons are compounds of hydrogen and carbon. The leading campaigners are CH4, which is methane gas, a pure form of natural gas, and methanol, a liquid alcohol compound, CH4OH. Both methanol and methane may be converted to hydrogen gas using a chemical reformer. Reformers have a drawback in that they lower fuel efficacy by as much as half. There is increased miniaturization of chemical reformers for automobiles. However, other compounds are being experimented with that are requiring little effort to catalytically convert to hydrogen for a fuel cell and may be more effortlessly stored in a vehicle’s fuel tank. An example of the type of system that could work is being experimented on at Daimler-Chrysler. It involves simple borate, borax, a compound chemical that is formulated and used for soap. A running prototype minivan was displayed at the North American Auto Show in 2002. The hydrogen fuel cell may run on hydrogen that is liberated in a simple chemical reaction from sodium borohydride. This chemical may be made in refineries from a combining of borax soap and Hydrogen gas. The vehicle could run on sodium borohydride, which would be processed in the car to yield hydrogen gas for the fuel cell. The only exhaust product would be water (H20). The other waste product would be borax (a form of soap), which would then have to be reprocessed to sodium borohydride, to refuel the car again. Infrastructure to construct hydrogen from methane or ammonia and then manufacture sodium borohydride would be necessary at your local refueling station. |
Hydrogen: Hot Stuff Cool Science, is a hot 
