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  • Hydrogen powered bike
  • TPTcruiser
    Full Member

    Linde, owners of BOC, have a hydrogen fuelled bicycle.


    ianbradbury
    Full Member

    And according to another press release on their site you may be able to refuel it, in Germany. In 2013. Sort of limiting right now. Oh, and by then the fuel cell will have died (service life 5 years). Major advantages over the standard e-bikes would be ?

    aracer
    Free Member

    Did you read the article?

    Like hydrogen-powered cars, fuel-cell bikes have the dual advantage of a long range and a short refuelling window of just a few minutes.

    ianbradbury
    Full Member

    I did. The range advertised is about the same as my wife gets from her standard pedelec, and short refuelling is only interesting if the infrastructure exists to do it. Which it seems it won’t, even in Germany, until the next decade. Seems slightly back-to-front to me. The other advantage they claim is ‘better carbon balance’ than conventional pedelecs, which seems bizarre, given that most hydrogen is produced by electrolysis, and the process overall is no more efficient.

    OK, not having LI batteries around is probably good, but I really can’t see this as a major contribution, unless all transport goes the hydrogen route.

    mintimperial
    Full Member

    Oooh, imagine being run over on one of those. Yeah, you’ll die in a massive fireball, but you might also take out the dopey **** who hit you. BOOOM! 😀

    aracer
    Free Member

    The point is that it is a prototype. It’s not exactly a huge fuel tank on there, and would hardly be difficult to double if not triple the size of that. The infrastructure is clearly a chicken/egg thing. You asked what the advantages are – well those are the theoretical advantages which make it worth developing the infrastructure.

    The reason it can be greener is that it’s a lot easier to store hydrogen and so it can be generated with spare renewable electricity. Batteries get recharged using marginal electricity production, which is likely to be hydrocarbons a lot of the time. IMHO hydrogen power is certainly one of the ways to enable the use of more renewables.

    TPTcruiser
    Full Member

    There’s a fleet of hydrogen FCEVs Toyota Mirais delivered to Boris Mayor earlier this week. Infrastructure inching it’s way forward.
    Got to store your excess solar somewhere, electrolysing water seems like an option.

    brakes
    Free Member

    so what are the chances that I can buy/ build something at home that can…

    obtain hydrogen through the electrolysis of water using wind energy or by reforming biogas

    and sustainably re-charge at home rather than waiting for an infrastructure to materialize?

    ianbradbury
    Full Member

    getting the hydrogen would be easy. Compressing it might be a bit of a poser.

    brakes
    Free Member

    what if I put it in a big balloon and just drag that around?

    andyl
    Free Member

    methane powered would be better :mrgreen:

    bencooper
    Free Member

    Meh, I helped build one of them over a decade ago:

    http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/starobject.html?oid=433824

    😀

    andyl
    Free Member

    that looks like it should have a flux capacitor!

    aracer
    Free Member

    I can’t imagine why the idea hasn’t taken off

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Got to store your excess solar somewhere, electrolysing water seems like an option.

    Not when you read up on how difficult hydrogen is to store. Shame, cos otherwise it’d be fantastic, and Iceland would be the new Saudi Arabia as it exported huge quantities of hydrogen generated for free.

    Flow batteries are a much better option for storage.

    bencooper
    Free Member

    I can’t imagine why the idea hasn’t taken off

    It was deliberately meant to look bodged. Artists 😀

    Explaining to BOC what we wanted to do with the very explosive hydrogen we were buying from them was fun. And I got to do the first test ride – it did make a start up noise exactly like a flux capacitor, which is a bit unnerving when it comes from right under the saddle and you have no brakes.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    I suspsect that all that electronic hardware is not strictly necessary either..? Is that a PC in the main triangle?

    bencooper
    Free Member

    It was at the time – it’s a Ballard 5kW fuel cell, overkill for this kind of thing but all he could get for reasonable money. That big circuit board is the fuel cell management system, that feeds power to the battery pack (behind the Raleigh sticker) which drives a golf buggy controller and then a 2kW Heinzmann hub motor.

    Really, it’s a fuel cell motorbike – 2kW is 10x the legal limit for electric bikes.

    gonefishin
    Free Member

    If only there was some form of carbon neutral way of powering a bicycle…

    bencooper
    Free Member

    It’s turning H2 into H2O – technically it is carbon neutral 😉

    (Yes, I know, there’s all the stuff about how you make the H2)

    maloney19710776
    Free Member

    http://goo.gl/photos/eQi6FLzFBCJVcZxV9

    Im hoping work dont notice a little of their 300 bar hydrogen disappearing once in a while.

    maloney19710776
    Free Member

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