Hydrogen Hybrid Cars, A Quick Look At Some Of The Technology

As technology progress's there is a series of new converging technologies that could mean cheaper better engines and fuel types to replace the internal combustion engine as we know it.

Im mainly looking at hybrid cars here
(ie- generators running from a combustion engine running motors and charging batteries)

Solar Cells
New advances in solar cells mean cheaper cells that can produce more energy for the same area of panel.
New designs in cells can now get close to 85% effiancy compared to 17% in older cells

www.abc.net.au...

Batteries
New lithium air or metal air batteries weigh less then normal lithium polymer packs so the final weight of the vehicle is reduced meaning better power to weight ratios.

en.wikipedia.org...

Fuel
Hydrogen is one of the fuels that may make a breakthough in the near future, the two main stumbling blocks are producing it cheaply and storing it for use.

Producing Hydrogen from water is the easist way, the trick is not to do it from oil or coal based fuels, but rather to make it using renewable clean power like solar or wind.

www.sciencedaily.com...

Another way to produce hydrogen is by using onboard chemical reactions with hydrides and steps are moving in this direction as well.

www.sciencedaily.com...

Combustion Engine
New designs in how engines are made and designed can create smaller engines with less moving parts, saving weight and reducing the manufacturing costs.
Because the engines are designed to run generators the need for complex heavy transmission gearbox's is negated further simplifing and saving even more weight from the vehicle.


news.discovery.com...


So this in no way means we are going to have hydrogen powered cars very soon, but as you can see the road just got a bit shorter and a bit straighter.. and theres no browns gas or Meyer's fuel cells in sight

I do like the looks of rotary engine, would be nice to see one in operation. The Kawai engine also looks like a good design for electrical drive www.cheniere.org... .

As for hydrogen storage I am currently leaning towards water separation for on demand supply www.project.nsearch.com... . The though of having a large container of hydrogen next to me is not appealing in the event of an accident or something goes wrong, at least it will be quicker than gradually burning to death as happens in some car crashes. Could also recycle the exhaust gases with water to close the system and reduce the need for top ups.

The lithium air battery sounds interesting and appears to pack quite a punch.

I also recently read about some solid state semiconductor device that gave a really good explanation of how it taps into variations in the quantum field. A one square centimetre wafer of this device produced about 1 watt, not sure how thick the wafers are but looking at around 1 litre of space for 1 kw of power. Something like this would be really cool. If I find the link again I will post it.

Also, negative resistors sound like another cool trick to keep that juice flowing.