The Next Step.... The Fuel of the Future!!!!

• Each year around 77 million cars are produced worldwide whit china taking the lead with 18 million units a year.
•  By the year 2007 there were around 806 million cars & light trucks on the road on the road (If kept bumper to bumper this is enough to circle the globe a 100 times) 
• These 806 million cars consume around 260 billion gallons of petrol and diesel yearly.

This in turn would mean that a quarter of the oil ever consumed on earth was done so in the last 15 -20 years. All these facts can’t help but beg one question….


How long do you think it will all last??

For many years now the debate has been ongoing as to what the future will hold for us. And in terms of automotive industry what will we be using to power our cars. I made it a personal goal to explore the options open to us. Now these alternatives may be either low emission or emission free. But one type of fuel stands a good chance to fight for prestigious award of 0% pollution…….





The Fuel of the Future….


The answer is...

HYDROGEN..

I mean think about it. Hydrogen is the single most abundant type of resource (if you are willing to go that extra mile to call it a resource) not in the world, in the whole UNIVERSE!!!. Our biggest star the Sun uses hydrogen in nuclear fusion to produce massive amounts of energy and helium as a byproduct. Here on earth hydrogen can react with oxygen to give out the same amount of energy as petrol with the only waste being water. I mean it’s the best possible thing right…


However hydrogen does have one drawback. Although hydrogen is a renewable resource it is not available in its pure form. In other words hydrogen is always available combined with other elements which would mean that to get to hydrogen you actually have to spend energy on retrieving pure hydrogen.




OK since we got that cleared currently there are 2 ways in which hydrogen can be used to power cars. One would be to use the normal petrol engines with a few changes (YES…we can do that…..YAY…this would mean that we can preserve most of the experience of a hunky petrol engine) and also fuel cell driven cars, which are basically electric cars (BORING!!!!!!.... seriously guys there is a bigger problem at hand, so bear with me). But you see although hydrogen can be used in cars very effectively to power them, there are 2 problems with it.


 

1. Manufacturing
2. Storage & Distribution

Manufacturing.

In terms of manufacturing the usual process for hydrogen manufacturing would be electrolysis. This involves the passing of an electric current through water. This process produces hydrogen at one end and oxygen at the other. However there is a drawback with this process as well. The process of electrolysis uses electricity. Which has to be taken off the electricity grids. As of today most of the power generated is through the use of fossil fuels. So in using hydrogen there is still ascertain amount of green house gas emissions taking place. The ideal solution for this would be to switch to renewable sources for power generation such as Geo Thermal, hydro electric, solar or wind as quickly as possible. Or even switch to hydrogen power plants ( I’m not very sure about the possibilities of this)


Storage & Distribution

Hydrogen unlike petrol is a gas. (DUHH!!!.. yeah I know.. I said that to make a point so listen up) so you can’t use pump to move the hydrogen from one place to another you actually need a pressure difference (a high pressure to low pressure scenario). Therefore hydrogen has to be stored under pressure.

It terms of transport for a few kilos of hydrogen it can be transported in gas tanks. But for commercial volumes hydrogen has to be converted to its liquid form which means it has to be maintained at a very very very low temperature…. And that is a hard thing to do. So the only available solution is to produce the hydrogen on site on demand. Eg: When you pull up into a fuelling station to fuel your car you usually ask for a certain amount of fuel right. So the hydrogen actually has to be produced by the dispenser at that moment itself, thereby eliminating many of the costs involved in it.



So if the technology is readily available to use and produce hydrogen why isn’t it being used already??


For the answer we have to move back to the 1940’s



 

Fueling Stations and mass car production both evolved together. So over decades the safety the procedures the infrastructure etc has evolved solely to support the distribution of petrol & diesel. So obviously the change to hydrogen cannot happen overnight. Petrol cars and Fueling Stations both evolved together.




In the case of Hydrogen. It’s like a chicken and egg scenario, both have to evolve together. So car manufacturers have to start producing hydrogen driven cars as well as Fueling Stations should start selling hydrogen.




All that is fine. But there is a bigger question bothering me.

What does the Future hold for the Fuel of the Future??

The BMW Hydrogen Engine

Note: Feel free to leave comments on what you think might happen in the future.

The Power : Weight Ratio

2 Weeks of waiting and we are back….

Up to now I have been going on and on about some of the cars, their breed and the technology that caught my eye. I would go on and on about what the car can do, what it cant do, what it would be better off doing and you know blah blah blah blah blah blah. Now… Change of Pace..

Heres what I have in mind….. :)

This time im going to go short and sweet. Short being the article and sweet being the the subject of the article…. My choice for this would be something which has come to become a fundamental factor when it comes to the motoring world. The Power to Weight Ratio

Okkk… now what exactly is this power to weight ratio…

The best place to begin to explain this would be to start off by explaining what power really is. Power in simple terms is the … erm… well… the power output of the engine. Its usually measured in horse powers, which basically equates the power of the engine to the mode of transportation at the time when the petrol engine was first invented, The Horse and cart.

So 1 Horse Power = 1 horse n cart

2 Horsepower = 2 horse n cart

Modern cars have horsepower ranges goin from 40 to well over 1000 horse powers and all produced from a petrol engine.

So where did it all start??

In Germany 1885.

The Benz Tricycle

The first ever petrol engine was put on the Benz Tricycle by inventor Karl Benz can be considered as the first motor car. It just consisted of a 3 wheeled bike like structure with a petrol engine stuffed into the back. It was first driven over a long distance by his wife when she went off with her daughter without telling Karl to see relatives who lived 2 towns away.

Yeah Yeah the first person to properly drive the first car was female...Thankfully its not a well known fact…or we’ll never hear the end of it.

Specifications

Engine: 1 cylinder, 1.0 litre, 1 horse power.

Top Speed: 8mph (12 kmph)



So over the years engines got bigger and bigger due to one reason. The bigger the engine the greater the power. It works like this

High Capacity cylinder = more fuel air mixture can be input = larger explosion = MORE POWER

This moved onto the launch of the first purpose built race cars. The engines kept bigger and bigger until they reached their most massive…………… until………….. they came up what is considered to be the god of race cars.

The Napier Railton.

Built in 1933 for land speed record breaking drive John Cobb’s the Napier Railton was powered by an airplane engine. There were 2 reasons for the use of the aero plane engines. One was that many of the car companies at the time were forced to build airplane engines to power the World War 1 air craft’s. So the left over’s after the war came in handy for Cobb’s. Obviously the byproduct of an engine made to do dogfights in mid air was well, sheer amounts of power that the enginecould generate. It was TERRIFIC for any race car driver.

Engine: Napier Lion, W12, 23 Litre, over 500 hp

Top Speed: 168 mph (270kmph)

This car holds the all time, life time speed record at the brooklyn race track (now shut down) of 143.4 mph (230 kmph)all the way back IN 1935 :O .. I mean 230 kmph in 1935….Simply austounding.








However soon after the race car associations somehow put together rules banning the use of aircraft engines in cars. Race car builders were made to focus on building lighter smaller engine cars with more power. Also due to the sheer number of casualties regulations forced race car builders to build cars which are more capable of taking corners and handling rather than just sheer brutal speed.

And here was one of the turning points away from power.



A way to increase your overall performance and stability was to reduce the weight. Even though the engine power was kept constant, the reducing of the weight meant that better performance and handling capabilities were available to the drivers. Many modern cars of the days, best example McLaren MP4-12C, SSC Aero are built with the whole weight reduction point in mind. I mean these cars were pretty much OBSESSED with weight reduction. The McLaren MP4-12C charred off kilos every where it possible could. The SSC Aero on the other hand removed comforts like the air conditioning and even the radio to boost performance.



Another reason for the power measurement to go out of hand was because as speed increase power tends to turn into a more exponential figure

You see as cars go faster and faster the more obstacles it meets to its motion such as drag force etc. So say I take the example of the Bugatti Veyron. All it needs to achieve 140 kmph is only about 270 horse powers but to reach its top speed of 400 kmph . It needs 1000 horse powers. So in essence to travel from 240 to 400 kmph which is an extra 160 kmph the Bugatti needs 730 horse powers. :O. I mean compare the figures. You’ll see for yourself just how much more power it needs to go fast. So that really puts the power measurement out of line.

So as you can see from what I explained above power really cannot be the measurement that can be used when measuring the actual capabilities of the car. Hence began the use of the Power to Weight ratio

The power to weight ratio uses the units of HorsePowers/Kg. So it basically looks at how much of horse power is produced for every tonne in a car.

Now this number can be really used to identify what a vehicle is capable of……..