• rentar42@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Why do you think it’ll overtake electric cars? The energy efficiency of hydrogen cars is significantly worse, as they introduce some extra steps in pipeline of energy-generation -> movement.

    The only major advantage they have is “ICE-like” fuelling, which has a bunch of major caveats attached to it (as in: it’s nowhere near as simple a system as ICE refuelling. Everything from generation, to transport to getting-it-in-the-car is way more complex and thus expensive and error-prone).

      • night_of_knee@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I hadn’t thought of it before but it’s obvious, hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, it had to be stored under pressure in order to get any significant mass into the volume of a tank. So it’s under pressure in the refueling station and in the car’s tank. How does it get from one to the other without boiling away?

        • supercriticalcheese@feddit.it
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          1 year ago

          Hydrogen is a gas, under very high pressure but you will never find it in a liquid form unless you cool it down to -250 C or so. It’s not used in liquid form for such applications.

          There is though the need to chill the hydrogen to about -20/-40C before delivery to the vehicles due to some anomalous properties of hydrogen respect to ever other gas known to humans.

        • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          oh there are a few ways. One group is researching turning H2 into a paste. the paste mixes with water and breaks down into water and Ca+ ions. You now have a energy density around liquid hydrogen and it only add some calcium to the exhaust. There is also storing hydrogen in metal disks.