Following on from our discussion about electric propulsion in aviation (and transport in general). It looks like Toyota did it again, but this time with a really interesting concept – the first mass-produced fuel cell car. Adopting this technology for aviation would, IMHO, be much more promising than an all-electric system.
Link to Der Spiegel article here (sorry, only in German, couldn’t find anything in the UK press yet).
Can it be overhauled by every Tom, Dick and Harry in their backyard? If not it’s useless.
What a pity it is based on hydrogen as fuel.
The Thielert engine can’t either and it’s not useless. This overhaul-and-replace-parts-for-70-years approach is what got us in the mess and we’re stuck with 1950s crap technology.
I have a 700 bar hydrogen fuel station in the neighborhood. It’s a monster. Infrastructure will be a challenge.
Whatnext – why don’t you explain your thoughts on hydrogen as a fuel?
It’s a tough problem to control fuel cells because of temperature sensitivity etc. so I think as with a lot of other technologies it comes down to being an energy storage problem. For aircraft and other weight sensitive applications I think you’d be better off burning the hydrogen.
Whatnext – why don’t you explain your thoughts on hydrogen as a fuel?
Many reasons… some of them are:
- No infrastructure exists.
- Storage is very difficult and lossy, the smaller the quantity, the bigger the loss, especially with cryogenic hydrogen.
- Production of hydrogen is not economic or ecologic (at least now). Efficiencies of converting other forms of energy into hydrogen are very poor. The best method for production of hydrogen at industrial scale right now is steam reforming of natural gas. Why not power the engines with natural gas in the first place? Infrastructure already exists and the same amount of carbon dioxide is raleased either way.
I am a firm believer in fuel cell technology, but until they can be fueled with storable propellents (e.g. methanol – a lot of research is going that way!) they will be a dead end.
I would agree, especially with burning the natural gas as fuel in the first place. I think it’s a very interesting way to spend their R&D budget and may help prepare us for the time hundreds of years from now when there is little easily sourced natural gas. OTOH it takes a lot of windmills to split water… assuming that’s the idea they are implicitly promoting. Companies like Toyota are obviously much motivated by PR considerations.
