The picture above says to me: hydrogen vehicles are always going to be a cludge. Just look at that fuel tank! It’s an aluminium core surrounded by hundreds of layers of some plastic or other - and that’s just one of two tanks in the Hyundai ix35 demonstrator, totalling 144 litres.

I just don’t know. As you know from my previous post, I would love fuel cell cars to succeed, but the challenges to producing a sensible vehicle system and ecosystem are many, and devilishly detailed.

Challenges are what engineering is all about, and whilst I, and no doubt most engineers involved in fuel cell development, could imagine some funky carbon-fibre-clad magnesium tanks reducing bulk, their colleagues in finance will be confiscating their coffee cups until costs are driven down and infrastructure is driven up. Now, I know that separating engineers and their coffee is counterproductive, even under the best collaborative conditions, achieving both will take a few decades more.

Anyway, the article that prompted this post, in the German emobilitytec magazine, about this self-same Hyundai ix35 raised some interesting points:

• The ix35 has two H2 tanks (1 at 100 l + 40 l) totalling 144 l
• Fully tanked, the fuel weighs just 5.6 kg at 700 bar.
• Yes, that’s 700 bar.
• Consumption is 0.94 kg H2 per 100 km.
• The car includes a 24 kWh battery (same as in the new e-Golf), half charged.
  • This is because fuel cells need time to warm up (so the ix35 starts up as electro car) plus time to run down after switching off the vehicle - so the battery needs to soak up the additional charge 100 kW power, Max 124 kW with fully loaded battery, providing a decent 300 Nm
• Good for up to 600 km.

So, power, torque and range are decent, and whilst the volume of fuel being held is large, at least its weight is low. Additionally, you don’t need pumps to get the hydrogen from tank to stack, so on the tank side of things, things are relatively simple. If you discount the difficulties in sealing up the piping between tank and stack under all operating conditions.

That stack itself remains a complex, expensive and still rather fragile mystery to me. And we still need to the extract hydrogen from the environment as sensibly as possible.

Development continues, if not apace. As the European HyFive infrastructure and 110 fuel cell vehicle project shows, industry and politics can combine to prod things forward little by little.

Toyota helped to kick off the 2014 CES show by pronouncing themselves happy with the rate of development and cost reduction on Fuel Cell Vehicles: “Fuel cell electric vehicles will be in our future sooner than many people believe, and in much greater numbers than anyone expected.” Indeed, they intend to have a “vehicle” (by which I understand a car of some sorts) on sale by 2015

Now, even with my occasionally shaky grip of arithmetic, especially in German, that’s NEXT YEAR. Whilst it’s usually better to look forward rather than backwards, the history of fuel cell vehicles is long and far from glorious, so it’s worth taking such pronouncements – even from Toyota – with a pinch of salt.

Having said that, I’ve always been fascinated by fuel cell technology - as a naive young engineer, I somewhat irrationally invested in what in hindsight was a rather dodgy looking British-Belgian-Russian company called Zevco. This firm at least managed to get a fuel cell into a river boat, a taxi (a recurring theme in fuel cells, as a small fleet of taxis created for the 2010 London Olympics shows) and an airport tug - before it folded, with the best of intentions to rise again. Admittedly, I wasn’t the only dreamer out there, as Zevco managed to sign several alliances and intents of work before going under, with companies much richer than I – but there has never been a convincing commercial case for fuel cells. 

More recently, I was naturally keen to be involved in a project to develop the high pressure lines and connectors between the hydrogen fuel tank and the fuel cell. This was, alas, but from a business perspective sensibly, cancelled by our management as – well, quite simply, there wasn’t a convincing commercial case for it.   Money aside, key technical challenges remain:

• H2 infrastructure (and figuring out where the energy to extract hydrogen should come from)
• Tank and system pressures of up to 900 bar
• Operating fluid temperature -40 to + 85 °C
  • When the fuel cell is running at max power, it’s drawing the maximum amount of hydrogen from the tank, thereby reducing the pressure and cooling the feed system to sub zero temperatures
• System permeation & losses
  • Sealing all the lines and connections in such a way that they’re quick to assemble and acceptably cheap
  • Ensuring that you can leave a car in an airport car park for a week without it emptying of its own accord.
• Refuelling safety and losses

Even before sending cars out onto the roads, developing and validating the system is non-trivial as there are only a handful of test centres capable of handling the full suite of tests required. And they’re not particularly cheap.

The fuel cell endeavour seems to go in waves, with resources built up and then, like GM-Opel’s team in Mainz, Germany, discarded. I personally hope that it works out. Perhaps the competitive and commercial might of Toyota, Hyundai, Daimler as well as a range of dedicated system suppliers like Intelligent Energy and Ballard, can result in a compelling case for the technology. But I  fear that, for want of a serious infrastructure, and the insurmountability of storage issues, it won’t.

Still, give me a project working on carbon fibre fuel cell cars, and I’ll be one happy engineer…!

For a variety of reasons unknown to me, I drifted away from that most permanently cutting-edge of artisanal engineering fields - carbon composites. My research project at university was all to do with aerospace carbon composites aerospace and I still have fond memories of laying up mats of prepreg, vacuuming them, cutting out the shapes and putting them in the autoclave (a fancy word for “oven”) to cure. It was all very peaceful, a far cry from my current state of frantic dashing from quality analysis to drawing release to development activities, a far cry from steel tubing and automotive PPAPs. It was actually all too dull for me at the time, to be fair…!

I still like to keep track of what’s going on in the carbon world, and harbour dreams of re-entering that realm one day (I harbour lots of dreams…) So I enjoy such series as from The Truth About Cars on the development of the carbon fibre Lexus LFA, and what’s going on with the BMW iSeries.

I recently came across what looks like a good resource for composites news, www.compositestoday.com. There really are some interesting articles in there, but the writing is frequently offputting and consists mostly, to my eyes at least, of press-releases. This article on a patent application from Apple for transparent composites is a barely legible copy-pasting from the patent text with few attempts at refinement: it’s patent churnalese. Do we really need words like “hereinafter” and “embodiment” in an online news article?

I was particularly interested to come across an article about the recycling of the hull and mast of Oracle’s 2003 America’s Cup winner. Other than chopping pieces up into 4-foot long pieces, how exactly will such structures be recycled? What methods will / can be used? Can resin and fibres be separated? Or will they end up as chunks in low-grade plastics? Alas, the article itself remains only enticing, granting us no details on how recycling will be done.

Still, with more extensive articles on the McLaren MP4/1, the car that introduced carbon fibre into Formula One, and lots of video entries aggregated from around the internet, describing Cervélo carbon fibre bikes, knitting fibres rather than weaving them and many others, Composites Today is an interesting resource - a slightly fuzzy, slick but cheap though well stocked window into my parallel history…