Mercedes E Superlight

While critics are disregarding the wisdom of rolling out hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the year 2015, Mercedes (and all of the other major automakers) is plunging straight ahead. Assuming that we all make it past the Mayan end of times prophecy for December 21, 2012, perhaps the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is actually the beginning of a new energy paradigm especially in the transportation sector.

Mercedes will be doing its part by selling small production quantities of the E Superlight hydrogen fuel cell car in 2015.

According to MSN Autos, the Mercedes E Superlight will run using “… a 150-horsepower fuel cell driving the rear wheels in conjunction with a 500-horsepower electric motor. It will be a 4-door saloon based loosely on the next-generation E-Class, and it will eschew aluminum architecture for a full carbon-fiber monocoque that fully integrates the suspension and drivetrain. Also: suicide doors. Even cooler from a visual standpoint: Said suicide doors won’t need reinforcing B-posts, thanks to the strength of the carbon material.”

So, what is interesting about this to me is that Mercedes is downplaying the fuel cell as no big deal since they’ve already agreed to put out one or more models of fuel cell vehicles by 2015. With the E Silverlight, Mercedes is featured the carbon fiber body on its mid-size 4 door sedan which is strong, durable, lightweight and fuel efficient.

In fact, Mercedes is so matter-of-fact about the fuel cell in the vehicle that its says it will roll this out first, and if all works out well, it may offer the same sedan with other powertrains later such as diesel, gasoline and some sort of plug-in hybrid. Clearly Mercedes is thinking fuel cell first with the E Superlight.

UTD Researchers

There’s been a lot of research in materials sciences in finding cheaper alternatives in which to store hydrogen or use as catalysts for hydrogen reactions. Most of this breakthrough technology perpetually seems to be 10 to 20 years away before commercialization.

This is why when I heard about what the researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas are doing in regard to titanium-doped aluminum I got a bit excited since this seems to me to be more of a near-term solution rather than a longer term pie-in-the-sky idea.

The UTD researchers noticed that light-weight aluminum hydrides can be made to release its hydrogen bond by slightly increasing the temperature which is an advantage over current metal hydride systems that require more energy in order to release their bonds.

According to UTD graduate student Irinder Singh Chopra, “We investigated a certain class of materials called complex metal hydrides (aluminum-based hydrides) in the hope of finding cheaper and more effective means of activating hydrogen.

“Our research into an aluminum-based catalyst turned out to be much more useful than just designing good storage materials. It has also provided very encouraging results into the possible use of this system as a very cheap and effective alternative to the materials currently used for fuel cells.”

So, let’s think about this statement for a moment. If it is true that titanium-doped aluminum holds the key for both hydrogen storage and as a catalyst in fuel cells, this will bring the price of storage tanks and FC’s way down without giving up any effectiveness. In fact, in the case of storage, hydrogen tanks will be more effective at releasing H2 at lower temperatures. And this, my friend, is a very Big Deal.

Pictured above are UTD researchers Irinder Chopra (left) and Jean-Francois Veyan.

Mercedes F125

Tomorrow, September 13, 2011 Mercedes-Benz is supposed to introduce its newest hydrogen fuel cell concept car, the F125 at the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany. Apparently, due to some leakage to the media we have some info about this car a day early.

In the Spring of 2010, the Mercedes Benz B-Class F-Cell began serial production and now a few drivers in Germany and the U. S. are leasing this car. So, apparently Mercedes decided to raise the bar a bit with the introduction of the F125.

At this point no one knows if the Mercedes F125 will be intended for commercial production or not. However what we do know is that this concept car is no slacker.

Powered by a hydrogen fuel cell stack it can put out 231 horsepower which is enough to propel it from 0 to 62 mph in just 4.9 seconds. The car gets some of its oomph from a bank of lithium ion batteries hidden inside the vehicle.

The Mercedes F125 also has a top speed of 137 mph. But, this speed burner is also a gas sipper as well. This hydrogen fuel cell cars gets around 74 miles per gallon equivalent and can travel approximately 620 miles before needing to be refueled with 10,000 psi hydrogen gas.

The chassis is made from carbon fiber, aluminum and high tech plastics to reduce the weight of the vehicle while strengthening its shell. My only hope is that Mercedes will decide to go into serial production with this FCV as this will surely be a car that many people will want to drive and drive with gusto.

External Video Link

Here’s a Youtube Video of the car in action

According to Duke University, “Instead of systems based on standard solar panels, Duke engineer Nico Hotz proposes a hybrid option in which sunlight heats a combination of water and methanol in a maze of glass tubes on a rooftop. After two catalytic reactions, the system produces hydrogen much more efficiently than current technology without significant impurities. The resulting hydrogen can be stored and used on demand in fuel cells.”

According to Hotz, “The hybrid system achieved exergetic efficiencies of 28.5 percent in the summer and 18.5 percent in the winter, compared to 5 to 15 percent for the conventional systems in the summer, and 2.5 to 5 percent in the winter.”

The combination of small copper tubes, aluminum and aluminum oxide plus catalytic nanoparticles allows this rooftop solar energy system to absorb up to 95-percent of the sunlight that falls on the panels. The hydrogen that is produced may be used immediately in a fuel cell or compressed and stored for night use. Or, I dare say, if one has a hydrogen car in one’s garage it is conceivable that someday this system could be modified for home refueling use as well.

Assistant professor Hotz has given us a new way to think about solar to hydrogen applications and how traditional solar panel systems may not be as efficient as a hybrid system such as Nico Hotz is proposing.

You are so unlikely to believe this that I’ll let Google tell you; enter this search argument in your browser:

copper + church + (steal OR stolen OR theft)

As of this writing, that entry nets well over ten million Google responses and over five million from Yahoo. An EPA friend whose church was just hit tipped me off to the problem. The price of copper has roughly quadrupled since the 2008 trough at the bottom of the Great Dismal Crunch. Yet copper’s price is at an all-time high, even with the economy bumping along the runway and trying to bounce airborne. Outdoor copper is like keys in an open convertible.

High copper prices are the calling cards presented by China and India and Brazil as they join the ranks of developed countries that use it to move energy around and, in exported products, move copper around the world to markets.

Petroleum prices pop-up fiercely but, when no one is looking, they ooze partway back down as the latest news sensations fade and lose their fear stimulation clout. But copper’s price is real, driven by steadily growing demand. It may feint a dip now and again but it’s always headed up, up and away.

Cooper’s worth stealing—so much so that the US Mint adulterates pennies with zinc to keep them from morphing (with the aide of entrepreneurs) into shiny ingots.

In this bent new world, does it make sense to pretend that future high–speed rail growth (which many of us believe is essential to relieve highway and airport congestion) can be powered externally via track electrification? To believe that is to believe that there is no upper copper price point beyond which railroads and their customers are unwilling pay in order to avoid coming to grips with the need for a better way to power electric trains. Of course there must be some such limit. But eyes are averted so as not to see it.

The present electrification cost is in the ten-million-dollars-plus-per-track-mile range. You’d need a flash camera to freeze it at that level. Aluminum may fill in, but only at the cost of a loss of efficiency, waste energy dissipated as resistance heat, and the problems of  electrical junctions between dissimilar metals.

Still, track electrification has two solid selling points: (1) it exists; and, (2) after 120 years, it still works.

And so did steam power and vacuum tube electronics and hand-wired circuit boards and cathode ray tube television sets and four-barrel Holley carbs perched atop huge displacement V-8 engines. Like all those things, track electrification is barreling toward the sunset of unaffordability.

But unlike those technologies, railroad traction and rolling stock have such long amortization and service lives that it’s intensely uncomfortable to contemplate a market abstraction like the price of copper making expensive, like-new, capital rolling stock obsolete. Being the first to nod toward that elephant in the parlor could have a foreshortening effect on one’s years of gainful employment. In change-averse industries, silence is more than golden; it’s a survival skill.

Standing safely outside the industry and regarding the electric passenger train elephant through the parlor window, I’d describe the ignored beast this way. All the following technologies are well known; they only want cobbling together.

Each car in the new-tech consist (the string of cars) has a very large, fast-charging lithium battery to reaccelerate it, using the energy it captured in stopping —using dynamic regenerative braking traction motors, powered partly from the locomotive.

Up front, there is a locomotive with an even larger battery system, fed by one or more clean, constant-speed diesels and also by a complement of hydrogen fuel cells. The FC’s are sized to have enough power to sustain the train at speed without diesel help (on all but the steepest grades) but also without enough power to reaccelerate the consist unaided. That is where the diesels come in.

An onboard “smart grid” deals out power from the hydrogen fuel cells and the diesel prime-movers to the locomotive’s and the cars’ traction motors and to all the train’s batteries.

The systems integration engineering to put all this together for the first time to even approximate the hefty pull of a catenary-powered electric locomotive is going to be very expensive. But even if it cost a billion dollars worth of R&D (unlikely), at ten million a mile, that’s just a hundred miles of track electrification, even at today’s snapshot price of copper. And the resulting train can go anywhere; it’s not wire-bound to only high–use corridors.

Security costs compound copper’s rip–off cost. If mid-city church rain gutters and downspouts and the lighting system wiring of Interstate Highways and live power lines and plumbing copper snagged from empty foreclosed homes don’t daunt copper–snatchers, imagine the temptation posed by lonely miles of open country electrified track. Image the security labor needed to keep copper cables from snaking away in the dark of night during construction. Mentally price-out the helicopter patrols needed to keep trains running in the wide open spaces of the South and West.

In a very real sense, planning investments committed to electrification of high-speed rail lines may prove the biggest rip-off of all.

First of all, leave it to college students to design a car that runs on beer can pull tabs. This is what student Aleix Llovet and his UPC BarcelonaTech professor Xavier Salueña have done by inventing a vehicle called the dAlH2Orean.

The name is either a spoof or paying homage to the DeLorean used in the movie Back to the Future. Spelling out dAlH2Orean you come up with d-aluminum-water-rean. Anyway, the car runs on pull tabs or any kind of waste aluminum plus sodium hydroxide and water.

Hydrogen is created and run through a tiny put powerful fuel cell that propels this beast 18.6 mph for 40 minutes. The dAlH2Orean uses a couple of filters which is impressive for an RC car. Vinegar and water filter out the hydroxides while a silica gel filter removes moisture from the hydrogen.

Also notable is that the aluminum can be recycled along with the sodium hydroxide. Now using aluminum to create hydrogen is nothing new. I’ve talked about it many times over the years. The latest hydrogen powered RC car, the dAlH2Orean, shows how a simple chemical reaction can be used to create hydrogen and do it renewably. And instead of back to the future, this may be fast-forward to the future of hydrogen cars.

Now a Japanese company, FUKAI Environmental Research Institute has found a way to do both and do so at low cost. According to the company, “This newly developed technology generates hydrogen by adding aluminum or magnesium to what is known as ‘functional water’ in the boiling state. The amount of hydrogen generated is 2.0L per 1g of aluminum or 3.3L per 1g of magnesium.

“Thanks to this technology, it is possible to generate the amount of hydrogen required to generate 1kWh of electricity for a cost of merely 18 cents or so, the world’s lowest cost.”

The functional water and functional water generation units are proprietary to the FUKAI Environmental Research Institute, but they say they can use regular city water as a feedstock to produce hydrogen.

If the claims turn out to be as stated, then this will offer not only a solution for creating low cost hydrogen, but creating it on demand as well.

Today, however, Purdue has put a slightly different spin on the same goal using aluminum, plus a liquid alloy of gallium, indium and tin to produce hydrogen from seawater. Why is this different?

The earlier technology could not produce hydrogen efficiently using seawater and because the new process does, this opens up a whole host of applications for marine propulsion.

Cruise ships and tankers could store the aluminum and liquid alloy on-board, and pump seawater as necessary upon the journey. Hydrogen would be created on demand and fed through internal combustion engines.

The only byproduct of the process of producing hydrogen is aluminum hydroxide, which according to Purdue, “…can be recycled back to aluminum using existing commercial processes.”

Pollution from boats, ships and other sea craft is something we don’t usually talk about. But, if the Purdue invention does make it to commercialization this could help clean up our oceans, lakes and rivers in a big way.

Now, AlumiFuel Power Inc. (API) has announced that it is working with the U. S. Navy to create unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs). During various parts of the BP Oil Spill crisis UUVs were deployed such as the iRobot Seaglider to gather information about how much oil was spilled in the Gulf.

According to the AlumiFuel press release, “The overall global UUV market is expected to reach $12 billion over the next decade, encompassing commercial, naval and other national security applications. This number includes $1.2 billion for the power systems, with $400-$500 million related to the fuel modules.

“API has been interacting with selected defense contractors in the design of novel energy generators (including superheated steam as well as hydrogen) to power U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and commercial UUVs and submersibles for over two years. In fact, apart from this Navy R&D contract, API’s technology for underwater applications has been incorporated into three other proposals to DoD customers by three separate major defense contractors. “

The AlumiFuel system is unique because it involves a chemical reaction among aluminum, water and a proprietary catalyst to create hydrogen in an easily swappable cartridge. The hydrogen powered UUV is but one of many specialty applications being developed in the hydrogen vehicle industry.

I’ve talked about eHydrogen Solutions once before when they developed their H-Solaris generator that uses the sun’s light to split water into hydrogen fuel cost effectively. Now, eHydrogen has found another cost effective method of creating H2 without sunlight.

The positive aspect of this process is that no outside energy is needed. Water comes in contact with the metal alloys and creates hydrogen and oxygen. During this process some oxidation of the alloys occurs.

Over time, the metal alloys have to be recycled and this can be done in a cost effective manner. According to eHydrogen, “By recycling aluminum oxide back to aluminum, the cost of producing energy both as hydrogen and heat will continually to decrease, and is expected to be well below 10 cents per kilowatt hour.”

Even though eHydrogen is mainly focused in the residential and industrial applications of this technology right now, this would also be a potential solution for creating hydrogen on demand at the pump and for home hydrogen fueling stations as well. The details of who would recycle, pickup and deliver the metal alloys would have to be worked out, but this is true of most new businesses selling tangible goods, especially recycled products.