Hydrogen paste may be an alternative hydrogen fuel for fuel cell vehicles to filling up with compressed hydrogen gas.

Created by The Fraunhofer Institute, this particular substance has become noted as a ‘revolutionary’ development in the auto industry.

How would hydrogen paste work in practice?

The process would mean that instead of having to fill up hydrogen fuel tanks drivers would need to swap out H2 paste cartridges. That would be a much easier process to manufacture, sell, and then distribute.

Institute research associate Dr. Marcus Vogt says, “POWERPASTE stores hydrogen in a chemical form at room temperature and atmospheric pressure to be then released on demand … POWERPASTE… has a huge energy storage density. It is substantially higher than that of a 700-bar high-pressure tank. And compared to batteries, it has ten times the energy storage density.”

The ability to simply swap out an H2 cartridge and then fill up a water tank would allow for much easier development of high-quality substances.

The development of an affordable and available hydrogen paste could arrive much sooner than what we might expect.

Who would have thought 20 years ago that paste + water could mean a 300 mile range for vehicles today? And yet, here we are.

Citation

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-bike-tesla-amazon-gates-bezos-climate-change-fuel-drone-2021-2

by guest blogger Stan Thompson

Canadian Pacific Railway has throttled-up the transition to zero-carbon freight movement by two big notches recently. Last December, 2020, CPR announced “that it plans to develop North America’s first line-haul hydrogen-powered locomotive.”   Then in March, 2021, they announced a combination with Kansas City Southern that will link Canada, the USA and Mexico via a single railroad for the first time.

While I have no inside knowledge whatever about CPR’s plans, my futurist’s instincts are pointing toward a great leap forward in the global transition from fossil to renewable railway traction power.

Here are a few dots that connect nicely with CPRs first two. Across the pond, France and Sweden have proposed to replace the last of their freight diesels with hydrail by 2035 and its likely that the rest of the EU will follow suit. Germany is said to be looking at 2038 and the conservative UK, 2040—though I’m all but certain they’ll match the continent’s earlier date.

There is a sort of natural scale progression for hydrail. Largely due to fuel capacity issues, small-and-slow is easier; big-and-fast much harder to design and produce.  That’s why trams were the first to go hydrail and high speed rail will be last.

That said, here’s an eye-opening exercise:  Try to envision a 2121 where all the trams, light rail and freight trains and the trucking and marine industries have been powered for decades by wireless electrification via hydrogen and yet high speed rail lines are still tethered to the power grid by a sliding contact. It’s hard, in the present, to envision profound future change with only the past and present as mental reference. But it’s even harder to imagine some legacy technologies persisting a hundred years into the future when external track electrification will be 240 years old.

We can’t yet imagine just how hydrail will be adapted to HSTs—but neither can we imagine HSTs not being wireless hydrail a century from now—though the Battery Bunnies could conceivably pull that out of their magical hat.

Getting back to Canadian Pacific’s dip down south of two borders, here are a few facts that make hydrail not unlikely.

At the top end, as I’ve often written, Canada has perhaps the deepest hydrail roots of any country. They extend from the first tiny mining fuel cell locomotive tested in the gold mines of Quebec’s Val D’Or region, through the 2013 rescue of of the hydrogen transition from the “tar pit” of H2 car fixation, to the national pro-hydrail position of the 2021 Federal Government.

Canadian fuel cells from Ballard will power CP’s innovation and Canadian fuel cells from Hydrogenics (now Cummins) have been powering passenger rail in Germany for years and will soon cover Europe and Morocco.

The USA Government’s hydrail vision, after a brisk start back in 2008, was pricked by an evil political needle and slept until 2019, when it was awakened by the kiss of a bustling world’s hydrail activity, including Canada’s.

Hydrail is already on Mexico’s green screen. President Lópes Obrador is keen on the tourist Tren Maya to carry tourist through the Yucatan’s rain forests. The Calakmul routes’s not finally designated as hydrail, but for a rail line created to showcase a rain forest, ¿por qué no?

Fueling for the prospective MEXUSACA (my abbreviation for  Mexico-USA-Canada, not CP’s) is a green dream. Canada is committed to a national transition to hydrogen and is rich in hydro power, wind and the makings for “blue” H2 if that were necessary. The middle USA is wind-rich, sunny enough for wheat, and fitted with the occasional nuclear station if the hydrogen storage is deemed iffy, early-on. Mexico has PV sun and to spare.

Canadian Pacific’s bold move up to line haul hydrail freight is not an isolated upgrade.  China is manufacturing hydrail switch engines and so, soon, will the USA. While it’s not announced, my guess is that the former Kiel, Germany, locomotive works—now China owned—will help power Europe’s transition to hydrail freight.

George Friedman, publisher of Geopolitical Futures, is one of the top-rung futurists whose thinking I most admire. Dr. Friedman has long been bullish on a global Mexico. A recent GPF article explains why that country is functionally North American, not Latin American. If CP stitches North America’s three giants together with a hydrail thread of logostic and climate innovation, Dr. Friedman’s unity assertion will be born out in spades.

One of the biggest names in hydrogen fuel cell truck production, Hyzon, have just entered into a SPAC deal that could be valued as high as $2.6bn.

The partnership will see Hyzon Motors move into an agreement with Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp. in the next step forward in the use of hydrogen fuel cell trucks in a more normalized environment. This is not the first time Hyzon Motors has been mentioned in this blog.

This is a Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) deal that is very intriguing. SPACs, as companies without any commercial operations, exist purely to raise capital through a public offering that could allow for a takeover of another company in the long-term. Hyzon are a large-scale production firm in Rochester, NY, that spends its time creating semi tractor-trailers and medium-duty trucks which use hydrogen fuel cells.

What happens now?

After the announcement was made, Hyzon’s Co-Founder and CEO, Craig Knight, said via a company statement: “We are excited to partner with DCRB at an important inflection point for our company, hydrogen and society. Deliveries of Hyzon fuel cell powered heavy trucks to customers in Europe and North America will occur this year, and our committed sales pipeline is proof that the world is truly recognizing the need to develop innovative solutions to mitigate climate change and accelerate efforts to move the world economy down the path to net-zero emissions.”

The deal will see Hyzon injected with some $636m in investment, helping to push the company valuation to over the $2bn mark. The aim is to try and ensure that over time more progress can be made, with large scale underwritings coming from groups including Riverstone Energy Limited and Wellington Management. This, then, could be a major step forward in creating a solution that allows for more development of hydrogen fuel cell products.

As Hyzon continues to make a real name for themselves due to their push for hydrogen fuel cell adoption, this could be a crucial step in creating that vital next step for the uptake of hydrogen fuel cells at a more robust, specific level.

Hyzon does face competition from Kenworth, Toyota and Nikola in regard to hydrogen fuel cell big rig trucks. Let the race to a greener future begin!

Citation

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greggardner/2021/02/09/hyzon-a-hydrogen-fuel-cell-truck-maker-in-spac-deal-valued-at-21-billion/?sh=775896b23051

The 2021 Toyota Mirai might be one of the most exciting developments for commercial fuel cell vehicles. This hydrogen fuel-cell sedan brings with it all of the life, charisma, and energy that one could have hoped for. If you are looking for proof of performance, then, you might be happy to see the 2021 Toyota Mirai is ticking just about every box that one might expect.

I’ve written a longer review of the 2021 Toyota Mirai and so this is just a short addendum to that article.

To some, the Mirai can feel more like a Lexus than a traditional Toyota car. Rest assured, though, that this comes with a host of Toyota-specific features and design inclusions. One thing that users will notice immediately is the fact that it is just so much quieter than the original Mirai range of fuel cell cars. The 2021 Mirai is one of the quietest cars that we have seen from Toyota.

Compared to the original Mirai which would make far too much noise relative to its actual activity, this is a huge step in the right direction.

Let’s quickly talk about performance. The vehicle capable of going from 0-60mph in just over 7 seconds, using a 221lb-ft electric motor which is very acceptable. Add to this a 402 mile driving range and 74 mpge, then this is a very good alternative to any battery electric vehicle on the market.

The 2021 Toyota Mirai, is a wonderful step in the right direction for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. For a world that very much needs more eco-friendly cars, the Mirai is no mirage.

Citation

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2021-toyota-mirai-hydrogen-fuel-cell-sedan-key-takeaways/

For years, hydrogen fuel has been viewed through two prisms including the ability to give us a potential solution for long-term ethical energy, and the mass challenges that we face in turning hydrogen into an affordable form of fuel in the long-term. Along these lines, there has been a push for a development of non-platinum catalysts that could help to make power generation not only cheaper, but more likely to last for the long-term.

Now I have created over 150 blog posts about hydrogen fuel cells over the past decade and a half that I’ve been writing this blog, so I never get tired of writing on this subject! One of my favorite subjects, of course, is platinum-free fuel cells to drive down costs and increase durability.

So, to continue, Washington University in St. Louis has been working alongside expert Vijay Ramani in a bid to come up with a solution to the this issue. As an engineering specialist from the McKelvey School of Engineering, Ramani is seen as an essential part of the solution to platinum-free fuel cell development.

The process has been a tine consuming one, with the need for a platinum catalyst an essential part of hydrogen-oxygen polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, or PEMFCs. They require a platinum catalyst, but this can be expensive to make and also the lifespan can be quite poor. Together, the research team has found a platinum-group-metal free solution.

The next step in hydrogen fuel cell affordability?

Having worked tirelessly on a solution, they have developed a catalyst made with a mixture of cobalt, nitrogen, and carbon. This is designed to give the same kind of performance that is expected from a platinum option, while they also found that it was not only remarkably powerful, but it was as much as 4x as stable as the best PGM-free iron-nitrogen-carbon catalysts that had been tried in the past.

The testing was carried out both by Ramani and Cheng He, a doctoral student in his research group. They developed the high-performance membrane-electrode assemblies and watched performance to determine if it was capable of meeting demand. The results were extremely promising, with the development showing that it was able to exhibit the highest activity of all of the non-iron-based PGM-free catalysts.

So, while we might still be in the early stages of such a development, it is an immensely promising move in the right direction. In an industry that is in such need of good news and positive feelgood factor decisions (especially during Covid-19), this discovery has been very important indeed for the long-term future of the industry.

Citation

https://source.wustl.edu/2020/12/new-catalyst-resolves-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cost-longevity-issues/

If you’ve ever seen a slow-motion video of a dropped glass object shattering, then—the video reversed—reassembling to form the whole again, you have some notion of futurism.

Futurists pay attention to the moving fragments all around us:  which are biggest; how they are shaped and spinning; and the direction toward which they seem to be converging. The shape of the pre-shattered object becomes clear when it’s only a few frames from becoming whole again. But, conversely, the more frames that separate the intact object from the scattered shards, the less clear the restored shape, or the future, can be. Like the people who  reviewed aerial reconnaissance images in pre-computer times, for futurists, noticing convergence and intuiting the result is a habit acquired over time.  Like riding a unicycle, it’s a thing few have occasion to learn.

Here’s a unicycle view of 2053, roughly three decades into the emerging transition out of the extraction age which will begin to wind-down in earnest during the 2020s—impelled at first by the menace of climate change but later by the positive, opening possibilities of synthesis.

Extraction‘s replacement is the synthesis age:  making what we need from what’s right around us becomes the new norm. We’ll still extract and refine ore to produce things we can’t obtain by re-sourcing. What’s different is that extraction becomes “plan B.” “Plan A” becomes re-sourcing.

Re-sourcing is “recycling’ in the time of very cheap energy. Its machineries will be both expensive and knowledge cost intensive. But energy itself, as a feedstock from wind and sun and primitive nuclear fusion, will finally approach the “too cheap to meter” stage predicted at the dawn of nuclear fission power plants.

With plenty of very cheap energy, everything from household waste to outdated  semiconductor devices can be disassembled via plasma into atoms. Plasma-freed atoms will be—like individual pieces of hand-set type redistributed into the boxes of a font tray—stored, traded and redistributed later as required. Atoms will be assembled, largely into bespoke items, by unimaginably complex additive manufacturing devices—the inkjet printers of the gods—over and over and over.

In 2053, no one under the age of forty will ever have heard of the quaint 2020’s chromotaxonomy of hydrogen:  grey, brown, blue green and gold. Hydrogen will be just the form electricity takes when traveling from electrolyzers to fuel cells by pipe or while riding in a container, waiting  to be called for. That imaginary bazaar where the varicolored element was supposed to meet buyers will never emerge. H2’s production cost will simply change too fast for such a structured market to take form.

After coal replaced wood as locomotive fuel, few dwelt on the respective cost or steam-producing properties of oak, ash, poplar or maple. Different hydrogens, different woods…same fate.

Downstream from the electrolyzers, a lot of H2 will be tapped-off and burned for space and process heat and in non-electric mobility engines. It will just be called fuel in 2053, since nothing else will be burned to produce heat. “Fuel” will just mean hydrogen that’s relaxed back into energy and water without putting its electrons to work.

There may be too much fixation on hydrogen’s carbon-free ability to harness solar and nuclear energy to things that move over land and through the sea and air. That focus could begin to fade as wind- and solar-based ammonia fertilizer replaces far more carbon than H2 mobility eliminates. I don’t know whether piston engines will live long enough to burn hydrocarbons synthesized from CO2 frozen out of the air and hydrogen electrolyzed by energy from the sun but that’s one possibility the synthesis age lays before us.

Like Hamlet, hydrogen is the central character but it isn’t the whole play. The morals of the synthesis play are, “you can’t get the stuff you want out of the earth without also getting some stuff you don’t want” and “sooner or later you run out of stuff locally…then everywhere.” Side plots deal with the mayhem that ensues when bad guys covet the geography where the treasure is buried and help themselves.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, the people who produced things have been like ore and oil: used where they were found and left there when technology moved elsewhere. But with the fading of extraction and the dawn of synthesis, bringing the work to the worker will no longer be the monopoly of knowledge workers. Air and water and re-purposed matter are much more nearly ubiquitous than oil and coal and mineral geology. When a technology “goes away” in 2053, it needn’t necessarily go “away.”

Through most of recorded history, the atmosphere and hydrosphere were assumed to be too massive and robust to be affected by anything humanity could throw a them. The last century reversed that belief and, as extraction gives way to synthesis, the lithosphere and its biomass may also become an object of attentive protection.

By 2053, humankind will have learned to love, and love deeply, the thin layer of the planet we evolved over millennia to inhabit. Whether it will be the reciprocated love of a finely-tuned marriage or poignant reflection on what might have been, the shards aren’t saying.

As one of the leading names in the fight to develop more eco-friendly vehicles, Toyota has been pushing for a more ethical approach to vehicle development with some success. Now, though, they have teamed up with Iwatani to try and help the rushed development of hydrogen fueling stations. At the moment, the target is to open up seven new stations across California, providing state residents with the chance to use a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and keep it topped up without the logistical challenges which exist today.

If you were to drive such a vehicle today, it would be hard to find H2 fueling stations within an acceptable distance of one another. Toyota, though, wants to try and boost the uptake on their new Mirai fuel-cell vehicle with the addition of more stations across the state. Given the focus of the company on this part of the USA, this should come as no surprise.

This is expected to continue to take place, as the company looks to try and boost the number of publicly accessible hydrogen fuelling stations in the state by as much as one quarter. If there is a genuine desire to see mass uptake of their vehicles, then it is obvious that Toyota will look to push on further with their ambitions to make hydrogen fuel cell stations more accessible.

Each of the stations is going to be designed to have a daily capacity of around 900kg of hydrogen. That means that it should be able to give as much as 6,300km of new hydrogen capacity to Californian residents. Should the inclusion of new stations help to fuel a rise in the uptake of the Mirai itself, then we could see even more stations built in the medium-term.

For now, though, the main aim is to improve the infrastructure across the state with an impressive seven new stations. For anyone looking to buy a fuel cell car, then, such additions are sure to encourage others to pick up this kind of vehicle in the future.

When choosing a vehicle, the ease of which you can keep it on the road always becomes a deciding factor. And with this fuelling station increase, it will be more logical for Californians to consider the upgrade as a worthwhile investment for them.

The increase will mean that we could see as many as 1,200 fills per day more, making sure that more fuel cell vehicles can get on the roads of California and start giving back to the world a bit more. With around 5kg of hydrogen needed to fully fill up a Mirai, this means that we could see many other people with the desire to drive a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle take the opportunity with both hands.

While some might see it as daunting, this is an exciting time in the auto industry, and it is only likely to get more exciting as time goes on. As more H2 fueling infrastructure is built, expect more and more FCEV’s to enter the market as well.

Citation

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1130286_toyota-steps-up-to-support-mirai-fuel-cell-car-with-7-more-hydrogen-stations-in-california

updated 12/21/2020

In the late 1800s Nikola Tesla took Thomas Edison’s DC and alternated the polarity back and forth so that its voltage could be stepped up by a transformer and hauled much further by overcoming electrical resistance. Way off in the distance, at the user end, another transformer stepped it back down to a safer voltage and higher current to light places and turn stuff.

Fast forward to today and thousands of scientists, engineers and captains of industry are taking DC and AC and stepping it over to hydrogen: “HC.” Hydrogen is electric energy relaxed. Make it when you’ve got some wind, sun or hydro; use it when you need some electricity. In between, pipe it, tank it and haul it. At the user end HC’s stepped over to boutique electric power at pretty much any voltage or current or frequency that’s needed.

Tesla’s AC gave the utility of distance to electric energy. Hydrogen “HC” gives electricity the utility of spacetime.

Hydrogen, almost coincidentally, is a portal—a shared element associating two vastly dissimilar worlds.

It’s true that electrochemistry bleeds-off a lot more loss that an copper extension cord. But try to power a ship or a plane or a semi tractors with a cable! You can’t. That’s the trade-off and it’s hydrogen’s big draw.

Hydrogen’s killer aptitude is that it can be simultaneously stored and transported in pipes, moving intermittent renewable energy in spacetime.

Take the Smart Grid—able to precisely match supply with demand—and add hydrogen:  you’ve got the Soft Grid, where exactness just doesn’t matter so much. Want to use solar at midnight? Want to use hydro in a dry spell? Wind in a calm? And do all this without tons of costly, fading batteries with a complex life cycle?  It’s a pipe dream—in the best sense—and it’s why hydrogen is surging back.

Hydrogen today is the portal between two worlds. One—the world of fuel extraction—is characterized by energy sources that are eventually depleted;  by introducing residues like coal ash, CO2 and toxic elements which must be managed;  and by geopolitical baggage begetting control of extractible assets to tyrants, suppressing liberty and and triggering wars to capture neighboring countries’ extracted local assets.

On the new side of the H2 portal emerges the world of synthesis—materials drawn from the ambient environment, which includes energy-intensive perpetual recycling, air and water. Material extraction from the earth will always continue as needed—but, gradually, that becomes the last, not the first, sourcing recourse.

Pundits make it sound as though the two worlds straddling the hydrogen portal will haggle over price in some eternal bazaar. That’s just wrong. At present the two eras do overlap—a transient externality which draws far too much pundit attention. The relationship between the two is not “cheap vs. costly” but rather “before vs. after.” Price is a trend, not a fixed parameter. But the fact of eventual depletion is a fixed reality.

Pundits are constantly observing, sagely, that “We’ve seen this hydrogen bubble before.” And we have. Earlier, its development was arrested because pundits propagated an error. Their trope was “Hydrogen is the car tech of the future…and always will be.” But, absent government support, no synthesis infrastructure can be funded without a pre-existing fleet of existing consumer vehicles to buy hydrogen from it. Conversely, nobody’s going to buy H2 cars until there’s a ubiquitous support infrastructure to keep them running.

For over a decade, we quarreled pointlessly about this chicken vs. egg paradox. All this time we could have been dining on heavy H2 mobility “steak” (or soy bean cake, if that offends).

The introduction paradox is not special to hydrogen. The learning model was diesel cars.

Truck stops nurtured early adopters until pump island justification numbers were reached and the diesel car market took off.

Hydrogen will be the same. The economics are obvious but publications which buy articles from pundits don’t sell ads to train, truck, ship and airplane builders. They do, however, sell a lot of car ads. For over ten years this kept the “H2 always ten years later” myths in circulation and the present hydrogen transition avalanche in limbo.

Today truck builders Azetec, Cummins, Daimler/Freightliner, Honda/Isuzu, Hino/Toyota, Hyundai, Hyzon, Iveca, Kenworth, Nikola, PACCAR, Peterbuilt and Mack/Volvo have announced hydrogen trucks. Per Haley Zaremba in Oil Price online (10/24/2020), “The U.S. Is Backing Hydrogen Trucks With A New $100 million Initiative.” They are doomed, of course, because a Bloomberg Opinion pundit says “The case for hydrogen trucks is also weak” and quotes another Bloomberg source as believing “…hydrogen doesn’t even make sense for trains.” (This news will disappoint France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Sweden, who want all diesel trains gone in fifteen years, as well as several other countries.)

Per Russ Mitchell in the L.A. Times “…the [California Air Resources] board ordered manufacturers of medium-duty and heavy-duty commercial trucks to begin selling zero-emission versions in 2024, with 100,000 sold in California by 2030 and 300,000 by 2035.”

Pundits have a mutual pact to banish among of their number who write a piece that doesn’t acknowledge “the abundance of hydrogen.” But since exactly as much water must be released by fuel cells as is electrolyzed, none at all is consumed. That’s like celebrating the market future of cell phones because the desert is full of silicone sand.

The H2 bubble-mongers are the weirdest of all. Do the dimmest among them really believe that carbon might actually come back?

Carbon, Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa are gone. Get over it.

Sages quip that “You have to put in a huge amount of electric power to get green hydrogen out.” Do they think more power comes out of any electrical system than goes in, including a copper extension cord?

What is the incremental cost differential between one gigapuff and two gigagpuffs of wind spinning a turbine? Capital and R&D make the earliest hydrogen pricey. But wind as sun are free so, as the gear that makes then into electricity scales up, scale economics will drive the price down and down.

Short of a cataclysmic war, nothing is going to push civilization back through the hydrogen portal into the extraction era. As awful as CO2 emissions are, leaking gas wells may be a worse GHG problem. If a cheap, totally sufficient CO2 sequestration process appeared tomorrow, the extraction-synthesis transition wouldn’t blink, anymore than steam locomotives would reappear. The paradigm shifted years ago.

While substances won’t shape the future, the future has already begun to shape substances in important green ways. It’s actually the never-to-be-mentioned fertilizer production which consumes that “96% brown” fraction that the hydrogen police tout ad nauseam as a reason to scorn the present transition.

But as you read this, a vast amount of capital and smarts is being poured into zero-carbon fertilizer plants in Scandinavia, Spain and Australia. They will use wind- and sun-derived hydrogen, in place of “brown” natural gas. Making matter with energy is not just the province of particle colliders!

BNSF built the first hydrogen locomotive in 2008. That same year, Boeing flew the first manned hydrogen plane and Iceland launched their first hydrogen ship. The technology worked; the economics would have too; but uninformed punditry and advertising dynamics proved more powerful than science, technology, commerce and environmental needs combined.

By entangling extraction with the electric transmission message, pundits may slow—but will not stop—the present H2 transition this time.

H2 has lighted a spacetime path for intermittent renewable energy into the energy marketplace. It will only grow wider with use.

Fuel cell manufacturers are constantly looking for solutions that allows for maximum performance and efficiency. That is why the development of polyphthalamide for use in fuel cells is so important: the performance boost that they can provide is incredible.

Fuel cell development firm Nuvera Fuel Cells are now moving into the process of using BASF’s new Ultramid Advanced N polyphthalamide product. This resin, known as PPA resin, is used to help make sure that key components within the fuel cell assembly is designed to the specs needed. The latest generation of fuel cell, a 45-kW FC, is capable of using this resin to help ensure that performance boosts become the norm.

This has become a common area of discussion in that it will be used in transit hydrogen buses and hydrogen fuel cell trucks across China within the next three years. The various components made needing this resin include the thermostat housing, the check valve and the ejector; these require materials that can retain stability even during temperature fluctuation.

This helps to provide that in abundance, offering a solution that can handle both thermal and chemical resistance unlike previous products. They are also noted for their intensity, their strength, their dimensional stability, and various other factors.

Some components are going to be exposed to a variety of different temperatures due to cooling water, air, and hydrogen channels being used. The PPA compound, though, will help to ensure that parts are not degraded and/or weakened needlessly. By finding a lightweight solution that can take parts previously made from other materials without making it heavier, this helps to solve various problems all at once.

The rigidity and strength of the material as well as its ability to handle friction and wear and tear is very impressive. It also has been shown to have excellent temperature resistance, with the applicant designed to withstand temperatures as high as 105C for 10,000 to 20,000 hours.

As we continue to look for ways to deal with the various challenges involved with making the world cleaner, developments like this help to overcome hurdles. The development of this fuel cell solution is a very important step in the right direction.

Citation

https://www.plasticstoday.com/automotive-and-mobility/polyphthalamide-boosts-performance-fuel-cell-engines

The German auto giant’s truck unit, Daimler, which relied on advanced technology for decades, is now all set to rollout a fuel cell that is capable of covering a distance of 600 miles per fueling. The primary reason for this transition can be attributed to the increasing competition that is concerned with reducing carbon and diesel exhaustion by heavy-duty vehicles.

The fuel cell truck will be a suave model from the house of Mercedes – the Mercedes-Benz GenH2, in particular. The truck has been specially designed for long hauls and will be available to the customers in 2023. The manufacturing company unveiled the truck at an event in Berlin and shared with the audience its plans of fulfilling the ends of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The mass production of the fuel truck model will begin in the second half of 2020 itself. Furthermore, the company also introduced the Mercedes-Benz Actros LongHaul which happens to be a battery-powered truck meant for covering shorter ranges up to 300 miles.

Both these models are equipped with Daimler’s new ePowetrain modular platform to reduce their operational costs. The trucks will be first available in Europe but, the company made it clear that customers from Japan and North America will also get their hands on the vehicles around the same time.

According to Martin Daum, the chairman of Daimler, it is the combination of battery vehicles and hydrogen that has helped them to render their customers with the best alternatives corresponding to their needs of application. He added that the fuel-power cells will be more liked by people who are willing to travel long distances with heavy loads while the battery power will be preferred for shorter distances and lower cargo weights.

This approach is similar to that of Nikola Corporation which is an upstart company specializing in hydrogen trucks. Owing to its out-of-the-box strategy, Nikola Corp. has already bagged innumerable orders, the most prominent of which is the order for 800 trucks from Anheuser-Busch, followed by industrial partnerships such as CNH Industrial, Bosch, General Motors, and Meritor.

Apart from its environment-friendly attributes, the lightweight feature of the hydrogen powertrains is a reason why it is creating so much buzz lately. Unlike the multi-ton battery packs that require a lot of effort for trucking, the hydrogen fuel cell increase the payload of the trucks and make them suitable to be turned to for traveling the longer routes of 500 miles or even more. Moreover, hydrogen trucks take less time to fuel when compared with the recharging proficiency of diesel-powered trucks.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the Daimler trucks will use liquid hydrogen (instead of compressed hydrogen which is more common). This is because liquid hydrogen is denser and with more energy content. Liquid hydrogen thus ensures more cargo space and higher payload weight and prepares it to cover a longer range at the same time. The only downside is the lack of liquid hydrogen fueling infrastructure at the moment.

Citation

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2020/09/16/daimler-shows-off-long-range-hydrogen-semi-new-battery-truck-amid-nikola-uproar/#54e0e9686db2