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Hydrogen cell powered trains - trams?


rue_d_etropal
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I'm quite friendly with a splendid Greek gentleman who is a luminary of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects who has been questioning the need to have electrical wires on ships for years. He assures me that wireless transmission of energy is quite straightforward. I'd write him off as a bit bonkers if it wasn't for the fact he's achieved far more in life than I ever will and that he is such a nice chap.

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Rather than cart the fuel cell around on each and every tram where it is stated it cannot cope with the ever changing demands, think instead of siting the fuel cells as sub stations along the tram routes where their inefficiencies of supply could be averaged out.

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Judging by the posts on here, many people have not actually read the article in the OP and have jumped to conclusions. Hydrogen as a byproduct of another process, lithium batteries are used to store unused enery from the cells, etc.

Edited by dhjgreen
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Scoffing infers that people have not considered what they post. There clearly are good applications for fuel cells, and provided that the supply of hydrogen or fuel feedstock can be sourced from clean/renewable sources they can be green. However the fact is that there are good reasons why despite being a well established, mature technology fuel cells have been slow to be adopted, namely their high cost, the availability of hydrogen, the fact that other forms of energy conversion are just as (or are more efficient) and that for a train especially wires are a perfectly acceptable means of supplying energy to the train.

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I thought the whole point of electric pickup by overhead wire or third rail was that the electricity could be generated by any method and the same trains and trams would still be able to operate. Central generation rather than on board generation (DEMU) has the advantage of economies of scale and regenerative braking feeding back into the system.

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Too many people scoff at new(or not so new) ideas, and seem to want to continue living in a non developing/non sustainable world.

All modern trains and trams use electric motors to propel them, it just needs electricity in some form to power them. Althom have developed this train, by using as environmentally feiendly a way as possible. Chances are something better will come along in a few years, but it is better than either spending millions up front to change to a wired system(which in many cases would be thrown out because it costs too much), or continuing with diesel engines which how ever clean they are meant to be are not clean enough. We have reached that stage, and there are people out there prepared to do something.

 

Sorry removed previous as there seems to be a time delay on updates to forum.

 

 

Point I am making is that in an ideal world it would be possible to develop every system in the best way, how ever much money and time it takes, but we are not in an ideal world, and I would rather have something at a lower price now than wait for something which might be better, but does not get off the starting block because it costs too much.

Edited by rue_d_etropal
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Why can't a diesel be sustainable or clean?

 

Actually I'm not anti-fuel cell, I just think they're expensive and that wires make more sense for rail applications, with batteries or diesel-battery electric making more sense for sections where wiring is not practical.

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I'm not an expert on fuel cells, but the. inclusion of onboard batteries is, to me anyway, strange. they're apparently needed to store energy produced by the fuel cells when not needed. Does this mean that once a fuel cell is operational it needs a constant supply of hydrogen? I always thought you just stopped the supply of hydrogen to the cell to turn it off, and to turn it back on you restored the supply of hydrogen. Or is this journalistic dumbing down, and the batteries are there to provide additional power for the higher current load needed on acceleration and to provide a "destination" for power produced in regenerative braking?

 

It was interesting reading reviews of the death of Rudolf Dieselthis week, that his invention of the engine was apparently spurred by an article suggesting that internal combustion engines could be 100% efficient, but that even today, even the best diesel engines only manage 50% efficiency in turning the chemical energy in diesel fuel into kinetic energy.

 

To me that, and the problems of particulates and nitrous oxides emissions, are the argument against diesel engines.

Edited by GoingUnderground
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Something to remember is that fuel cell describes a group of technologies in the same way as internal combustion engine or battery. The differences between the different technologies are huge as are the performance characteristics. Using a means of energy conversion in a hybrid arrangement with batteries can allow you to run the device at its optimum efficiency point using batteries to manage transients or low load operation. Ships are doing the same thing with diesels (and fuel cells).

With respect to efficiency, many fuel cells are no more efficient than diesels. You can knock the NOx out easily, I had responsibility for power plant diesels where we lowered NOx to 1-2% of raw levels using SCR installed in the early 90's. PM is more difficult but there are many variables and unless you define the species of PM then you can't really consider emissions and abatement.

The advantage of fuel cells is zero emissions, but it is zero emissions at the point of use. The environmental impact depends on where the hydrogen comes from. In the German application in this article they're using a waste stream from chemical processing. Most hydrogen uses hydrocarbon feedstocks and is energy intensive to produce, meaning its not very clean. You can generate clean hydrogen using wind turbines and water, but then you're wasting most of the energy from the turbine, energy which could maybe deliver more environmental benefit if sent into the network.

I think that for trains the diesel engine should only ever have been a transitional technology. However the question is transition to what? I don't think there is any question that wires offer the best solution to eliminating range limitations and offering huge amounts of power for intensive operations or high train performance. The issue then becomes one of what to do for lines where electrification doesn't add up. The Hydrogen economy has been just around the corner for the last 40 or 50 years. In that time battery technologies have gone through several revolutions. They are on the verge of another revolution which if successful would slash recharging times, increase energy density still further and address eco concerns of being reliant on rare metals etc. Batteries already offer sufficient energy density for many of the applications which fuel cells are most well suited for.

If the production of hydrogen in a clean, efficient way is cracked, if the cost and life of fuel cell stacks is transformed then clearly the arguments may change. However there would still be the risk management question - why move lots of hazardous hydrogen around if you don't need to?

I've done quite a lot of work with hydrogen energy and with the exception of military projects they were almost all greenwash projects.

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  • 1 year later...

Just to keep this topic up front. The first Chinese articulated hydrogen powered tram (for Foshan) is now under test operating on a railway service. I would love to see this car demonstrated on London Tramlink. A single car version would be ideal on a project like the TAW Line one for Barnstaple which could even develop into a tram-train operation (Exeter - Barnstaple - Braunton and possibly Ilfracombe). Even the Warwick University's Coventry project's automatic lightweight battery car could be reviewed as a hydrogen powered vehicle. Regards, Colin Withey.

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