Hydrogen Storage System Making Cars Closer to Reality

April 4th, 2009

If you want to debate the usefulness of developing hydrogen cars, or some other method let’s save that for you. I’m not going to give the pros and cons of these here. You all can swing from the chandeliers and debate that amongst yourselves. I am going to talk about the new development being made on how researchers have developed a critical part of a hydrogen storage system for cars that makes it possible to fill up a vehicle’s fuel tank within five minutes with enough hydrogen to drive 300 miles.

The system uses a fine powder called metal hydride to absorb hydrogen gas. The researchers have created the system’s heat exchanger, which circulates coolant through tubes and uses fins to remove heat generated as the hydrogen is absorbed by the powder.

The heat exchanger is critical because the system stops absorbing hydrogen effectively if it overheats, said Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the research.

“The hydride produces an enormous amount of heat,” Mudawar said. “It would take a minimum of 40 minutes to fill the tank without cooling, and that would be entirely impractical.”

Suffice to say this development is rather helpful, and makes it a bit more realistic to have this available in the future.

Surprisingly, guess who is heading this research? The research, funded by General Motors Corp. and directed by GM researchers Darsh Kumar, Michael Herrmann and Abbas Nazri, is based at the Hydrogen Systems Laboratory at Purdue’s Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories. In February, the team applied for three provisional patents related to this technology.

Better wait on getting paid before GM declares bankruptcy and steals your money .