Clean fuel cells could be cheap enough to replace gas engines in vehicles

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/clean-fuel-cells-could-be-cheap-enough-replace-gas-engines

Clean fuel cells could be cheap enough to replace gas engines in vehicles
Thursday, May 9, 2019

Advancements in zero-emission fuel cells could make the technology cheap enough to replace traditional gasoline engines in vehicles, according to researchers at the University of Waterloo.

The researchers have developed a new fuel cell that lasts at least 10 times longer than current technology, an improvement that would make them economically practical, if mass-produced, to power vehicles with electricity.

“With our design approach, the cost could be comparable or even cheaper than gasoline engines,” said Xianguo Li, director of the Fuel Cell and Green Energy Lab at Waterloo. “The future is very bright. This is clean energy that could boom.”

Researchers initially concentrated on hybrid vehicles, which now have gas engines as well as batteries due to issues involving limited driving range and long charging times.

…

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.02.040

[3Hotdogs]

1. What is the difference between a fuel cell and a battery?

[Aristus]

2. A battery stores energy. A fuel cell creates it.

The fusion of hydrogen and oxygen produces water, heat, and energy.

It's what provided all three on the Apollo spacecraft.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Thanks.

[mackdaddy]

4. I would say that a Fuel cell takes energy stored as hydrogen and converts it to electricity.

It still takes some original source energy to create the stored hydrogen. Solar wind Nuke or Fossil fuels are used to Isolate and compress the Hydrogen into the storage device.

The fuel cell is a type of chemical battery device that uses the chemical reaction of hydrogen combining with oxygen to convert this energy to electrical energy. The fuel cell basically keeps running as long as hydrogen and oxygen are supplied to it.

A storage or rechargeable battery has an form of original source electrical energy charge applied to it which causes an internal chemical reaction to happen storing most of that energy. When electrical energy is taken out of the batter, the electro-chemical reaction is reversed "liberating" the electrical energy to be used.

So both the Hydrogen generation/use cycle system and the battery take some source energy and store it for later use.