A new hydrogen-powered city car is launched in UK, which attempts to sidestep the three main hurdles to the dream of hydrogen-fuelled highways.  

Like other hydrogen cars, the Riversimple Urban Car (RUC) is powered by a fuel cell that combines hydrogen with oxygen from the air to release energy and nothing more toxic than water, says a report in New Scientist. 

Starting from scratch to build a small, efficient car, the makers claim that they can make it commercially viable more quickly than the major auto manufacturers experimenting with adapting more conventional cars to hydrogen. 

Riversimple is planning to touch the road for the first time in 2011 and mass produce in 2013. 

Urban pollution and carbon emissions too can be reduced by using hydrogen to power the cars, especially when hydrogen can be obtained from renewable source or is used efficiently enough. 

There are three main problems in building a hydrogen car even if we keep aside the lack of fuelling infrastructure, problems are that fuel cells contain expensive platinum, are difficult to make powerful enough to power a conventional vehicle, and the hydrogen they use is hard to store in large quantities. 

Riversimple founder and automotive engineer, Hugo Spowers said that, “Those barriers are very real, but were created by the auto giants themselves. He added to it, if your car is light and efficient enough, the hurdles are lowered. 

The size of RUC is similar to that of a smart car, its weight is 350 kilograms (772 pounds) and the fuel cell used is relatively cheap 6 kilowatt fuel cell, compared to the more sophisticated 100 kW cell used by the FCX Clarity. 

Spowers said that, “The fuel payload need not be huge, either: just 1 kg (2.2 lb) of liquid hydrogen (26 litres at normal pressure) is enough to take the car 300 kilometres”. 

The top speed of the car is 50 miles per hour (80.4672 kilometres per hour), and can be accelerated from 0 to 30 mph (48 km/h) in 5.5 seconds. 

Hydrogen used extracted from natural gas, is also well-to-wheel carbon emissions for urban driving are only 30 grams/km. 

The Riversimple Car doesn't have a battery, and thus uses a bank of ultra capacitors, which are able to take on and release energy much more rapidly, and provide most of the power to get the car moving. 

The fuel caell runs at a constant rate and trickles energy into the ultracapacitors, instead of varying output to match demand, alongside the energy reclaimed when braking. 

Spowers said that, “When you accelerate, 75 per cent of the power comes from the ultracapacitors”.

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Posted by Naresh Koshti on 19 June, 2009 12:59:59 PM IST #