Quote (dro94 @ Nov 19 2020 01:04pm)
Anyone got strong opinions on hydrogen vehicles and investing in hydrogen related shit
Hydrogen just isn't a viable strategy for vehicle powering.
The advantage of hydrogen power is it's safe. Hydrogen rises when it's released due to it being lighter than air, so when it catches on fire it's far safer than a gasoline powered vehicle.
That's it.
The disadvantages are that the tank is incredibly heavy which cuts into the energy per mass efficiency, it requires actively compressing gas into a cylinder which cuts down its total energy provided, and it can only barely keep up with traditional gasoline in terms of energy per unit volume.
So overall there's very little incentive to use hydrogen powered vehicles until these factors are greatly improved.
One route of improvement is to use a solid support that captures and releases the hydrogen, thereby lowering the volume and compression need, but those are going to be exceptionally expensive and specialized materials that will require billions of dollars if not trillions in R&D to get to a level it can be used in commercial vehicles. The reason is you're basically having to hack thermodynamics, where you want somethingto bind strongly to hydrogen so it's space efficient, but you want it to be easily released so it doesn't eat the energy availability. Strong binding + easily released are contradictory, so you will have to make an exceptionally specialized material to achieve both. Not impossible, but insanely difficult.
So overall I don't see a viable future for hydrogen powered vehicles unless it's in very specific use cases.
This post was edited by Thor123422 on Nov 19 2020 02:47pm