Turkish students get 568 km from one liter of hydrogen in tiny SAHİMO car
Posted Jul 5th 2009 7:27PM by Sebastian Blanco
Going 568 kilometers (353 miles) on a liter of hydrogen is nothing to scoff at, but for the students at Sakarya University in northwestern Turkey who built the SAHİMO vehicle, it's simply not good enough. The hydrogen-powered ride was the third-most fuel-efficient vehicle in the recent 26th Shell Eco Marathon, but for the Global Green Challenge down in Australia this October, the students are shooting for 1,000 km per liter.
The SAHİMO can squeeze so much distance from so little fuel because it's ridiculously lightweight. The enclosed vehicle weighs just 110 kilograms (240 pounds). While details about the powertrain and exactly how the students plan to almost double their range in the little car weren't easily found in our English-language searches, we can assume they won't be cheap to implement. The SAHİMO, as is, cost $170,000.
[Source: Today's Zaman, SAİTEM via Treehugger]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Mark 5:08AM (7/06/2009)
Why did the students choose H2 to fuel the car, and where did the students get the $170,000 to build it? Could it be Shell?
I see the big Shell logo there which goes to show that Shell is very much in support of H2 over anything that would acutally benefit the end consumer. So once again we just need to find a way to get the price of H2 down to about $3 a gallon so that the oil companies can keep screwing us, god forbid people would ever want to have a solar panel and recharge their car at home.
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paulwesterberg 11:15AM (7/06/2009)
I'm sure that shell donated the fuel cell so it didn't add anything to the 170k "cost".
jpm 5:52AM (7/06/2009)
pffffffff
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Alan 5:55AM (7/06/2009)
I think (and hope) that there are giant forces at play now that even the likes of Shell can't stop. What I don't understand about the huge oil companies is the obession with the status quo, there's going to be profit for them if they back the right horses, if they continue to push for expensive personal transportation fuel there's just going to be less money available for other things in the general economy and surely ultimately that's going to be bad for them.
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Mark 6:12AM (7/06/2009)
Notice the difference between the oil companies and the oil producers like some of the Middle Eastern nations, some of the governments were are activiely investing battery technology knowing that oil has no long term future. There is a method in the madness of companies like Shell, they want to sell something to people and solar or wind doesn't cut the it for him, they want a simple transfer from oil to H2 so that the consumer doesn't really notice the difference. However the consumer today is a lot better informed than he was back in the 1950s and people see the possiblity of having a car that isn't affected by oil prices or strikes as a sort after item.
The oil companies just want people to hold their noise and keep buying some sort of liquid be it ethenol, H2 or somesort of fuel.
Alan 6:20AM (7/06/2009)
The obession with liquids you mention (even if it's liquid hydrogen!) hits the nail on the head. I find it curious that they seem to be paranoid that demand for their product will fall off a cliff, I don't think so. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I really don't think the oil industry can keep increasing daily output for very much longer, but if they can maintain output I'm sure that demand can keep up, of course if they lower production to keep the oil price somewhere 'sweet' for them they'll also increase the lifespan of their oil fields.
Mark 7:09AM (7/06/2009)
Yeah Alan you are right, even if we had EVs today for sale sitting in showrooms the affect on oil production would not have an affect for a number of years. EVs are going to dent it a bit for the first 10 years but EVs currently only cover personal transport and not haulage or shipping or even air where sales of fuel are huge.
The decrease in oil would be gradual I think but it will come and they can even go with the tide (get in the solar/wind/geo business) or be crushed by it.
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Sean P 9:34AM (7/06/2009)
On the up side, $170K is quite a discount from other models we've seen. I wonder if they aren't using an H2 ICE. With that light weight, they might be able to get by with something around the size of a go-kart engine.
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DasBoese 10:33AM (7/06/2009)
Quite possible, similar cars have been built that go 1000km and more on one liter of gasoline, using extremely efficient, sall engines. Also, achieving the low weight they did would be hard using a fuel cell, not to mention the price.
BlackbirdHighway 10:07AM (7/06/2009)
Brilliant achievement! These kids have shown wonderful engineering skills in developing this.
The hydrogen-battery debate, and the coal-solar-wind debate is really about moving beyond fire isn't it? Ever since ancient humans figured out how to harness fire, we've been using fire in some form or another to cook our food, keep us warm, move us about, supply electricity to power our technology devices, and even propel us to the moon.
Even the hydrogen fuel cell is really just a super high-tech form of fire, it's still combining a fuel with an oxidizer.
With electricity generated by solar wind, geo-thermal, (or even nuclear), and stored in a battery, we are finally, after many thousands of years, moving beyond fire for our energy.
No wonder this has so many people freaking out, it's changing the way things have been for probably 400,000 years! (At least according to Wikipedia). Talk about change! This is a really, really big change!
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paulwesterberg 11:13AM (7/06/2009)
Q. How much energy does one "liter" of hydrogen contain?
A. Depends on how much it is compressed.
5000psi, 10000psi, compressed to liquid form? The space shuttle uses liquid hydrogen to launch itself into space so it is an impressively energy dense fuel, but I doubt it would be safe for people to fill their cars with liquid hydrogen at a filling station.
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Bip-D-Bo 11:48AM (7/06/2009)
"Safe" is really relative. How safe is it really to carry highly explosive gasoline in a thin walled plastic tank under your car?
Anonymouse 12:09PM (7/06/2009)
Sorry, but gasoline isn't explosive. Try again. It's incredibly hard to even get a proper deflagration through the air going with gasoline vapors; you have to have just the right mix. Not even close to hydrogen, which can readily detonate and burns in almost any fuel-air mixture. And diesel is even less flammable than gasoline -- it's very hard to light a puddle of diesel on fire.
The reason gasoline and diesel burn rapidly in an engine has more to do with the fact that they're aerosolized. Make any "fuel" into particles small enough and it'll do that -- see grain elevator explosions for an example.
Back to the article in question: The real way these eco-marathon cars get the mileage that they do is that they only go 10-20 mph during the competition.
Bip-D-Bo 1:30PM (7/06/2009)
Gasoline isn't explosive? Really? I may not be a chemist, but I figured that if a gas tank is punctured, and a spark occurs in the wrong place, something is likely to explode. Am I ignorant? My point is that driving is dangerous by nature, yet we continue to do it. Hydrogen cars just like any new technology, hydrogen powered cars has its hurdles. One of those hurdles has been storing and filling hydrogen at very high pressures. Fortunately engineers seem to have found realatively safe ways around this.
"paulwesterberg" does ask a good question, though. It would seem that the amount of energy in a liter of hydrogen is dependent upon the pressure. When one purchases a "liter" of hydrogen, is that under some standardized pressure or do we need to apply some math when we shop?
paulwesterberg 1:56PM (7/06/2009)
Gasoline is explosive, but liquid gas is not much of an issue. An empty gas tank filled with air and fumes is more explosive than a full tank. My prius tank uses a bladder to hold the gas and minimized air intake which minimizes gas evaporation and the possibility of explosion.
My point was that a liter is a poor unit to measure hydrogen because it contains an unknown amount of energy. An uncompressed liter of hydrogen at ambient temperature and pressure contains very very little energy. So they must have used compressed hydrogen, but they didn't say what psi they compressed the hydrogen to. 10000psi contains twice the energy of 5000psi.
Saying you drove 568-km on one liter of hydrogen is like saying you drove 1000 miles on one tank of gas. It could be an impressive feat using a 15 gallon tank or you could have used a 100gallon gas tank.
Serge 4:47PM (7/06/2009)
According to SEM rules (http://www.shell.com/static/eco-marathon-en/downloads/pdf/sem_rules_2009.pdf) "one liter of hydrogen" than SB refers to here is the energy equivalent of 1 L of Shell 89 Octane gasoline. So, the prototype has an energy efficiency equivalent of 568 km / l of 89 octane gas.
What I find quite interesting is the following statement:
"If an embedded electric storage device is part of the powertrain, it must be of
capacitor type, referred to hereafter as super-capacitors. Other types of
embedded electric storage device (Pb, NiMh, etc. batteries) are forbidden"
Why are "Eco Marathon" organizers afraid of having batteries being part of power-train? So much for "These Official Rules are designed to enable safe, technically sound and fair competitions. They intentionally leave various design parameters, technologies and tactics unspecified in order to stimulate creativity and allow for the competition of novel ideas and solutions"
paulwesterberg 5:08PM (7/06/2009)
The rules were probably added by the events biggest sponsor. Capacitors are required for fuel cells to operate properly. Battery electric vehicles would easily win a competition like this due to their much higher efficiency at converting energy to motion.
Shell doesn't want their "green fuel of the future" to be trounced by a plug-in vehicle.
Chris M 11:06PM (7/06/2009)
Exactly, but I'd add that it isn't possible to liquify hydrogen by compression alone, it must be chilled to extremely low temperatures in order to make liquid H2.
Apparently, they weren't really measuring hydrogen by the liter, they were measuring it by the energy equivalent of a liter of gasoline.
Serge 1:48PM (7/06/2009)
In other news, the Sunraycer has completed a 3,005 km trip on nothing but photons.
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Mark 6:45PM (7/06/2009)
This is what I hate about the whole H2 project they won't give proper info, a litre of hydrogen means nothing when we don't know how it is compressed. The whole thing seems to me to be all smoke and mirrors and lacking anything that graded as useful information to anyone interested in future car technology.
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