We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus or a truck, it becomes problematic with smaller vehicles, especially ones such as scooters or even full-sized motorcycles. The Fraunhofer Institute wants to run smaller vehicles on magnesium hydride in a paste form that they call POWERPASTE.
One thing that’s attractive is that the paste is easy to store and pump. A gas station, for example, could invest $20-30,000 and dispense the paste from a metal drum to meet low demand and then scale up as needed. A hydrogen pumping setup starts at about $1.2 million. Fraunhofer is building a pilot production plant that will produce about four tons of the material a year.
Although a hydrogen powered vehicle still has an electric motor, and sometimes a small battery, it's source of power is the conversion of hydrogen to electricity. Its big attraction is how quickly it can be "filled up" but the biggest downside is the transportation and storage of hydrogen in special high pressure tanks to the numerous places it needs to be dispensed (think of all the gas/petrol stations we have today). This paste looks quite promising, and it also has the attraction that scooters and motorcycles themselves may then not need to have such heavy tanks fitted.
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The Future Of Hydrogen Power… Is Paste?#
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We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompany…
