New Ammonia Cracking Method Makes Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars More Viable

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  Prasanta Dey

  Satya Swaroop Dash

  In the future when natural gas and oil resources come to an end, we shall be left with electricity to power our cars. At least today electric cars have not managed to gain much ground on our roads because of a big issue, refueling. Imagine you want to make a long highway journey let’s say from New Delhi to Agra which is a total distance of 230 kilometers on any Mahindra electric car which has a maximum range of 80 to 100kms.The one way journey alone will take you over two days. Why? because charging a car is a lengthy process which can take up to five hours. To get rid of this problem various manufacturers like Honda and Toyota have announced Hydrogen Fuel cell cars that are basically electric cars but they are not powered by them. Compressed hydrogen goes into the fuel tank and that combined with oxygen from the air produces electricity for the front wheels to power the car. Filling your car with Hydrogen takes the same amount of time as you do to fill your car with Petrol or Diesel. We already have cars like the Honda FCX Clarity plying on streets of some American cities that have Hydrogen filling stations but they too are finding it hard to expand this on large scale because compressed hydrogen is very hard to transport. All that is about to end thanks to a research by some Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) researchers who have found an alternative to this process.
  
  They are considering Ammonia as an alternative. As you know ammonia chemical formula is NH3 which means that it has three parts of hydrogen. In the past extracting the hydrogen from ammonia involved precious metal as catalysts. All this cost a lot of money, so in a bid to reduce the costs to a third, the team of STFC concocted another method. The new method involves two simultaneous chemical processes that produce hydrogen without any precious metal catalyst. The researchers have made a water bottle sized ammonia decomposition reactor that can be fitted to any car without taking much space. As compared to Hydrogen, Ammonia is very easy to transport.
  
  

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  Since it would be popping in your minds right now we would like to inform you that they have also worked out a way to contain the NOx gases being produced by this process. The researchers even think that manufacturers do not have to bother making hydrogen fuel cars anymore as they think a mixture of a tiny amount of hydrogen and ammonia can power any conventional car engine.
  
  If you are craving for more information on this development, we would like to request you to go through their research paper on the #-Link-Snipped-# and its coverage on #-Link-Snipped-#

  Nice data.... But will it be cheaper than diesel/fuel??
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  Satya Swaroop Dash

  Unless the system gets implemented on a larger scale, the researchers cannot comment on the cost benefits.