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Building a Hydrogen Fuel Cell-Powered Electric Motorcycle

MIT's Electric Vehicle Team is testing their latest innovative electric vehicle — a hydrogen-powered electric motorcycle. Watch this video to see how the mechanical and electrical systems hold up at high speeds.

“We’re hoping to use this project as a chance to start conversations around ‘small hydrogen’ systems that could increase demand, which could lead to the development of more infrastructure," says graduate student, Aditya Mehrotra  . "We hope the project can help find new and creative applications for hydrogen.”

Topics:
Automotive Energy Hydroelectric Power Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] ADITYA MEHROTRA: I have no idea where my interest in vehicles comes from. I think it might come from a combination of Cars, the movie, and also just-- I like to go fast. It's fun. [MUSIC PLAYING]

    00:00:24 The MIT electric vehicle team is a student team on MIT campus made up of both undergraduate and graduate students now. Mostly what we do is we take commercial vehicles and we convert them to electric vehicles. And recently, we've started converting them to hydrogen-powered vehicles. Our team historically has very much liked to look at what do we think the future of vehicle technology is going to be and what

    00:00:47 are the technologies that we can develop coming into the next years of transportation, and also to provide hands-on experience for undergraduates in those future technologies to prepare them for careers in industry and also academic research. SPEAKER: And then I want to zip-tie the rest-- ADITYA MEHROTRA: So I guess if you ask why is the team building a hydrogen-powered motorcycle, to some extent, it's because, why not? Can we do this?

    00:01:12 And all of us are just very curious about this idea of, can we make a hydrogen-powered motorcycle that beats a gasoline motorcycle? ANNIKA MARSCHNER: When I first found the team, the project was just so fascinating and so unique among other build team projects that that's what drew me in the first place. Coming into this-- and I think a lot of people from the same background would think about hydrogen this way,

    00:01:34 where, in school, you learn about it in its chemical sense. So you're familiar with the capabilities it has as a reactant. But I hadn't been introduced at all to fuel cell vehicles, and now I've learned a lot more about them, why they're a good thing to put on a car, why they make sense, whether they're competing or complementing battery electric vehicles. And as someone who sort of just getting into it, it's been interesting to learn a lot more about that.

    00:01:55 ADITYA MEHROTRA: A hydrogen vehicle works similarly to a battery electric vehicle with a range extender. So you have a motor, and the motor drives the wheel. There's a motor controller that converts DC power into AC power for the motor. The motor controller draws power from the battery. The motor controller powers the motor, and the vehicle moves forward. The hydrogen system is kind of attached in parallel

    00:02:18 to the battery, as like a charger. Over a long period of time, the fuel cell is just continuously recharging the battery as the battery is just taking all the variable loads from an electric vehicle. But as long as the average power output of the battery is lower than the power output of the fuel cell, the battery never drains charge. In a hybrid vehicle, you have a gasoline engine that is turning a motor that's recharging your battery.

    00:02:45 So it's kind of similar to that idea, except a hydrogen system is fully green. ANNIKA MARSCHNER: But hydrogen is one of those things where it seems like it's very hard to access. And it is. You have to take it out of water or take it out of other molecules, which is one of the reasons that we haven't been using it in the past when it's such a energy-dense fuel.

    00:03:02 ADITYA MEHROTRA: There's this huge chicken-and-egg problem with hydrogen right now where it's like nobody's buying hydrogen vehicles because you can't fill up a hydrogen vehicle at a gas station, there's not enough charging infrastructure. And nobody's building hydrogen infrastructure because nobody has hydrogen vehicles. And it's this back and forth; where do you start? So one of the things we're hoping to do with our project is prove that this is possible and also

    00:03:25 document it to the point where others can use it to also build these vehicles. And if we do that, then we hope that that will accelerate the demand side and the consumer side of hydrogen vehicles to hopefully facilitate the development of infrastructure. We've done the proof of concept, so the next step for us is push it to the limit of what is possible. How far can we go? How fast can we go? Can we beat a gasoline bike?

    00:03:51 And I think that's one of the questions we want to answer. And for me, that's a super exciting question because it's like we don't know what the answer is and we're going to find out. [MUSIC PLAYING]