Even as the debate over private vehicles & their tailpipe emissions contributing to the deterioration of the air-quality rages on across the country, car manufacturers are taking concrete steps towards cleaner cars. Of-course, the ultimate goal for everyone would be to have eco-friendly cars running on air to become commonplace everywhere. The engineers on their part, are constantly on the lookout for newer ways to achieve this.
Indian scientists have only last year come out with a way to make the air-powered car a mainstream reality. They seem to be putting their might behind two distinct power generation & storage technologies viz. Fuel-cells & solar energy. Both have been around for some time now, with development stretching back in the automotive applications space for at-least a decade, if not longer. The scientists reckon that they could use the endless energy of the sun in conjunction with fuel-cell technology to create a perpetuating source of green energy that could also be used in the automobile sphere.
Like the air-powered car, fuel-cells were once thought to be too esoteric to become a reality, but the promise of combining hydrogen and oxygen to generate usable energy with only water as a byproduct is too hot a payoff to ignore.
One of the things that has proven to be tricky with fuel-cell technology has been the storage of volatile hydrogen on-board the vehicle in a safe & secure manner. A bunch of Indian scientists however, have leapfrogged over this on their way to their dream of eco-friendly cars running on air. They reckon that they could synthesise hydrogen through specially designed solar powered cells thereby making the dream a reality.
The principle is sound, according to the expert panel of scientists behind this development. They opine that they could optimize a system that takes the oxygen in the air and synthesizes it into hydrogen peroxide, which would then be used to generate electricity with water as a byproduct. But it is truly the way they’ve managed to achieve quantum improvements in the amount of energy generated from a single fuel-cell that has gotten the world all excited about it.
The great part about the hydrogen peroxide powered fuel-cell technology is that it can also be utilized beyond automotive applications. Feasibility tests are now underway on their potential viability & usage in some of the toughest conditions over land, water & air on our planet.
