Alpine's hydrogen-burning hypercar is about to go endurance racing
By C.C. Weiss
April 11, 2024
After a couple of hell-raising concept iterations, Alpine's hydrogen combustion fire-and-ice Alpenglow super-racer is finally prepped and revved to take the track. It'll make its dynamic debut next month at the Spa-Francorchamps 6 Hours endurance event in Belgium, running its hydrogen combustion engine on its first public outing.
While some auto industry insiders and observers have all but dismissed hydrogen's potential as a planet-protecting solution, a few notable players have been quite actively pursuing its use, both for fuel cell-electric powertrains and H2-fueled combustion engines. There's been particular interest in hydrogen combustion in the racing world, where traditionalists are loath to see the visceral feel and thundering roar of the combustion engine vanish in favor of a more sterile all-electric racing future.
Longer-lasting and More Sustainable Green Hydrogen Production April 26, 2024
Introduction:
(Eurekalert) Researchers led by Ryuhei Nakamura at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have improved on their green and sustainable method of extracting hydrogen from water by using a custom-made catalyst for the chemical reaction. Published in Nature Catalysis, the study details how they manipulated the catalyst’s 3D structure, which led to improved stability and an increase in the catalyst’s lifetime by almost 4,000%. The findings impact the ability to achieve a lasting and sustainable hydrogen-based energy economy.
Water electrolysis using proton exchange membranes is a green electrochemical process for splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen produced this way can then be stored and used at a later time. For example, when combined with a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell, the stored hydrogen can be used to power an electric car. However, PEM electrolysis still has limitations that prevent widespread industrial uses such as in power plants. In particular, the necessary chemical reactions happen in a highly acidic environment, and the best catalysts for these reactions are extremely rare earth metals, such as iridium. As Nakamura explains, “scaling up PEM electrolysis to the terawatt scale would require 40 years’ worth of iridium, which is certainly impractical and highly unsustainable.”
Almost two years ago, Nakamura and his team developed a breakthrough process that allowed acid water electrolysis that did not rely on rare earth metals. By inserting manganese into a cobalt oxide lattice, they created a process that relied only on common and sustainable earth metals. Despite the success, the process was still not as stable as it needs to be in a PEM electrolyzer. Now, they have built on their previous discovery and developed a longer-lasting earth-abundant catalyst.
The new catalyst is a form of manganese oxide (MnO2). The key finding was that reaction stability could be increased over 40 times by altering the catalyst’s lattice structure. Oxygen in the 3D lattice structure of manganese oxide comes in two configurations, planar and pyramidal. The planar version forms stronger bonds with manganese, and the researchers discovered that increasing the amount of planar oxygen in the lattice significantly enhanced catalytic stability.
