Toyota it is not the only company to think about the transformation of internal combustion engines, adapting them to the use of hydrogen instead of the fuel we use today. Also Punch Group, which in Italy took over the GM studies area in Turin, is studying the hypothesis. Its goal is to convert the diesel engines in modern units capable of handling hydrogen without risk and above all without significant emissions.
According to Automotive News reports, Punch Group is working on an evolution of the GM Duramax, a 6.6-liter V8 engine originally optimized for diesel. The resource would be particularly useful for commercial vehicles and heavy transport. The reason is the following, according to CEO Guido Dumarey: “the most relevant element for those vehicles is the available payload. But more batteries are needed to increase range, which adds weight and reduces payload. Therefore, we believe that converting diesel engines to burn hydrogen provides a very efficient way to offer CO2-free mobility, advantageous both from a technical and a social point of view“. We therefore try to solve a problem that is now known: the search for the balance between past and future, and between today’s jobs and tomorrow’s emissions.
Dumarey also explained the greater difficulty in working on this conversion: “Hydrogen burns seven times faster than diesel, so it is necessary to lower the temperature in the combustion chamber. Water injection is a proven technology for doing this, but a negative side effect is that this creates corrosion. Lubrication is another potential problem for an engine that tends to be very dry. Consequently spray lubrication is the only solution. The engine itself only needs minor modifications to the cylinder head. The injection and control systems also need to be reworked to handle hydrogen. The main problem is the duration: Modern diesels are designed to last for 350,000 km, unlike petrol engines which reach 250,000“.
For passenger cars, unlike trucks, they could arise from the instead tank size, which should be placed in a well protected (reinforced) space without compromising the vehicle’s load capacity. With SUVs this problem could be less felt, but it would be difficult to cram such a system on a small car – a category that in fact, in the future, may only be available in electric format.
#diesel #hydrogen #obstacles #conversion #FormulaPassionit