2023-04-21 14:22:20
Are hydrogen cars really viable? These fuel cell electric cars effectively emit no CO2 and run on renewable energy. However, hydrogen cannot yet be considered the fuel of the future. And for good reason, this fuel presents many obstacles, whether in terms of its storage, its transport, its polluting production, its volatility, etc.
The French start-up HySiLabs, established in Aix-en-Provence since 2015, intends to solve the problems of storage and transport of hydrogen. She did find a solution: Hydrosil. It is a charged liquid capable of “storing” hydrogen in order to transport it.
Hydrosil stores hydrogen like a battery stores electricity
Hydrosil is a promising solution for the future. The idea is therefore to store the hydrogen in a charged liquid, to transport this liquid, then to discharge the liquid when we need to recover the hydrogen. The discovery of this solution is also the result of chance.
President and co-founder of HySiLabs, Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova, explained that: a fortuitous reaction was carried out by researchers from Aix-Marseille University. This reaction between liquids was indeed found to produce a gas, unexpectedly. To characterize this gas, the research team used a simple means: they struck a match. This caused a detonation, but also generated water droplets on the walls of the test tube… They therefore suspected that it might be hydrogen, which a more formal characterization then confirmed. ».
With the results of this experiment, HySiLabs developed Hydrosil to store hydrogen in the same way a battery stores electricity. The advantage of Hydrosil is that this method is safer than transporting hydrogen under high pressure.
To give an order of magnitude, Pierre-Emmanuel Casanova specified that one Hydrosil tank truck is the equivalent of seven hydrogen transport trucks at 200 bars of pressure. However, HySiLabs does not particularly target road transport, but rather air, sea and rail transport for which Hydrosil is lighter to transport than batteries, for example.
Source: Engineering Techniques
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