11 ms·

Hydrogen-powered train makes UK maiden journey

76 points by aries1980 6y ago

dazbradbury 6y ago
Seemingly on the same day as: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/bus-electric-edinburgh-dundee-ember-b695120.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/bus-ele... 1st October was a good leap forward for transport in the UK!
rwmj 6y ago
How do they store the hydrogen? Just big pressurised tanks? Also be interesting to see how they refuel the train, because I imagine that small hydrogen molecules are difficult to confine, while the gas is so diffuse that it must take ages. Edit: I found a better link which has more technical details: https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/hydroflex-hydrogen-train/ https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/hydroflex-hydrog... A total of 20kg of hydrogen is stored in four high-pressure hydrogen fuel tanks whose pressure is regulated and maintained at 8.5 bar by the pressure drop regulator. The fuel cell unit is powered by hydrogen from the tanks, while oxygen is sourced from ambient air. The fuel cell converts the mixture and generates pure water and electricity up to 100kW. Electricity generated by the fuel cell will be sent to the lithium-ion battery pack.
- dn3500 6y ago
  20 kg of hydrogen is about 2400 Mj. The Class 319 has 1 MW of motors. So the hydrogen fuel will run the train for 40 minutes at max power. Maybe 3 or 4 hours in typical use? 20 kg may not seem like a lot, but hydrogen has three times the energy content of diesel.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    It sounds as if the train has a battery pack as well, so it will recover breaking energy. Trains are uniquely suitable to energy recovery since they have mostly predictable acceleration and deceleration curves.
  - tremon 6y ago
    Keep in mind that trains expend a lot of their output power only during takeoff. Maintaining a constant velocity requires relatively little power, and with regenerative braking some energy may be recovered (the primary reason for the Li-Ion cells between the power source and the motor). I don't have any numbers on this, high-power electronics was never my field. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if cruising power was less than 10% of max engine power.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Cruising power can be almost zero. Trains run on shallow gradients, and most of the power is used to climb them. When the gradient is negative trains freewheel down the slope, and the power source is only used to keep the lights, heating, and electronics running.
      - ksec 6y ago
        >Trains run on shallow gradients This is genius. But could anyone confirms this. I try to do some google search and nothing useful or related came up. Does that mean Trains are constantly running downhill? Because that doesn't seems to be the case long distance rails.
        Symbiote 6y ago
        It means an ascent or descent of less than 1.5% is normal for railways, and there's so little friction a train can coast downhill without power. They obviously need power to maintain speed going uphill.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Not unusual for trains to be at 50-75% throttle even at cruise. No getting around v^2 A lot of this is just due them being relatively underpowered since acceleration isn't usually a priority. For instance the BR Class 319 mentioned up thread has 1300hp to move over 120 tons - and the aerodynamics of a barn.
hannob 6y ago
I'm very skeptical whether it makes any sense to use hydrogen on a train. We know since many decades how to run trains on electricity. It's an established technology. It seems hydrogen trains are a cheap excuse for places where infrastructure is lacking and train tracks haven't been electrified. Except it's not cheap, because physics dictates using hydrogen will always be much less efficient compared to direct electricity use, as it includes an additional conversion step. I think developing hydrogen infrastructure is important for sectors where no other alternatives are available. For sectors were established technologies for electrifiation already exist - not so much.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  There's plenty of train lines in the world that see very few trains, maybe only one an hour, where the business case for electrification is much weaker. Many of these lines are already questionable from a business case point of view which can deter anything that would increase infrastructure costs, and if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains then there's a clear business case for them.
  - hannob 6y ago
    > if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains That's exceptionally unlikely. You go from "use electricity to run a train" to "use electricity to run an electrolyseur, fill hydrogen into hydrogen tanks on the train, use hydrogen to power a fuel cell to generate electricity, use that electricity to run a train".
    - i_am_proteus 6y ago
      You need to add "build electric lines over entire length railway" to the left side of the equation and "build a hydrogen locomotive" to the right side.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      Hydrogen is easier to store than electricity, and you can produce it at times where electricity price is zero or negative (very sunny days at photovoltaic plants, very windy days at wind turbine plants, 3am at nuclear plants). Processes more efficient than electrolysis do exist. I suppose safe storage and transportation of hydrogen is a major cost, though. Hydrogen gets absorbed into metals, because their crystalline lattices act like sponges for molecules this small. Worse yet, hydrogen can seep through things that work as impenetrable solids for other gases. And hydrogen flame is all but invisible (most radiation is infrared, nearly no visible light).
gsnedders 6y ago
Note that hydrogen-powered trains have been in regular passenger service in Germany for a couple of years now: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/17/germany-launches-worlds-first-hydrogen-powered-train https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/17/germany-... A bunch of the questions I saw asked about hydrogen on the UK rail network was the comparatively large size of the hydrogen tanks needed, and whether packaging of tanks of sufficient size was going to practical.
- hannob 6y ago
  Please note these trains have a dirty secret: They run with hydrogen made from fossil gas.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    The hydrogen source might change pretty soon, so. There are a ton of initiatives right now aiming at green hydrogen, all over Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      Can be made with excess wind energy.
      - lnsru 6y ago
        Not really. Who will invest in a facility, that runs occasionally on excess wind energy and stands rest of the time still?.. I want my investment working 24/7 with max 5 minutes maintenance each week.
        soperj 6y ago
        they aren't. They're investing in something that creates power whenever there is wind, and hydrogen whenever there's excess power.
laurencerowe 6y ago
Battery-powered trains are also being developed and likely a more cost effective solution. https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2020/07/09/over-400-battery-trains-could-be-introduced-in-uk/?gdpr=accept https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2020/07/09/over-400-b...
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  >wire-free range of 50 kilometres Yep, there's your problem... Look, I love lithium batteries as much as anyone, but the range really is a huge problem. If you take a look at the real world places that the existing diesel locomotives serve (on non-electrified lines) you have a lot of places where you're basically using one or two trainsets to go back and forth a rural line. They usually don't sit in stations for more than a minute or two, maybe 5-10 mins at each end. If each one is out of service to charge for 30 minutes once an hour, you're either demolishing the schedule or adding significantly more trainsets ($$$$).
  - ant6n 6y ago
    Many lines connect rural to less rural places. As the train will get closer to the less rural place, it will start running under the wire. At the rural end of the line there can be a dedicated charging station for layovers. This way, there are plenty of opportunities to charge the trains. In Germany, a very high percentage of Diesel Services could be replaced by trains having about 50km of autonomy - and for the rest it would be possible to fill the gaps using only a relatively small amount of electrification.
    - owenversteeg 6y ago
      That's simply not how the lines are usually built, unfortunately [0]. In general, electrification was done for entire rail lines. If you look at maps of non-electrified rail, it's a relatively small amount where you have a sufficiently long electrified section near a station to charge. And usually, at the end of the line, you don't have enough time to get a good charge in. Certain regions of Germany are an exception, partly due to their early electrification of the rail, then subsequent damage in WW2, then strange rail layouts, but if you look at non-electrified rail maps of the Netherlands, France, the UK etc it will be extremely clear that battery trains wouldn't work well. Part of the reasoning is that you want these massive batteries to last, so you're going to want to charge at the fastest around 1C, aka 1 hour for a full charge. Turnaround time at the end stations being usually around 5 minutes for these services, your choice is either to absolutely destroy your schedule, fork up far more $$$$ for more material or ignore battery rail. Look, if they made economic sense, we'd already have electric locomotives - the technology is extremely simple, just toss a bunch of batteries into a box; the engines themselves are already electric. Similar batteries to electric buses, too. But while the economics of electric buses do make sense - and you see electric buses in most of the world's cities today - trains running on batteries really don't make sense in most cases. That's why you don't really see them. Out of the nearly 2000 Stadler FLIRTs that are running across Europe, zero of them run entirely on batteries today - and there will only be a projected 55 in 2023 (!) in one region of Germany. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_lines_in_the_Netherlands#/media/File%3AElektrificatiekaart.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_lines_in_the...
martythemaniak 6y ago
I'm extremely skeptical of hydrogen trains. First, we all know that hydrogen cars are never going to take off because of the massive success of batteries. But as production of batteries ramps up, prices will fall and power densities will increase in a virtuous cycle. Adoption of battery cars (already widespread) drives the adoption of cargo vans, people movers and pickup trucks (a multitude of models shipping next year), but it doesn't stop there. BYD, Tesla, Daimler and others are working on battery-powered semis and buses, and once you're there, you're basically in train territory. Think about a train - one expensive, custom, bespoke, finicky engine and 100 dumb cars. Why not make mass-produce 100 cars with batteries and motors built in, reusing the same cells or packs that you use in cars, van, picks, lorries, etc. The fixed nature of train routes also means you can electrify parts of it strategically (ie, a few km around a station to help a train accelerate) and rely on a mix of battery and overhead lines. At this point hydrogen still seems possibly usable for ships and long-distance planes - short-haul planes will be electrified in the coming decade due to the same mass production that will drive EV adoption.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Unlike battery you carry only 1/2 the weight of the fuel as you burn them whilst battery is dead weight even drained. Hence airline considered that more. Just wonder why hydrogen car is so under the radar. All E except a few advertisements or waiting.

76 points by aries1980 6y ago

Seemingly on the same day as: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/bus-electric-edinburgh-dundee-ember-b695120.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/bus-ele... 1st October was a good leap forward for transport in the UK!

rwmj 6y ago

How do they store the hydrogen? Just big pressurised tanks? Also be interesting to see how they refuel the train, because I imagine that small hydrogen molecules are difficult to confine, while the gas is so diffuse that it must take ages. Edit: I found a better link which has more technical details: https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/hydroflex-hydrogen-train/ https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/hydroflex-hydrog... A total of 20kg of hydrogen is stored in four high-pressure hydrogen fuel tanks whose pressure is regulated and maintained at 8.5 bar by the pressure drop regulator. The fuel cell unit is powered by hydrogen from the tanks, while oxygen is sourced from ambient air. The fuel cell converts the mixture and generates pure water and electricity up to 100kW. Electricity generated by the fuel cell will be sent to the lithium-ion battery pack.

dn3500 6y ago
20 kg of hydrogen is about 2400 Mj. The Class 319 has 1 MW of motors. So the hydrogen fuel will run the train for 40 minutes at max power. Maybe 3 or 4 hours in typical use? 20 kg may not seem like a lot, but hydrogen has three times the energy content of diesel.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  It sounds as if the train has a battery pack as well, so it will recover breaking energy. Trains are uniquely suitable to energy recovery since they have mostly predictable acceleration and deceleration curves.
- tremon 6y ago
  Keep in mind that trains expend a lot of their output power only during takeoff. Maintaining a constant velocity requires relatively little power, and with regenerative braking some energy may be recovered (the primary reason for the Li-Ion cells between the power source and the motor). I don't have any numbers on this, high-power electronics was never my field. But I wouldn't at all be surprised if cruising power was less than 10% of max engine power.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Cruising power can be almost zero. Trains run on shallow gradients, and most of the power is used to climb them. When the gradient is negative trains freewheel down the slope, and the power source is only used to keep the lights, heating, and electronics running.
    - ksec 6y ago
      >Trains run on shallow gradients This is genius. But could anyone confirms this. I try to do some google search and nothing useful or related came up. Does that mean Trains are constantly running downhill? Because that doesn't seems to be the case long distance rails.
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        It means an ascent or descent of less than 1.5% is normal for railways, and there's so little friction a train can coast downhill without power. They obviously need power to maintain speed going uphill.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Not unusual for trains to be at 50-75% throttle even at cruise. No getting around v^2 A lot of this is just due them being relatively underpowered since acceleration isn't usually a priority. For instance the BR Class 319 mentioned up thread has 1300hp to move over 120 tons - and the aerodynamics of a barn.

hannob 6y ago

I'm very skeptical whether it makes any sense to use hydrogen on a train. We know since many decades how to run trains on electricity. It's an established technology. It seems hydrogen trains are a cheap excuse for places where infrastructure is lacking and train tracks haven't been electrified. Except it's not cheap, because physics dictates using hydrogen will always be much less efficient compared to direct electricity use, as it includes an additional conversion step. I think developing hydrogen infrastructure is important for sectors where no other alternatives are available. For sectors were established technologies for electrifiation already exist - not so much.

gsnedders 6y ago
There's plenty of train lines in the world that see very few trains, maybe only one an hour, where the business case for electrification is much weaker. Many of these lines are already questionable from a business case point of view which can deter anything that would increase infrastructure costs, and if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains then there's a clear business case for them.
- hannob 6y ago
  > if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains That's exceptionally unlikely. You go from "use electricity to run a train" to "use electricity to run an electrolyseur, fill hydrogen into hydrogen tanks on the train, use hydrogen to power a fuel cell to generate electricity, use that electricity to run a train".
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    You need to add "build electric lines over entire length railway" to the left side of the equation and "build a hydrogen locomotive" to the right side.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Hydrogen is easier to store than electricity, and you can produce it at times where electricity price is zero or negative (very sunny days at photovoltaic plants, very windy days at wind turbine plants, 3am at nuclear plants). Processes more efficient than electrolysis do exist. I suppose safe storage and transportation of hydrogen is a major cost, though. Hydrogen gets absorbed into metals, because their crystalline lattices act like sponges for molecules this small. Worse yet, hydrogen can seep through things that work as impenetrable solids for other gases. And hydrogen flame is all but invisible (most radiation is infrared, nearly no visible light).

gsnedders 6y ago

Note that hydrogen-powered trains have been in regular passenger service in Germany for a couple of years now: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/17/germany-launches-worlds-first-hydrogen-powered-train https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/17/germany-... A bunch of the questions I saw asked about hydrogen on the UK rail network was the comparatively large size of the hydrogen tanks needed, and whether packaging of tanks of sufficient size was going to practical.

hannob 6y ago
Please note these trains have a dirty secret: They run with hydrogen made from fossil gas.
- hef19898 6y ago
  The hydrogen source might change pretty soon, so. There are a ton of initiatives right now aiming at green hydrogen, all over Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    Can be made with excess wind energy.
    - lnsru 6y ago
      Not really. Who will invest in a facility, that runs occasionally on excess wind energy and stands rest of the time still?.. I want my investment working 24/7 with max 5 minutes maintenance each week.
      - soperj 6y ago
        they aren't. They're investing in something that creates power whenever there is wind, and hydrogen whenever there's excess power.

laurencerowe 6y ago

Battery-powered trains are also being developed and likely a more cost effective solution. https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2020/07/09/over-400-battery-trains-could-be-introduced-in-uk/?gdpr=accept https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2020/07/09/over-400-b...

owenversteeg 6y ago
>wire-free range of 50 kilometres Yep, there's your problem... Look, I love lithium batteries as much as anyone, but the range really is a huge problem. If you take a look at the real world places that the existing diesel locomotives serve (on non-electrified lines) you have a lot of places where you're basically using one or two trainsets to go back and forth a rural line. They usually don't sit in stations for more than a minute or two, maybe 5-10 mins at each end. If each one is out of service to charge for 30 minutes once an hour, you're either demolishing the schedule or adding significantly more trainsets ($$$$).
- ant6n 6y ago
  Many lines connect rural to less rural places. As the train will get closer to the less rural place, it will start running under the wire. At the rural end of the line there can be a dedicated charging station for layovers. This way, there are plenty of opportunities to charge the trains. In Germany, a very high percentage of Diesel Services could be replaced by trains having about 50km of autonomy - and for the rest it would be possible to fill the gaps using only a relatively small amount of electrification.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    That's simply not how the lines are usually built, unfortunately [0]. In general, electrification was done for entire rail lines. If you look at maps of non-electrified rail, it's a relatively small amount where you have a sufficiently long electrified section near a station to charge. And usually, at the end of the line, you don't have enough time to get a good charge in. Certain regions of Germany are an exception, partly due to their early electrification of the rail, then subsequent damage in WW2, then strange rail layouts, but if you look at non-electrified rail maps of the Netherlands, France, the UK etc it will be extremely clear that battery trains wouldn't work well. Part of the reasoning is that you want these massive batteries to last, so you're going to want to charge at the fastest around 1C, aka 1 hour for a full charge. Turnaround time at the end stations being usually around 5 minutes for these services, your choice is either to absolutely destroy your schedule, fork up far more $$$$ for more material or ignore battery rail. Look, if they made economic sense, we'd already have electric locomotives - the technology is extremely simple, just toss a bunch of batteries into a box; the engines themselves are already electric. Similar batteries to electric buses, too. But while the economics of electric buses do make sense - and you see electric buses in most of the world's cities today - trains running on batteries really don't make sense in most cases. That's why you don't really see them. Out of the nearly 2000 Stadler FLIRTs that are running across Europe, zero of them run entirely on batteries today - and there will only be a projected 55 in 2023 (!) in one region of Germany. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_lines_in_the_Netherlands#/media/File%3AElektrificatiekaart.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_lines_in_the...

martythemaniak 6y ago

I'm extremely skeptical of hydrogen trains. First, we all know that hydrogen cars are never going to take off because of the massive success of batteries. But as production of batteries ramps up, prices will fall and power densities will increase in a virtuous cycle. Adoption of battery cars (already widespread) drives the adoption of cargo vans, people movers and pickup trucks (a multitude of models shipping next year), but it doesn't stop there. BYD, Tesla, Daimler and others are working on battery-powered semis and buses, and once you're there, you're basically in train territory. Think about a train - one expensive, custom, bespoke, finicky engine and 100 dumb cars. Why not make mass-produce 100 cars with batteries and motors built in, reusing the same cells or packs that you use in cars, van, picks, lorries, etc. The fixed nature of train routes also means you can electrify parts of it strategically (ie, a few km around a station to help a train accelerate) and rely on a mix of battery and overhead lines. At this point hydrogen still seems possibly usable for ships and long-distance planes - short-haul planes will be electrified in the coming decade due to the same mass production that will drive EV adoption.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Unlike battery you carry only 1/2 the weight of the fuel as you burn them whilst battery is dead weight even drained. Hence airline considered that more. Just wonder why hydrogen car is so under the radar. All E except a few advertisements or waiting.