There are a plethora of new automobile engines their creators hope will capture the commercial marketplace in the near future. The engines are designed to run on methanol, ammonia, hydrogen, nitrogen, and (surprise?) lithium. Another company has a motor shaped like a donut that operates inside the wheels.
Hydrogen
The Indian state of Kerala is pioneering the use of “green” hydrogen in transportation. The Kerala Green Hydrogen Valley project, initiated by the Agency for New and Renewable Energy Research and Technology (ALERT), is creating a complete hydrogen value chain to showcase how hydrogen can reduce emissions across industries.
Kerala wants hydrogen-fueled, rather than battery-electric, heavy-duty trucks to replace diesel trucks, as they can travel long distances without sacrificing carrying capacity. The Kerala State Road Transport Corporation is focused on hydrogen buses. The Kochi Water Metro project has included hydrogen boats as part of an integrated transport system.
Despite these grandiose plans, India will need hydrogen refueling infrastructures which cost an estimated US$2 million per station – far above the cost of installing charging stations for battery-electric vehicles. Heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell systems also need improvements.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently boasted that a hydrogen-powered truck traveled over 1,800 miles on a single fill-up of hydrogen fuel. The truck – the H2Rescue – is a prototype developed by DOE in partnership with the U.S. Army, the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, the Naval Research Lab, and Accelera by Cummins. No word yet when or even whether the experimental truck will be placed into real-world service.
The truck, powered by a Cummins Accelera hydrogen fuel cell engine paired with a 250-kilowatt traction motor, is being designed for use in emergency response, military, and utility scenarios. With an initial 386 pounds of hydrogen in its tanks, the truck traveled California roads during rush-hour traffic at speeds between 50 and 55 miles per hour.
Methanol
German engine manufacturer MAN Energy Solutions is developing a new dual-fuel methanol engine for the maritime industry. The MAN 175 DF-M is expected to be available for retrofitting into its successful MAN 175D high-speed engine by the end of 2026. Caterpillar Marine is also working on a dual-fuel methanol engine model set for field tests in 2026.
MAN’s dual-fuel engine is available in configurations with 12, 16, and 20 cylinders, each with an internal diameter of 175 mm for mechanical or electrical propulsion and onboard power generation with a power range between 1,500 and 2,000 rpm. The engine is optimized for ferries, offshore supply vessels, tugboats, and other working vessels. Customized versions can be fitted for superyachts and other marine applications.
The dual-fuel engine has already been awarded “fuel ready” certification from Det Norske Veritas, a global risk management and quality assurance organization based in Norway. The DNV certification affirms that the engine is optimized for diesel-electric and diesel-mechanical propulsion with the implementation of dual-fuel methanol technology.
Nitrogen
The Dearman Engine Company has been developing and researching a liquid nitrogen engine solution for over a decade. Beginning in 2014, DEC embarked on a project in collaboration with Ricardo, E4tech, MIRA, and leading British academic and research institutions to develop a zero-emission piston engine that runs on liquid nitrogen with the exhaust being cold air.
DEC says that liquid nitrogen’s benefits include its simple design with low production costs, as it utilizes most of the existing powertrain supply chain. The engine require minimal maintenance with no loss of capacity over its lifespan.
DEC claims that the energy provision of nitrogen engines is 700 times more powerful than that of hydrogen. Hydrogen engines use either combustion or electrochemical reactions, both of which must overcome problems with energy density and storage. But pressurized nitrogen turns turbines directly with minimum energy loss.
The nitrogen engine has zero tailpipe emissions and low overall greenhouse gas emissions, and its fast-refueling time is comparable to gasoline or diesel engines. The engine can harness waste heat from the coolant loop to integrate with other waste heat recovery systems; it can also provide both propulsion power and cooling.
DEC says this technology is highly relevant for industrial applications, mining, inland waterway applications, and the built environment. The only exhaust is cold air, conducted through the vaporization and expansion of cryogenic fluids. Ambient or low-grade waste heat is used as an energy source with the cryogen providing both the working fluid and heat sink.
Lithium
German researchers from the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau have introduced a prototype quantum engine powered by lithium. The engine operates by manipulating the quantum states of lithium atoms to generate energy.
Results of the university’s research highlight the engine’s potential to redefine energy production, opening doors to innovation like ultra-efficient quantum batteries that last longer and charge faster. This technology holds promise for applications beyond engines, potentially reshaping how energy is produced and consumed across industries.
For the engine to function effectively, lithium atoms must be maintained at temperatures nearing absolute zero to minimize thermal interference and ensure precise control over the quantum states. Magnetic fields shift atoms between the two quantum states of lithium atoms — fermion and boson states. This is the critical step in the energy conversion process.
Researchers found innovative ways to control the quantum states of fermions and bosons. Fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously, but bosons can share identical states. The research uncovered a method to toggle between these states to optimize engine performance – yet to date, the prototype has achieved only a 25% efficiency rate, lower than that of conventional thermal engines.
The Donut Motor
Electric motor manufacturer Donut Lab has designed a donut-shaped in-wheel motor to power electric vehicles. The new motor has a big hole in the middle that allows it to fit perfectly into a wheel.
The donut motor fits into a 21-inch hoop, delivers up to 845 horsepower and 3,171 pound-feet of torque while weighing only 88 pounds. The resultant removal of drivetrain components, half-shifts, and other parts further reduces overall weight. With no motor housed in the vehicle’s body, there is extra space to increase seating area and cargo capacity.
Donut Lab claims its motors are up to 50% cheaper to manufacture, but the in-wheel motors make the wheels heavier than conventional wheels. This means they add unsprung mass (weight below the suspension) that can negatively impact handling and braking.
The company is also developing a version of its donut motor for semi-trucks that will provide 200 kW and 2,212 pound-feet of torque per wheel. The technology is already being used on the road in a few electric bicycles developed by Verge Motorcycles, Donut Lab’s parent company.
BMW, too, has developed its own in-wheel electric motor in partnership with Munich-based tech firm DeepDrive. The BMW in-wheel motor, currently in the testing phase, features a unique dual-rotor design.
This sampling barely scratches the surface of emerging automotive technology worldwide – but all of these reports were issued within a two-week period at the end of 2024. Innovation and free markets, not government mandates, continue to drive the future of transportation.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
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Sorry. A lot of wishful thinking -maybe to get government subsidies and fool private investors. The article mentions no costs. If one expands liquid nitrogen (which is very costly because of the low temperature and energy for cooling) then the temperature will be lowered. I can not see how that will power a device to produce motion. In combustion one produces a pressure (force/unit area). The expansion of liquid nitrogen is actually used to produce liquid nitrogen.
I hear fusion cars are only 5 years away
And always will be.
The frictionless tyre is only 3 years away, they just need to sort out the starting and stopping problem.
Mr. Fusion?
This is how all technological development takes place. Lots of competing ideas, competition in the lab, the factory, and the market place, and ultimately customer acceptance. The government has no business directing technological development, and every time they do the result is either outright failure or suboptimal performance. Government’s only role should be to regulate on the basis of public health and safety, and to avoid encouraging monopolies, and finally just be another consumer. Beyond that, the government needs to butt out.
I think it is great that all of the possibilities are being considered.
May the best come out on top.
The government is not qualified to diktate what is best.
It was hit around 15-20 years ago, “Car fueled by air”.
Main point is to inject small amount of liquid nitrogen to bigger amount of compressed hot air in combustion chamber of engine.
Liquid nitrogen then vaporizes, equivalent of creating steam form water and creating pressure in combustion chamber, pushing piston downward.
It was working, but it had its own problems…
How much energy does it take to cool the nitrogen and keep it cold, vs how much energy it gets out of the process?
I don’t remember exact numbers and efficiency, but this car had range like 150km/93miles.
It disappeared, so the efficiency was no so great apparently.
Anyway concept is very intersting.
LN2 is typically kept in a Dewar with a bleed, thus kept cold from its vaporization. Without a bleed, pressure in the tank would increase until it ruptures or explodes.
I believe it would not be advisable to run one of these engines in an enclosed space.
Could create problems for long tunnels.
I believe it would not be advisable to run one of these engines in an enclosed space.
Could create problems for long tunnels.
LN2 in a gasoline ICE.
That’s pretty funny.
How will the liquid nitrogen be produced?
What will be the actual source of energy for any of the systems discussed?
It is actually latent heat of ambient air.
Exhaust is colder air than in the intake.
Peter K jumped past the “make liquid Nitrogen” step to the “use liquid Nitrogen” step.
1saveenergy answered the actual question below.
By wasting lots of primary energy to power the refrigeration & liquefaction process ( ~ 50% loss just there + storage losses ). The liquefaction process requires a tremendous amount of energy,
There is a supply of ‘waste‘ liquid nitrogen available as a by-product of Oxygen production, a % of that nitrogen is used in the food & medical industries .
“The U.S. Department of Energy recently boasted that a hydrogen-powered truck traveled over 1,800 miles on a single fill-up of hydrogen fuel.” No word on if the truck was laden?
I suspect it was laden.. with the fuel tank.
From the deceptive pictures on the site, one can make out what appears to be a large round tank filling the back of the truck. It also sounds improbable that a truck can make a 2000 mile trip and be in city traffic the whole time, unless just driving in a loop.
It would require a spherical tank about 5.5 feet in diameter to hold the 386 kg of liquid H2 mentioned. It would also need to be super strong and thus super heavy. Similar to BEVs a substantial amount of power would be devoted to hauling around a lot of extra weight.
Unicorn farts are multiplying.
Can’t have that. Methane.
Mercedes benzine?
I’m all for “thinking outside the box” / “Blue sky Thinking”;
But you can’t beat the laws of thermodynamics !!
You can’t, but THEY can! 🙂
Just have Congress rewrite those troublesome laws.
It seems there are only developments on, er, technologies that not only exist, but actually work. Hydrogen, no.
Miliband will not be pleased. Carts and horses, please.
Hydrogen is currently well used already in countries in Europe. See these:
https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/hydrogen-farm-fuel-future
https://youtu.be/wDKLoLUQgH0
That hydrogen can be used as a fuel is not in doubt. The question is, at what cost.
In the UK both Liverpool and Glasgow councils have dropped plans for hydrogen buses because they are as much as 6 times more expensive than battery powered buses.
Saxony in Germany introduced hydrogen trains to much fanfare but a year later said they were changing to battery operated trains because they were much cheaper to run.
Hydrogen is NOT a fuel;
it is an energy carrier, like a flywheel, battery, clock spring, elastic band. Hydrogen is not freely available (unlike coal, oil, uranium ), it has to be manufactured, striping hydrogen from a compound uses a lot of primary energy & even more to store & distribute.
I don’t care what these engines are designed to run on. As long as they are ‘control me 24/7 cars’ like most new cars today I don’t want them.
None a practical alternative to a hydrocarbon fueled Internal combustion engine running Otto or Diesel cycle.
And contrary to the title of the article, the donut motor is not going to “dethrone” BEVs, since it’s designed to operate IN a BEV.
Sure would like to know how any ground based vehicle can attain 50-55 mph in California rush hour traffic as the Hydrogen To The Rescue (H2Rescue) truck can.
I lived in California. My daily commute from Concord to San Francisco was 35 miles, all by freeway. The average time for this commute was an hour and a half or 90 minutes one way when there were no accidents or other.
And which shall we have before the above game-changers: nuclear fusion; space elevators; warp drive?
Beam me up Scotty.
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
There are lots of ways to improve vehicle design that ultimately may or may not pan out. Innovation is good, but not all innovation is equally successful. It takes a lot of trial and error to finally develop practical engineering solutions. That’s exactly how it worked with virtually all existing and historical technology, whether for transportation, industrial production, labor saving devices of all kinds. The ultimate winner in each long term design and production contest is often not obvious in the beginning.
The problem is one of whether entrepreneurs and engineers are able to operate free of government constraint or government support. The minute that politicians and government bureaucrats dictate design is when real innovation ceases.
As soon as the article mentioned using a compressed gas as an energy source I knew immediately that the author had no real knowledge of physics. Compressed nitrogen can very inefficiently store energy but it is never a source of energy. Ignorance might be bliss in some cases but it is dangerous and even criminal in some cases when it influences government energy policies.
People with a “real knowledge of physics” would know that energy is conserved and hence there is no such thing as “a source of energy”. All fuels just convert energy from one from to another. If liquid nitrogen can store energy then that energy can be converted into kinetic energy powering a vehicle.
Energy conservation requires accounting for all inputs and outputs. Low efficiency plays into those calculations as an output that does not deliver performance.
In absolute terms yes, there is no such thing as a source of energy. Even fission and fusion are conversion technologies. That said, when one applies a frame of reference (aka a constraining context), the source of energy expression becomes valid, but only if the context is stated.
From the point of view of an electric motor, a battery is the source of energy.
I hope this link works. (I’m still can’t view YouTube for some reason.)
I’ve got a much better idea… stick with gasoline and diesel. The infrastructure is all there. Never mind all of this dreamworld fantasy of the uneconomic, and unworkables.
From Starship Troopers:
“You want the job?”
“I’ll take it until I’m dead or you find someone better.”
Same applies to gas and diesel. There is a growing concern that those fuels are not unlimited. At some point we will need to move on to something else. Until Mr. Fusion or some other technology proves better, stick with what works.
“The right tool for the right job.”
and a good fuel injected ICE beats them all …
and a good fuel injected ICE beats them all …
Article say:”… and low overall greenhouse gas emissions…”
So what. Again with the sop to the CO2 will cause the earth to burn crowd. The engine works or it doesn’t.
Now let me see, where did I put those plans for that perpetual motion machince?
Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning;
The problems with hydrogen have been beaten to death for years. I don’t see any evidence that these developers have addressed, much less solved any of them.
Methanol: same issue as hydrogen. Plus the problem of using up farmland.
Lithium: Has to be maintained at close to absolute zero in order to work properly. No mention of how much energy that takes, nor of how they are going to be able to maintain the chiller in a high vibration road environment.
Nitrogen: Problems already dealt with above.
Donut: Either 2 or 4 donuts replacing 1 central motor. Even with the loss of the drive shaft, I don’t see that as saving any weight.
First problem. They add transmissions to EVs for a reason. Electric motors lose efficiency as they turn faster. The windings of an electric motor form a huge inductor and the nature of an inductor causes it to oppose changes in current. In order to make an electric motor turn, you need to switch the current through that inductor on and off, repeatedly. The faster the motor turns, the faster this switching has to occur.
Second problem: Wheel weight. In addition to the problems of handling and such that were mentioned in the article, it takes more energy to accelerate/decelerate weight in the wheels compared to weight in the body of the car. In addition to accelerating the wheel in a straight line, you also have to accelerate the weight of the wheel rotationally.
Millions of electric scooters use brushless DC sine wave or square wave in-wheel motors with hall effect sensors and learning wires. RPM in wheels is under 1000; problems with inertia and induction are reduced, gyro effect is in line with forward motion. Springless weight remains a disadvantage overall but reduces the need of shock absorbers (the lighter the wheel the faster the propulsion into a pot hole). Batteries remain the big limitation.
Did I mention, these are 3-phase brushless DC motors?
Methanol is actually a quite reasonable fuel, but the energy density is lower than diesel, petrol (gasoline) or ethanol.
I’m not sure how CH3OH is carbon-free, though. Perhaps if it’s fermented from organically grown wood, or combining organically grown biomass with green hydrogen…
I stopped reading when I got to Nitrogen engines. Duggan, don’t you anything better to do?
Or you could just use petrol and diesel.
NO discussion of how the fuels will be produced which kills all of the proposals
Does any of this make any sense?
These ideas would be great if they could operate everywhere diesel/petrol engines are currently used.
One can go to almost anywhere on our multi-environment planet and see ICE engines at work, being repaired in extremely poor conditions and still running after several decades of operation. Also, fuel can be transported to even remote areas in everything from a truck to a tin can, by road, donkey or Shanks’s Pony.
Trying to replace this existing, extremely functional technology is impossible with these new technologies.
“Kerala wants hydrogen-fueled … heavy-duty trucks to replace diesel trucks, as they can travel long distances without sacrificing carrying capacity”
Really?
These are all interesting and promising innovations, but the real test of their viability will become obvious when their pricing structure is revealed. If they’re going to be 30% or more expensive than ICEVs as are EVs, then they’ll have same sales problem. In addition, if they’re hampered by limited cruising ranges, reliability problems, limited resale values, government mandates, etc., they”ll encounter the same low demand that EVs are currently experiencing.