The Urbee concept car uses only a small amount of electricity to get on down the road. Now, it just might be possible to use only 1 ammonia cracker in that car and that might be feasible. If so, then you could replace the diesel engine with a fuel cell powered by hydrogen obtained from ammonia. The amount of ammonia needed should be small, so storage problems are eased significantly. Mileage per kg of ammonia may be impressive enough to use really small tqnks. For example, given that about 6 kg of ammonia contains 1 kg of hydrogen, and mileage for the fuel cell is comparable to the battery system, then a tank containing just 6 kg of ammonia could give a range of over 200 miles.
The repost continues just below....
Aronsson shows his ammonia cracker here.
I extracted some pics from the video:
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| Looks like the dimensions are approximately 1 cubic foot, this supplies presumably a 5 kilowatt hour fuel cell |
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| The ammonia tank behind the cracker. |
And a schematic of the insides of the black box.
There needs to be at least 4 of these crackers for 4 of the 5 kilowatt fuel cells that would be needed for highway driving. That many fuel cells would be necessary because the electrical discharge on a battery at highway speed is about 20 kilowatts per hour.
Based upon this, I don't think all of this hardware will fit in a car. The cracker will have to stay off the auto and the hydrogen will have to be compressed at the fueling station before being dispensed to the fuel tank in the car.
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