One company claims to have created an internal combustion engine that uses hydrogen as fuel instead of gasoline. They claim that their engine does not pollute, is cheaper to manufacture, maintain and operate than hydrogen cells and also weighs only 10 kilograms. It sounds like science fiction but the company that invented it claims that it is real and can radically change the electric vehicle industry.
The Aquarius Engine, they say, has been successfully tested by a third party, the Austrian engine company AVL-Schrick. According to these tests, they assert, their new internal combustion engine can operate exclusively with hydrogen without problems.
The engine is based on the design of a similar internal combustion engine that they created in 2014. That engine runs on gasoline and, according to its inventors, is also in testing. Recently, they say, they have opened offices in Tokyo to make them with Japanese companies TPR and Musashi Seimitsu, a Honda affiliate.
How does it work?
The Aquarius Engine is a linear combustion engine, with a single-piston and a single cylinder. In itself, this design is a radical departure from traditional internal combustion engines whose fundamental mechanism has not changed in decades.
The result, as you can see in the video below these lines, is an extremely simple engine compared to a traditional internal combustion engine. Here there is only one piston that moves on a single axis, alternating the fuel inlet from one side of the piston to the other.
The result is a motor with only 20 fixed parts and a single moving part. By comparison, a traditional engine has hundreds of parts. According to Aquarius Engines, this extreme simplicity results in a much lower manufacturing cost, as well as greater efficiency and ease of maintenance that a traditional engine cannot compete with.
With each movement of the piston, the shaft moves and interacts with magnetic coils at each end of the motor. This is what generates the electricity that powers the car's batteries. The version just announced, the company says, has a similar mechanical structure, but using hydrogen as fuel instead of gasoline.
When will it arrive?
The result, Aquarius Engines argues, is an engine that does not pollute at all. The idea is to integrate these motors to charge the batteries from which the motor of an electric car is powered.
According to the company, it is much simpler, more efficient, and cheaper to manufacture than a hydrogen cell. However, they do not give an estimated price or comparative data to support this claim.
Their power seems to be 16kW, although they claim to have an 80kW solution. At 16kW it would be enough to extend the range of an electric car significantly, reducing the size and weight of the batteries. And with it, the global cost of electric cars. But again, there is no technical data published about it.
Hopefully, all of this isn't bluffing, and that we really are looking at a machine that can help accelerate the adoption of EVs and reduce their toxic footprint at the same time.
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