The Massachusetts Institute of Expertise Electrical Automobile Staff (MIT EVT for brief) is a student-run crew at MIT that’s been exploring electrical car innovation for over a decade. Now, as of March 29, 2023, the crew has introduced a brand new partnership with Doosan Mobility Innovation (DMI) to construct a brand new hydrogen-powered motorbike.
Hydrogen and electrical energy aren’t the identical factor, so what’s happening right here? In accordance with the Doosan crew, MIT EVT has come to the conclusion that battery-electric automobiles, at their present stage of growth, have each vary hurdles and lithium mining considerations to beat. Because of this, the crew needs to discover the probabilities of small hydrogen gas cells within the hopes that hydrogen automobiles can overcome each of these obstacles.
There’s a key phrase within the press launch about this venture, although, and it’s simply 4 phrases lengthy: “assuming inexperienced hydrogen manufacturing.” As we’ve mentioned earlier than, manufacturing of inexperienced hydrogen is definitely doable in principle. Nonetheless, it’s at the moment so costly in apply that many firms have opted to provide so-called blue hydrogen as an alternative, which makes use of present pure fuel to provide—and as such, is a substantial downside in the event you’re making an attempt to fight carbon emissions. That stated, the historical past of technological developments all the time begins out on the costly finish, after which comes right down to extra cheap ranges over many iterations (and time)—so there’s definitely precedent for hope.
In any case, DMI will present the MIT EVT with its DM15 gas cell module, which may present as much as 1.5 kilowatts of energy. It’s by no means been built-in into a bike earlier than, however each the MIT crew and DMI have an interest to see how this experiment goes.
“The DM15 module is admittedly small, and light-weight making it ideally suited for integration right into a car like a bike. We hope to work with DMI and their gas cell know-how to actually push the boundaries of what EVs can do, and showcase the capabilities of hydrogen instead gas supply,” MIT pupil and venture lead Aditya (Adi) Mehrotra stated in a press release. “The extra individuals we’ve got engaged on this, the sooner it would develop into a actuality, and the sooner we will construct a greener planet.”
To that finish, whereas the DMI gas cell know-how gained’t be open-source, the MIT EVT crew plans to make a lot of its design course of and calculations for the motorbike’s design accessible on-line. That approach, the crew says, it could assist to jump-start different firms that wish to get entangled in producing hydrogen gas cell motorbikes of their very own.
