[Land-speed] Ford's Hydrogen 999 racer shooting for fuel cell land speed record > Hybrid News

Jon Amo webmaster at landracing.com
Thu Jul 12 22:04:30 MDT 2007


Im not sure why you are so scared of the Hydrogen projects and im not sure
why the SCTA is taking special precautions for the vehicle.

Is it the tanks, the risk of explosion, or the fire that scare you??? I
think I have an answer for all three.

The tanks are DOT approved and have a safety factor in them of almost 2.5 to
3 times.  They are three or more layers, and safety blowoff valves designed
into system, sometimes and usually more then one.... Hydrogen tank
explosions have been non exsistant in the fuel cell vehicles out today.
Todays tanks can withstand shots from a 357 magnum and a sticks of dynamite.
You stated stuff that happened decades ago and much larger scale , and
totally different operating circumstances.

Risk of explosion is very low and are in reality TONS safer then any
gasoline or fuel tank setup. Think about it, a race type car with 10 gallons
of fuel ruptures a fuel tank and you have liquid fire, burns very hot, and
spreads fast and goes everywhere and saturates everything. A hydrogen fire
will go out very very fast after shutoff of valve due to pressures involved,
and some systems have temprature and pressure monitoring systems build into
the cells. Some of fuel cell tanks have strain gauages built into the
composite shell for fiber optic monitoring.

Fire is scarey when thinking about it. But the radiant heat from Hydrogen is
very very low. Risk of burn due to heat is extremely low as long as you are
not sitting on flame. when used on smaller scale like a fuel cell vehicle,
now when you talk about large scale NASA Shuttle stuff, all bets are off.

Jon


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