Submitted by Hypx t3_10mdti7 in Futurology
BoredCop t1_j63k2ed wrote
Reply to comment by Hypx in Cryo-compressed hydrogen, the best solution for storage and refueling stations? by Hypx
I'm fully aware of that. Makes no difference to degree of risk, only to wether it will accumulate along the floor or along the ceiling in a garage or a tunnel.
There are reasons why an old name for hydrogen in some languages is "knallgass" or variants of same, it translates as "bang gas" and refers to its explosive tendencies.
There are reasons for why you're supposed to connect and disconnect the charger or jumper cables in a certain order when dealing with a car that has a flat lead-acid battery, and make the final connection to chassis ground away from the battery. Such batteries can create and leak hydrogen via electrolysis, and explosions are a known hazard. The act of connecting jumper cables can create enough of a spark to set it off, as many people have experienced.
Basically, the explosive hazard of hydrogen gas is well known and has been for over a century. Your claiming otherwise cannot change the facts.
Hypx OP t1_j63kvb5 wrote
And yet it is fact that it is safer than gasoline. This is not actually a debate here. People have set both on fire and gasoline is a lot more dangerous:
BoredCop t1_j63nx60 wrote
That first one is laughable, it is from a biased source and is intentionally rigged to produce the desired result. They present it as if the overpressure relief valve is the only probable leak point, and set it up to immediately ignite before any real volume of gas has time to mix with air. It's like lighting a gas range in a kitchen immediately after opening the valve, and claiming this proves it would be safe to let gas leak out for half an hour and then light a match in the same kitchen. Of course you get no explosion when you carefully make sure the conditions needed for an explosion don't occur, by igniting immediately at the leakage site.
The second one is more interesting. Here, they do in fact allow the gas to mix with air for a few seconds before ignition. However, these tests used liquid hydrogen at a much lower temperature than the gaseous phase cold compressed hydrogen we are discussing here. Liquid hydrogen is seriously cold, and only boils off to gas phase at a slow rate depending on how much heat energy it can absorb from the surroundings. In that sense liquid hydrogen it is rather similar to liquid gasoline; it's the gas that burns not the liquid. You'll note none of the spill experiments in that video involved pressure vessels rupturing or pressurised fuel lines breaking, it was all liquid hydrogen at atmospheric pressure. That makes a huge difference in how rapidly it mixes with air. The very low temperature also slows down the reaction when it is ignited, compared to igniting gas that's a hundred degrees warmer.
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