BANGALORE: If everything goes according to plan, guests at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi would be travelling from the games venue to the games village and back on pollution-free hydrogen buses!
This green initiative of ISRO and Tata Motors will see the country’s first hydrogen bus. Work has already started on the project and the prototype is expected to be ready by December 2008.
The bus will not run on an engine, but on electric power produced out of a mix of hydrogen and oxygen. It will use hydrogen fuel cell technology as against combustion technology which burns gasoline. The bus will emit nothing but a cloud of water vapour.
Tata Motors will get the frame and chassis ready while ISRO will provide the fuel technology. The first bus will be a 60-seater proto-model.
Based on its performance, modified versions will be built further on, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair told reporters on the sidelines of the 14th session of the Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum that opened on Thursday at the ISRO headquarters here.
The bus will roughly cost Rs 80 lakh with per kg of hydrogen gas that will run it costing around Rs 120 per kg or more. A 40-kg cylinder will allow the bus to run 560 km, ie an entire day for a typical metro bus.
“In short run it may be costly, but in long run when we are on the verge of hydrocarbon extinction, people will be willing to pay anything. We are working on a bus now because that will be more economical than a car as it would carry 60 people. In Phase II we will come out with a car with lower cost of hydrogen gas. Technological challenge of conversion of gas to electricity is immediate for ISRO now,’’ architect of the bus, V Vnanagandhi, programme director, ISRO, Ahmedabad, said.
“In fuel cell technology (buses that run on cells that store hydrogen in the form of fuel), hydrogen energy is reacted with oxygen to produce water and electricity,” Vnanagandhi explained.
