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After air car, its time for water Car

Most of you may have heard about the Air Car that has been in much news over last year, thanks to the Tata backing the project. If you read the comments on my earlier post on air car, you would find many people have reservations about the success of the project.

However, unlike years of research and experimentation (and Offcourse millions of funds) spent on air car, a group of young Indian college students have done a stupendous feet.

They have created a vehicle that runs on water ! yes…water !

Now the car literally does not run on water, but hydrogen from the water forms the major component for running the car. This Hybrid vehicle runs nearly 500 kilometers on a single litre of fuel (petrol) with water as an important component.

That’s the prototype of `Project Garuda RVCE Super mileage’ by students of R V College of Engineering in their bid to build most energy-efficient, eco-friendly vehicle.

The corporates have jumped over this idea and many of them have expressed keen interest with with GE stepping in to financially support initial research costs and provide them with light and state-of-the-art polymers for the car’s aerodynamic shell.

How water works as fuel

A space scientist familiar with the use of hydrogen explains that this car uses the principle of extracting hydrogen from water and converting it into gaseous form to be injected into the engine. “When you hydrolyze water, hydrogen is separated from oxygen. The separated hydrogen is then injected into the engine in gaseous form which will be the fuel to run the vehicle.”

“The use of hydrogen as gas could possibly lead to enhancement of mileage, which these students are experimenting. Rockets anyway are powered by hydrogen. If hydrogen is extracted from water, water becomes fuel or at least one of its components becomes a fuel. Given that water is available in large quantities, it is far easier to access it compared to oil.”

“The use of water to run a vehicle is in terms of converting hydrogen in water into gas. In that sense, water can become fuel. It could be mixed with another primary fuel form, say gas, to enhance a vehicle’s powe. (source)

The project has been nominated for the Rotary Young Achievers Award 2008. Their dream is to enter the Super Garuda project in two international competitions — the SAE Supermileage in Michigan next June and the Shell Eco-Marathon in the UK next July.”

We wish them all the best !

The team also has a blog, if you wish to follow them.

Arun Prabhudesai: Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin and Facebook. Arun’s Google+ Profile
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