MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team is building a hydrogen-powered electric motorcycle, using a fuel cell system, as a testbed for new hydrogen-based transportation.
The motorcycle successfully underwent its first full test-track demonstration in October. It is designed as an open-source platform that should make it possible to swap out and test a variety of different components, and for others to try their own versions based on plans the team is making freely available online.
Aditya Mehrotra, a graduate student who is spearheading the project, “We came up with the idea of a hydrogen-powered bike. We did an evaluation study, and we thought that this could actually work. We [decided to] try to build it.”
Team members say that while battery-powered cars are a boon for the environment, they still face limitations in range and have issues associated with the mining of lithium and resulting emissions.
So, the team was interested in exploring hydrogen-powered vehicles as a clean alternative, allowing for vehicles that could be quickly refilled just like gasoline-powered vehicles.
The team, consisting of about a dozen students, has been working on building the prototype since January 2023.
“We’re hoping to use this project as a chance to start conversations around ‘small hydrogen’ systems that could increase demand, which could lead to the development of more infrastructure," Mehrotra says.
"We hope the project can help find new and creative applications for hydrogen.”
The motorcycle took shape over the course of the year, piece by piece. “We got a couple of industry sponsors to donate components like the fuel cell and a lot of the major components of the system,” he says.
Initial tests were conducted on a dynamometer, a kind of instrumented treadmill Mehrotra describes as “basically a mock road”.
The vehicle used battery power during its development, until the fuel cell, provided by South Korean company Doosan, could be delivered and installed.
The team initially used a commercially available electric motor for the prototype but is now working on an improved version, designed from scratch, Elizabeth Brennan, a senior in mechanical engineering, says, “which gives us a lot more flexibility”.
One of the team’s goals for the project is to make everything available as an open-source design, and “we want to provide this bike as a platform for researchers and for education, where researchers can test ideas in both space- and funding-constrained environments,” Brennan says.
Unlike a design built as a commercial product, Mehrotra says, “Our vehicle is fully designed for research, so you can swap components in and out, and get real hardware data on how good your designs are.” That can help people work on implementing their new design ideas and help push the industry forward, he says.
The few prototypes developed previously by some companies were inefficient and expensive, he says. “So far as we know, we are the first fully open-source, rigorously documented, tested and released-as-a-platform, [fuel cell] motorcycle in the world.
“No one else has made a motorcycle and tested it to the level that we have, and documented to the point that someone might actually be able to take this and scale it in the future, or use it in research.”
He adds that “at the moment, this vehicle is affordable for research, but it’s not affordable yet for commercial production because the fuel cell is a very big, expensive component.”
The project will continue to evolve, says team member Annika Marschner, a sophomore in mechanical engineering. “It’s sort of an ongoing thing, and as we develop it and make changes, make it a stronger, better bike, it will just continue to grow over the years, hopefully,” she says.
While the Electric Vehicle Team has until now focused on battery-powered vehicles, Marschner says, “Right now, we’re looking at hydrogen because it seems like something that’s been less explored than other technologies for making sustainable transportation. So, it seemed like an exciting thing for us to offer our time and effort to.”
Making it all work has been a long process. The team is using a frame from a 1999 motorcycle, with many custom-made parts added to support the electric motor, the hydrogen tank, the fuel cell, and the drive train.
“Making everything fit in the frame of the bike is definitely something we’ve had to think about a lot because there’s such limited space there.
“So, it required trying to figure out how to mount things in clever ways so that there are no conflicts,” she says.
Marschner says, “A lot of people don’t really imagine hydrogen energy being something that’s out there being used on the roads, but the technology does exist.”
She points out that Toyota and Hyundai have hydrogen-fuelled vehicles on the market, and that some hydrogen fuel stations exist, mostly in California, Japan, and some European countries.
“But getting access to hydrogen, for your average consumer on the East Coast, is a huge, huge challenge. Infrastructure is definitely the biggest challenge right now to hydrogen vehicles,” she says.
She sees a bright future for hydrogen as a clean fuel to replace fossil fuels over time. “I think it has a huge amount of potential,” she says.
“I think one of the biggest challenges with moving hydrogen energy forward is getting these demonstration projects actually developed and showing that these things can work and that they can work well. So, we’re really excited to bring it along further.”