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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine's also have a tendency to explode. I haven't seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.
Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it'll just burn up because it won't all be released at once. And I've never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.
Are they routinely tested in high impact crashes too? Slamming into a phone pole might be more energy than a rifle round.
EV battery packs are also designed to mitigate thermal runaway events, even down to Tesla packs making every cell connection a fuse on case of issues. That doesn't stop them from catching fire anyway after some accidents.
Since hydrogen is so light though, it escapes into the atmosphere before collecting enough to explode in a car. BMW claimed this way back in the 90s when it was experimenting with the gas.
There’s probably more of a danger of the tank and in hydrogen cars bursting, since the hydrogen is stored at relatively high pressures. But the gas could easily escape without igniting.
Obviously anything is possible when you are storing energy as densely as possible. And one of the highest density energies we store is still hydrocarbons.
It's also a pressure vessel. Rupturing that might be scarier than just fire.
Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn't hydrogen's fault.
No... No, that's not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won't burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn't have been a catastrophic fireball...
The Hindenburg's skin was also highly flammable. Regardless of what gas it contained it would still have burned as fast.
The leaking hydrogen was just the initial fuel that the static arc ignited.
One the skin was burning it was over.
Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
If nothing else, hydrogen can't burn without oxygen, and there's very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
Thank you. After the deluge I did hit up Wikipedia. The skin was coated in flammable material as I remembered. It did say the skin being a major factor was controversial and that the burn patterns didn't indicate that to be likely, which is fine. But just the blanket downvotes with no one addressing that is annoying. It stifles any conversation. Were I not a naturally curious person I wouldn't have looked into it further. I'm sure plenty of the downvotes came from people that probably didn't even know about the static discharge part and still don't know because they just downvoted and moved on in their ignorance.
It wouldn't have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn't have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.