How about a hydrogen steam injection tech. vehicle.?

Question

Can we use hydrogen and solar combined to produce a steam injection tech. vehicle. Steam is pretty powerful. The steam engines could be made of a heat and friction tolerant nano carbon ceramic material, or something similar?

Answer 1

You have a lot of interesting ideas. Either hydrogen or solar could be used to drive a steam engine. Steam power really only needs an external source of heat to operate and so it can run on pretty much any energy source you can imagine so long as it gets hot. The basic principal of a steam engine is that the heat source heats water to boil it creating pressure. That pressure is used to drive either a turbine or a piston, which does work. That general principal can be used with other working fluids too. If a gas is used you get a sterling cycle engine and in that case helium is commonly used as the working fluid because of its flow and heat transfer properties. Steam engines in particularly the turbine variety can be made quite efficient which is why they are used in electricity generation. The key to high efficiency is to maximized the hottest temperatures of the fluid. That allows the most amount of work to be extracted. The use of exotic materials such as ceramics is therefore desirable to withstand very high temperatures. Toughening ceramics with fibers such as carbon nanotubes could improve the mechanical properties of ceramics allowing them to be used more widely in engines.