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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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In the case of military vehicles, hydrogen is about the greenest option that we're gonna get. No one is going to make a battery powered AFV, because where the fuck would you charge it?
Who if not the Germans built an electric tank in 2020 https://efahrer.chip.de/news/geraeuschlose-einsaetze-weltweit-erster-elektro-panzer-kommt-aus-deutschland_103179
Sounds crazy at first but comes with some good advantages: it can cross rivers as it doesn’t need air for combustion, it’s silent, and you can load it anywhere at the battle field if you have solar panels, time and sun. Still you can rely on military logistics to carry a swap battery. But isn’t the military supply chain the first target to disrupt? My two cents, this is the next thing at battle fields.
Oh, and if all your equipment runs on electricity, you can load and reload power at your needs. Tank needs power but car not? Combat robot out if power and car is full? Transfer the power
Honestly if MILITARY applications are what kicks renewable energy and mass storage into high gear, I won't be surprised, but I will be disappointed.
But hey, improvement is still improvement and if a military organization sees renewable as the future, they're gonna try to make sure they get there first. As long as whoever gets there shares the progress with the rest of the world, I'm okay with it.
But who am I kidding, it's gonna be China or the US and the rest of the world won't see shit for decades due to suppression of research and technology that would allow for similar specs to be achieved privately...
... How credible is my aluminum foil hat guy?
I must admit though, it'd be cool to see an armored combat battery sliding across a field to quick charge a tank that died mid-battle. 10 seconds of charging to get it up and running, and the battery moves to the next low power thing. I'm imagining a semi-autonomous hot-swap of a battery compartment and eventually recharging like modern airplane mid-air refueling. Insert Rod A into Slot A and wait a little bit. The faster they want it to charge, the more they'll dump into R&D.
Just wait some years - they have solid state batteries close to industry ready. That means huge increase in capacity and no issues with temperature.
Next stage will be structural batteries where you take the structure as battery. For a tank that means all the armour will be charged and work as battery. Just a matter of years.
Loading time is solved already. It’s a matter of battery temperature while infusing power and solved by battery management software.
Any idea why the Boston Dynamics robots aren’t on a battle field? I mean the do incredible stunts. It‘s the battery. Lasts for around 2-3 hours. Today. Military is working on that, I‘m pretty sure.
Carrying volatile chemical energy on the outside of your tank seems somewhat unwise.
There are other types of batteries that don't involve volatiles, like water batteries or metal-air batteries.
Yes, but structural batteries won't make proper armor. The material demands are simply nowhere near compatible.
Any reasonably sized pv installation near a battlefield will definitely not look suspicious on reconnaissance images.
You think less suspicious than these huge petrol storages in a city?
PV can be dismantled, if needed. I bet it’s even cheaper to replace when destroyed compared to petrol storage. Anyway, future will tell
Tanks are going the way of the battle ship though. Drones are doing a lot of the stuff they can do, and a lot of things they can't.
I'm not super familiar with the matter, but what do you mean by "going the way of the battle ship"? Do you mean they're becoming more obsolete because of their size/utility compared to drones?
That, and expense. Tanks cost millions, while a $5k drone with an RPG strapped to it can take it out and exploit the weak spots.
Ultimately these small drones are still pretty vulnerable. I’d imagine the next/current generation of automatically targeting point defense weapons will be the solution.
Drones also seem to be good anti-tank and anti-ship weapons.
I can imagine a unmanned autonomous tank though.
That's true as well for hydrogen, though. And I guess there's a higher chance of getting access to "power" somewhere in the field than finding a hydrogen tank. Also, energy density of lithium batteries is higher than for hydrogen storage.
opposite is true by a large margin. You'd still want a hybrid power train, and a charging from solar or BEV option never hurts, but H2's advantage is quick refueling with battery charging on the go.
That applies if you're looking at density per weight - but for most stuff driving around the interesting metric is density per volume, and hydrogen sucks there, even if we're looking at liquid nitrogen, which is completely impractical for storage here.
To make matters worse, you're limited to specific shapes for your pressurized tank if you want to optimize pressure it can take (and with that storage volume), while batteries you can stick in individual chunks pretty much wherever you find a bit of space.
While LH2 is about 1/3 the density of gasoline as heat energy, and 3/4 the density for electric energy, it is about 2kwh-electric per liter. Lithium batteries are under 1/4 of that.
Range of tanks is not super important other than blitzkrieg strategy where refueling infrastructure catches up. Even under blietzkrieg, tanks eventually get into a siege position and solar can be enough to sustain their position indefinitely. H2 is the best quick refueling method for electric heavy vehicles. A dispenser can be hidden 1 mile or so behind the front lines. Production facilities can be portable and moved forward
And if your tank is electric, it can be modified later with a small nuclear or fusion reactor.
Isn’t hydrogen even more flammable and explosive than petroleum. Just seems like a dumb idea to put that in a military vehicle.
Yes, obviously, putting explosives and projectile propellants in an armored vehicle is dangerous and should be avoided
/s
OSHA is not a credible military threat
Right, but you are going to want to choose a fuel that has the least chance of flaming up if you’re making a military vehicle.
Hydrogen has (compared to petroleum) a Wider Flammability Range, Lower Ignition Energy (0.02 millijoules) which is really low and much smaller than petroleum, and a higher diffusion rate.
All of which make it more likely to go kaboom.
Silly one, and but do tanks run on diesel?
Every other heavy machine I can think of typically uses diesel for their engines: tractors, lorries, boats.
Also diesel is less flammable then petrol or hydrogen in the event of a spill of leak...
The Abrams uses jet fuel mainly. But most tanks are diesel.
The Abrams can run on just about anything liquid and flammable. It's not gonna be happy about it, but it'll go.
I think it was designed by pakleds...
Yup, that's why I put "mainly"
Wasn't trying to call you out for being wrong or only partially correct, just think it's neat all the stuff they considered when designing and testing it.
Right, no worries. I was just being lazy and didn't wanna explain. You did and did it in less words than I would've needed.
The problem with diesel is that there has been a cap in their efficiency for quite some time. We've pretty much tweaked as much speed and efficiency out of what is possible with diesel tanks, which is why the Abrams has a turbine engine.
As tanks become heavier and heavier the only real solution is to migrate to electric motors, which are more efficient and vastly more reliable than diesel or turbine.
Just like with trains, the future of tanks are electric motors, and until we find a battery material more efficient and safe than lithium, hydrogen fuel cells are likely going to be the solution.
The correct solution is for tanks to drag a power cable and a water cooling loop behind them. This will make them invisible to thermals.
Diesel is a type of petroleum product.
Sir this is NCD. That comment is far too credible.
Shit I never saw I was in a meme sub lmao. To be fair the comments above mine seemed mostly serious.
Some of the best serious conversations get started by meme posts.
Would you say that we (wiggles eyebrows) subverted your expectations?
Why? If something has gotten through the armour, your fuel is the least of your worries. I mean you are sitting next to a stack of shells filled with high explosives.
Well if the fuel is compromised there’s a larger chance it’ll ignite and reach the shells if it’s hydrogen as opposed to petroleum.
My point is that if your tank's armour is compromised by modern antitank weapons, it doesn't really matter where it hits you. You're going to be turned into chunky marinara, or your shells are going to cook off.
A pressurized fuel cell is already more protected than any fuel tank, and is smaller and lighter and more efficient than any ice engine. Which means you can add and divert even more armour to protect the cell and the occupants of the tank. Basically any danger associated with hydrogen is vastly overshadowed by the fact that tanks already carry high explosives. And that's not so dangerous that we're trying to replace them with non combustible weapon systems.
It's not like Rotem is new at making tanks, the K2 is one of the best tanks currently in production. If the engineers thought fuel cells increased the likelihood of catastrophic failure, I highly doubt they would have tried it with the K3.
Personally, I think most people are just buying into the propaganda that shut down hydrogen power in the first place. To my knowledge there hasn't ever been a death associated because of an explosion or fire involving a vehicle with h2.
H2 is much safer than gasoline. Gasoline with explode as a bomb. A leak will make everything around it super flamable. An H2 tank that both is ruptured and on fire will shoot a flare into the air, instead of blowing up and killing everyone in the vehicle.
It is less so. Also safer if tank ruptured.
You'd probably want a quick swap battery and charging far from the front lines.
Just put solar panels on top, easy.
If you ignore the fragility (creates a weak point to disable the tank) and the slow charging rate, dust and debris from firefights would be a pretty big issue.
Dust is indeed an issue for fuel cells. It is a solved issue with air filters though. FCEVs brag about making the air cleaner than without them. Industrial equipment in ultra dusty environments also work on FCs. It does require regular filter changes compared to BEV though. An industrial equipment alternative is an FC setup away from the dusty environment to recharge batteries overnight and during breaks.
My comment was about solar panels
Solar deployments around mines can be far enough from the dusty areas. Today, tanks could bring a bunch of briefcase solar panels and when the tank is not moving and firing, its not that dusty. Cleaning is pretty easy for 20-50 panels too.
Fuel cells are the actual technology that require special designs to deal with dust.
Also don't fight at night. Or in the Arctic circle. Or really anywhere during winter. Or sandstorms. Dust storms. Overcast days. Rainy days. Snowy says.
Y'know what, just conduct all your warfare during beautiful clear sunny weather at daytime. Why would you want to fight in crappy weather anyway?