Two hydrogen-burning engines powered this car to a new land speed record
It's been far too long since I've been able to report a new land speed record.
JCB has invested heavily in hydrogen to power its diggers and other machinery.
JCB is a UK-based manufacturer of heavy industrial and agricultural equipment—think diggers, loaders, backhoes, tractors, and so on. And as JCB is based in the UK, it doesn’t have the luxury of being able to ignore carbon emissions targets; it has to have alternatives to diesel engines. For some products, that means switching to batteries, but the company has also been working with hydrogen. At first, that meant fuel cells, but after developing prototypes, JCB concluded the tech was too expensive and too fragile for life on the farm or the construction site. Instead, in 2020, the company started developing its own hydrogen combustion engine.
The idea of burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine has been tried before with little success. For example, in 2006, BMW modified a naturally aspirated V12 engine in a 7 Series to run on hydrogen, which it did, but with 60 percent of the power and five times the fuel consumption compared to gasoline. More recently, Toyota’s president Akio Toyoda has been among the drivers of an experimental hydrogen-burning Toyota Corolla in some Japanese endurance races . In this case, Toyota started with the GR Corolla’s turbocharged three-cylinder engine; the forced induction from the turbocharger made up somewhat for the reduced energy density of hydrogen.
JCB decided to build an entirely new hydrogen engine , drawing on its experience developing diesel engines and sharing much of the engine architecture. Hydrogen is injected into the cylinders at much lower pressure and temperature than in a diesel engine, and a spark causes ignition. Like JCB’s diesels (and the Toyota hydrogen race car), the engine is turbocharged, and like a diesel, it runs at very low revs.
Performance might match JCB’s diesel engines, but 74 hp (55 kW) won’t go very fast on the salt. Instead, each of the two hydrogen engines powering the JCB Hydromax has been seriously worked on , increasing their outputs to 800 hp (597 kW) apiece. That required doubling the engine speed to a heady 3,800 rpm, replacing the pushrod valves with double overhead camshafts for better control over timing, and moving to direct fuel injection at much higher pressure than the production engine. JCB also dry-sumped the engine, cut weight, and improved cooling. The JCB Hydromax even uses two ice tanks to cool the air leaving the turbocharger, down from 392° F (200° C) to below 50° F (10° C).
