News

Seniors build hydrogen-powered motorcycle

Seniors-build-hydrogen-powered-motorcycle

Courtesy of Clean Technica

In print | February 12, 2009

Engineering students Alex Bell ’09 and Andres Pacheco ’09 are just weeks away from obtaining the final data on their thesis project: a hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle.

“A lot of people push for electric cars because they have this neighbor who built a battery powered vehicle,” Bell said. “But the fuel cell still has the stigma, like it’s this Hindenburg. [We’ll do] anything we can to make it more mainstream.”

Bell and Pacheco began designing their hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle two years ago. Although the project started as an “extracurricular” experiment, the pair found themselves devoting increasing amounts of time and effort to its development. When senior year came around, the two students were too invested in the motorcycle’s completion to switch to another project for their engineering theses.

With a two-year head start (engineering students usually only have a semester to design and build their senior projects), Bell and Pacheco have completed all of the motorcycle’s major elements, even though they devoted the extra time to making their project more complex than is the norm for an engineering thesis. “Now it’s just a matter of testing and analyzing all the data,” Pacheco said.
Intent on proving the viability of alternative energy sources as early on as their freshman year, Pacheco and Bell originally focused their efforts on a partially completed electric car that had been left behind by graduating seniors.

They worked on completing the vehicle with the hopes of entering it in a driving contest for electric cars, but when the expensive motors burned out during a test run, they decided to redirect their attention to hydrogen fuel cell technology.

The engineering pair is working on a limited budget provided by the Swarthmore Engineering Department, as well as the Halpern Family Foundation Engineering Design Fund. Instead of going with the conventional car, they decided to work on a motorcycle.

The hydrogen fuel cell itself constituted most of the expense, and the priciest one they could afford was “only 1.6 horsepower, and that could basically never drive a car,” Pacheco explained.

Next, they contemplated designing a Vespa or scooter type of vehicle, but the hydrogen fuel cell is so large that those kinds of vehicles cannot cope with its weight or volume. Bell said that he believes the fuel cell’s bulkiness is simply due to the fact that it is still “in its earlier design stages,” and that it will be streamlined and lightened for the use of future engineers.

For the time being, however, Bell and Pacheco only have the larger model to work with. According to Pacheo, a motorcycle provides the perfect balance: it has “a great deal of volume” in order to cope with the physical size of the cell while remaining “quite light.”

The motorcycle has recently received press from a variety of different websites such as Fuel Cell Today and CleanTechnica. Bell and Pacheco were pleased that their fuel cell motorcycle generated stories that highlight Swarthmore’s engineering program.

“I think it would be hard for other undergraduates to come up with their own idea and [have it be] fully funded,” Bell said. “It’s nice to see Swarthmore College getting some press saying ‘look what’s possible at a smaller school.’”

The positive press is also increasing public awareness of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Both Pacheo and Bell hope their success will make the idea of a usable hydrogen vehicle seem like a more realistic possibility for the public.

Bell and Pacheco will soon complete their data analysis and hope to present their findings at an engineering conference in June.

Upon graduating, Pacheco hopes to continue his studies in business and engineering with the ultimate goal pursuing his interest in production engineering.

Bell is currently applying to graduate programs for power economics with the hope of maintaining his focus on vehicle efficiency. “We’re both really into alternative energies and vehicle efficiency,” Pacheco said.

With a projected efficiency of the amount of energy maintained in the transition from hydrogen fuel cell to motion at 46 percent for the nearly completed motorcycle, the two engineers are optimistic about what their work can do to prove the viability of hydrogen fuel cells to other engineers and to the public.