SEOUL, South Korea – Amid the fierce competition throughout the globe to develop hydrogen mobility technologies to achieve carbon neutrality, a new technology for a 2-liter class hydrogen-fueled engine (a passenger car hydrogen engine) capable of running entirely on hydrogen has been developed for the first time in Korea.
The joint research team led by Principal Researcher Young Choi of the Department of Mobility Power Research of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), and Researcher Hong-gil Baek of the Zero-Carbon Engine Research Lab of Hyundai-Kia Motor Company (HMC) developed the “direct injection hydrogen engine” that runs entirely on hydrogen fuels, and demonstrated its world-class excellence through performance evaluation.
The joint research team of KIMM and HMC injected hydrogen directly into the combustion chamber of the engine of HMC’s existing hybrid vehicle, with a pressure of more than 30 bar. By using a turbo charger that improves the performance of the engine, the research team was able to maintain high thermal efficiency in all domains from the ignition of the engine to the upper limit of the engine load, allowing the engine to be stably operated throughout the entire engine operating conditions.
In the case of conventional “port injection engines,” the amount of air that flows into the combustion chamber declines because of the space taken up by the hydrogen fuel that exists in a gaseous state, which leads to lower fuel efficiency and poorer engine performance due to the backfire of the hydrogen fuel and air.
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