Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology - July 2021
Hydro power
John Challen 2021-07-20 03:47:39
Watershed moment
An automotive startup is developing a hydrogen-powered hypercar to prove the propulsion technology can exist as a perfect partner to battery power, and could also be the key to unlocking the optimum powertrain for heavy goods vehicles
Viritech – a UK-based startup company with one eye on the climate as well as the world’s resources – recognizes that battery electric vehicles have their place, but also realizes there are sustainability and scarcity of resource issues. Therefore, Viritech’s founders, Matt Faulks and Timothy Lyons, have turned to hydrogen.
Faulks, who is also CTO of Viritech, has a background in motorsport and low volume sports and road car programs – he worked on the BAC Mono, for example. Lyons worked in investment banking, but also has a passion for engineering and got to know Faulks through the motorsport industry. During conversations with each other, it transpired that the two had both been seriously thinking about hydrogen powertrains and soon took the plunge to set up Viritech.
“I’d just sold my motorsport business and I wanted to do something a bit more useful for the world instead of playing with fast cars,” explains Faulks. “I looked at EVs, but it was a hard thing to sell to myself because the vehicle was always heavy, the energy density was an issue and the mass compounding was also an issue.
“We realized it isn’t a case of choosing between hydrogen or battery; there is space in the market for all types of power source, depending on the application,” he says. “We saw that we could use smaller lithium batteries and couple them with hydrogen fuel cells, which gives a unique proposition. Then, suddenly our onboard battery is not over 1,000kg, it’s under 100kg.”
To develop the ideas and technologies that Faulks and Lyons had devised, they needed to create a vehicle quickly and cost-effectively. The answer was a hypercar.
“While we have no ambitions to be a vehicle manufacturer, because of our motorsport contacts it’s not difficult for us to build a low-volume vehicle,” explains Faulks. “What that allows us to do is to develop the powertrain components in Apricale, without the part price pressures of high-volume production.” It also allows Viritech to prove the technology to a ‘volume production’ level without going through all the hurdles involved if it was trying to build 10,000 vehicles.
On a mission
One of the major changes for Apricale, compared with previous hydrogen vehicles, was an overhaul of the fuel tank. “Traditionally, hydrogen vehicles have carried large, heavy pressure vessels solely to store hydrogen,” says Faulks. “What we’ve done is integrated the tank as a structural member of the chassis.” The graphene composite pressure vessel forms part of the car’s monocoque chassis and helps to reduce overall mass.
Beyond fuel tank integration, Viritech has also addressed the fuel cell stack. Faulks says the team is looking at developing multi-hundred-kilowatt cells that aren’t in a multiton form. “The fuel cell stack is relatively lightweight but, at the moment, the weight and package optimization of the subsystems are generally bulky because there hasn’t been a drive to shrink them down,” he reasons.
At the heart of Viritech’s hydrogen powertrain is an in-house vehicle controls system – a single box that controls 95% of the subsystems. It also manages the interaction of the driver’s requests to the vehicle, but other subsystem and safety aspects as well.
“Our target is to be an integration assistant and engineering resource for manufacturers who want to produce hydrogen vehicles,” states Faulks. “So having that technology in-house allows us to very quickly deploy bespoke variants of vehicle control for other applications. It’s something that doesn’t exist right now for hydrogen, only for EVs.”
Helping the startup in its mission is Horiba MIRA. “We have a senior team, but MIRA, with a great test and development operation, gives us similar capabilities to the likes of Bentley and Jaguar Land Rover, for example,” says Faulks. “We wanted the backup for validation and testing work by passing it onto MIRA. It’s what we did with the CAE work and we’re currently doing the same with the aero validation at the moment. We’ve designed it, handed it over and then there is a back and forth process to get everything right.”
These are very early days on the Apricale project, but the signs are very encouraging. Weighing in at around 900kg the hypercar will have the option of anything up to 1,115PS, depending on tire choice (track or road). That performance will be aided by a four-wheel-drive system, with a dual motor rear setup comprising torque vectoring along the rear axle and a single motor on the front axle with limited slip differential. Faulks says the zero to 62mph 0-100km/h) time is currently in the range of 2.6-2.7 seconds.
“What’s going to be really interesting will be the zero to 200mph [321km/h] time,” he teases. “It’s quicker than anything else that we’ve been able to find that has a time we can verify, put it that way.”
The Apricale mule car is currently running and the first production spec e-machine components will be integrated by the end of 2021. Prototype models will follow in 2022 before the production run of 25 customer cars commences at the end of 2023.
Faulks reveals that some of those customers have come forward because they simply like the company’s approach. “Apricale buyers are essentially assisting the development of technology that will hopefully provide key solutions to some of the problems we have with transport,” he describes. “That ethical aspect is something we didn’t realize on day one. We just saw it as the most viable way to develop the technology.”
GOING BIG
The Apricale is a stepping stone to other applications for the technology that will be proven, hopefully, with the hypercar.
“The heavy goods market is a real target for us,” explains Faulks. “That might sound odd from a company building a hypercar, but it’s a key area because electric trucks aren’t the optimum solution. Solid-state batteries are coming, which will be great and we’ll make use of that technology, but the battery pack will go from 7-tons to 5-tons and that’s not the solution that haulage companies need to be able to operate effectively.”
It’s no coincidence that the fuel cell sizes that Viritech is working on with Apricale are the perfect size for HGVs. The motor technology can also be reoptimized for trucks. “In Apricale, we’re predicting 250kW per rear motor, but we can bring that up to around 400kW – and with a single-stage gearbox we’re at 2,400Nm of torque that you need in a truck,” explains Faulks.
The ex-motorsport entrepreneur also sees opportunities in aerospace, such as the wings being used for hydrogen storage. “There are many applications of the key technologies we want to push,” he states.
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Hydro power
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