The James Dyson Award is an international design competition aimed at young engineers who want to advance their professional career through their creations. Every year, the competition opens its doors to designers who can offer a different perspective and give existing products a twist to create an improved version. In 2022, the winning project was a suitcase designed for wheelchair users.
In this year's edition, one of the finalists for the award is a young Indian engineer who has designed a motorcycle powered by hydrogen and ethanol obtained from water and sugar cane. The innovative project signed by Vikrant Subhash Pawar competes for the award by creating a motorcycle that reduces the emission of polluting gases and is presented as a sustainable and efficient alternative to traditional fuels.
Pawar explains on the contest's website that when he began his studies in mechanical engineering, at the age of 17, he wondered if there was an alternative fuel to gasoline and diesel to move vehicles that was also sustainable. This is how the young man began to use a low-power electric motorcycle that, according to himself, had a lot of errors.
Aware of the limitations of his first creation, Pawar matured the idea of developing a more powerful motorcycle. He himself was in charge of making the chassis and considered ethanol, obtained from sugar cane, as a source of energy to propel the motorcycle. Seeing that the motorcycle still did not develop the desired power, the engineer decided to build a hydrogen generator to combine this gas with ethanol as fuel for the motorcycle.
Hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water. This process uses distilled water or 0-TDS and potassium hydroxide as electrolytes, which involves separating oxygen and hydrogen atoms through electric current.
The bike uses a 100 cc four-stroke internal combustion engine and a carburetor specially designed to deliver ethanol. This element is responsible for the alternator generating the electrical power necessary to generate the hydrogen that is mixed with the ethanol in the combustion chamber.
Unlike gasoline or diesel, this combined fuel of ethanol and hydrogen is less harmful to the environment. Ethanol, extracted from plant sources, is considered a renewable source. Its production involves processes such as crushing and filtering sugar cane to obtain juice, followed by multiple stages of fermentation and distillation that concentrate the ethanol to more than 95%.
As for hydrogen, it is obtained without depending on external energy sources, beyond the water used in the electrolysis process.
Vikrant Subhash Pawar's motorcycle is specially designed to be used in urban environments since by using sustainable fuels it does not have circulation restrictions in low-emission zones. It offers a maximum speed of 75 km/h and can travel between 50 and 55 km per liter of fuel.
