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Fejlesztési Ügynökség

All alternative energy sources should be used to replace the usual but rapidly exhausted stocks of energy. Lehel Kádár, Senior Research Fellow at BME, leads a team which is looking for special solutions for the economical propulsion of small cars. Mr Kádár has been successfully experimenting with hybrid and purely electric vehicles since the early 2000s.
His first success was a small three-wheel electric car with an electric engine driven by high-capacity condensers. Presented at competitions and shows, the small car rightly became a source of pride for lecturers and students of the department, even winning praise from NASA after a visit. The delegation was surprised by the car’s acceleration and smart features. This gave another impetus to the researchers, and they started to work on the development of a hybrid car with the aid of the NDA’s EU tender. Designers were wary of hybrid cars on the grounds that they were expensive and that clients did not like cars with a refuelling time of more than five minutes and a maximum range of 150 km.
Nevertheless, Lehel Kádár did not give it up and used a Hungarian invention, the hydrogen battery, which enabled him and his team to make a product which astonished the entire world of motorists.

As with large car manufacturers, the vehicle department also used to experiment with a hydrogen propulsion method where the gas was stored in and extracted from a double-wall high pressure vessel. However, the large volume and the high pressure posed a permanent risk. The team achieved the great breakthrough when it was offered the hydrogen battery by its Hungarian inventor. As a matter of curiosity, hydrogen ignites when mixed with oxygen and burns with a colourless flame, so the burning can hardly be seen with the naked eye. Kept as a secret for a long time, the technology primarily consists of storing hydrogen atoms from plastic bottles filled with distilled water in the ion trap which belongs to one of the electrodes, in nanogrids, and hydrogen is only released when the atoms are used to change the polarity of the battery. You may even shoot bullets into these batteries and they will not explode. This technology was used by Lehel Kádár for designing his unique small car called Hidrocar.

Skipping scientific details, the point is that it’s the two rear wheels incorporate synchronous engines driven by electricity. The engines are powered by the battery, which is charged by a generator driven by an internal combustion engine. The engine is propelled by petrol, ethanol or hydrogen.

Lehel Kádár has a lot to say about the small car’s parameters and special scientific technical solutions. Of course, they are rather difficult to be translated to lay parlance. Anyway, operating the electric car only costs four forints per kilometre. Admittedly, this is also because the synchronous engines inside the wheels switch over to generator mode when the brakes are applied and regenerate energy for the batteries, which may increase the vehicle’s efficiency by up to fifty percent.

The researcher-developer mentioned that lots of work remains to be done as the team wants to replace the engines inside the wheel hubs with higher performance synchronous engines developed by them to further increase the recoverable energy. Also, Mr Kádár would like to raise the performance of hydrogen propulsion from the present two kilowatts. In the meantime, he and his fellow researchers and students will continue to work on other developments.

Mr Kádár mentioned only incidentally that he is credited for developing and designing a great number of vehicle types. He designed a steam locomotive looking rubber wheel sightseeing vehicle, which pulls three coaches on the bank of Balaton. Also, he built a motor driven three-wheel ice cream car and special vehicles to transport special animals and freight.

Source: Napló