India’s space scientists have developed hydrogen fuel cells to power an automobile bus by leveraging their know-how of the homegrown cryogenic technology for rockets.

The two-year effort of the space scientists has yielded positive results and the scientists are now readying for the fuel cells to be fitted into a bus. Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), G Madhavan Nair said that the organization has finalised the design.

ISRO and Tata Motors entered into an MoU in 2006 to design and develop an automobile bus using hydrogen as a fuel through fuel cell route. Tatas are taking the responsibility for the locomotive part of the new bus, and hydrogen handling system also.

Honorary Adviser of ISRO, V Gnana Gandhi who is leading the technical team in this project, said that they are planning to integrate the system in the first quarter of next year (January-March 2009), and vehicle integration in the second quarter. Hydrogen cells are a spin-off of the cryogenic technology that ISRO has been developing for the last few years.

Explaining how the whole system works, Gandhi said hydrogen would be fed to the fuel cells which would then produce 80 kw of electric power to drive the bus. Hydrogen in eight bottles at high pressure is stored at the top of the bus.

The new bus would be environment friendly and will have zero-pollution. So the running of this bus would be more costly than the conventional vehicles run on diesel. The vehicle would be a boon to the cities and towns which are affected by the pollution from vehicle smoke.