"They say the most immediate potential use for the new technology is in industrial locations where permanent hydrogen fuel supply lines are already in place." - so not actually applicable to regular cars but rather industrial equipment/large engines.
"The research team hope to be able to commercialise the new system in the next 12 to 24 months" - so hopefully this happens within a reasonable time frame.
The authors of this development say that the CO2 emissions were reduced by more than 85% compared to a regular unmodified diesel engine. Furthermore, hydrogen fuel recently became less expensive than diesel, which could mean that hybrid diesel-hydrogen engines could appear on the mass market, too.
“We have shown that we can take those existing diesel engines and convert them into cleaner engines that burn hydrogen fuel,” said Prof. Kook, one of the authors of the paper describing the results of this engineering study.
In order to make diesel engines run on hydrogen, the original fuel injection system remains in place. However, it is necessary to install an additional injector for hydrogen to deliver it directly into the cylinder.
The direct hydrogen injection must have the proper timing to achieve the best fuel mixture burning conditions, while also minimizing the residual emissions of toxic nitrogen oxide typical to all diesel engines.
Scientists say that they managed to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions below the levels of a regular diesel engine. The efficiency gains were also significant: in the diesel-hydrogen hybrid, the fuel efficiency was improved by more than 26%.
Reducing NOx emissions would be great, odd they don't mention particulates, since they seem to me to be one of the worse aspects of diesel engines[1] (and I'd expect that burning 90% less diesel should mean a similar drop in particulates).
"They say the most immediate potential use for the new technology is in industrial locations where permanent hydrogen fuel supply lines are already in place." - so not actually applicable to regular cars but rather industrial equipment/large engines.
"The research team hope to be able to commercialise the new system in the next 12 to 24 months" - so hopefully this happens within a reasonable time frame.