Emirates Team New Zealand have been continuing the commissioning and testing of their hydrogen powered foiling chase boat ‘Chase Zero’ on Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf.
The team have now run Chase Zero for 36 hours of motoring and over 562 nautical miles (1042km) have been covered on the water, with the only emissions of its operations being pure water.
The top speed of Chase Zero to date has been clocked at 50.3 knots (93.16km/h) which was the expectation of the design of the foiling boat.
On a recent test of the cruising range and reliability, the tanks were filled to 96% and Chase Zero circumnavigated a few islands around the Hauraki Gulf.
Total running time was nearly six hours and covered 151 nautical miles (280km) at an average speed of 28.3 knots and still had about 10% gas left in the tanks.
To put that into perspective if Emirates Team New Zealand had done the same day’s run in a regular 11m chase boat with twin 250hp outboards, they would have used 140 litres of petrol an hour @ 28knots, which would have equated to 825 litres total.
Unfortunately a regular 11m chase boat only has an 800 litre tank so it wouldn’t have even made it back or matched Chase Zero’s range without running out of fuel.
The range test provided the engineers with valuable data that has been crunched and now the team can accurately assume that the range of Chase Zero on four full 8.4kg tanks of hydrogen gas is 178nm (330km) at a cruising speed of 28-30 knots.
Ed Note:
Chase Zero is using Green hydrogen, which is when the energy used to power electrolysis to split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen comes from renewable sources like wind, water or solar to electrolyse water, emitting zero-carbon dioxide in the process.
Green hydrogen currently makes up a small percentage of the overall hydrogen available, because production is expensive.
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