Making Hydrogen Visible

The use of hydrogen as an alternative, carbon-free fuel for heat, hydrogen vehicles, energy storage, and long-range energy transport is gaining importance in industrial applications.

Hydrogen (H₂) as an energy source for automotive propulsion is becoming increasingly important to reach future sustainability goals. Not only for powering fuel cells but also for H₂ fueled internal combustion engines (ICE). Therefore, it is obvious to combine the advantages of H₂ as fuel with advanced ICE technology.

The Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) technique visualizes gas motions e.g. in hydrogen or helium applications without seeding the flow by simply taking a video with our FlowBOS camera.

The commonly used IR cameras fail with hydrogen because it is not IR active. The FlowBOS camera fills this gap and detects almost any gas.

Gas Leakage Detection

Gas leaks, down to micrometer defects at low flow rates, are visualized with LaVision’s BOS systems. 

Hydrogen Injection

New hydrogen combustion engines like ignition compression engines or gas turbines need to increase their performance by optimizing the gas injection valves. The BOS technique visualizes the flow structure of the penetrating gas plume and helps to analyze the important parameters of cone angle or penetration depth.

High-speed cameras capture the transient nature of pulsed hydrogen injection of a typical commercial gas valve at highest temporal resolution. Due to the simplicity of the BOS setup not more than a background pattern and the LaVision BOS software is required.