Question: How do you plan to make the power of the future cars?

Stuart Archer answered on 17 Jun 2013:

I will use my amazing science skills to harness the power of the sun!!

Anyway, to details! The plan for my research is to make things called artificial leaves. There are lots of different components to them which I won’t go into just now (if you’re interested just ask!), but basically they absorb light from the sun and use the energy from that light to power a chemical reaction which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The hydrogen is the useful part of this – it gives out a lot of energy when it burns, and the only waste product is water! There are two ways we might use it:

1) Burn it in an engine similar to the ones we have in cars at the moment. This probably the easiest way to do it, but not the most efficient.

2) We could use it in a ‘fuel cell’. This is a device which uses the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen together to generate electricity, which could then be used to power an electric car. This is probably the better way of doing it, but fuel cells are difficult to make and very expensive at the moment!