Not Just Words on a Page: HydroQell's Lab, On Video
When the Innovations page launched, we promised its entries would be updated on real milestones — and here is the first one. A new project video takes you inside the HYCODUQ laboratory in Ventspils, where the hydrogen compressor featured on our page is turning from models into machined metal.
INNOVATIONS
HydrogenLatvia
7/29/20262 min read
When we launched the Innovations page, we made two promises: entries would be updated when something real happens — not on a marketing calendar — and modelled figures would always be labelled as modelled. Today the first entry gets its first update, and it does not arrive as another block of text. The BioPhoT platform has published a project video that takes you inside the HYCODUQ project laboratory in Ventspils, where the hydrogen compressor featured on our page is being built. Watch it, then read on.
See it, don't take our word for it
Technology at an early readiness level has a credibility problem: from the outside, it can be hard to tell a genuine laboratory campaign from a rendering and a press release. Video dissolves that doubt in a way no article can. In three minutes you see the workbenches at Ventspils University of Applied Sciences and its Engineering Research Institute VIRAC, the SolidWorks models becoming engineering drawings, chamber components being machined and measured, high-pressure vessels standing in the lab, and researcher Vladislavs Bezrukovs explaining on camera why the compression chamber is the heart of the system. HYCODUQ l is not something that lives behind texts — and now anyone can verify that for themselves.
What has happened since the launch
Since we first featured HYCODUQ'Ss project HydroQell compression technology, the project's public record has grown. Its laboratory validation campaign is financed with €188,573 under Latvia's long-term state research programme "Innovation Fund", through the BioPhoT platform financed by the Ministry of Economics, running from March 2026 at Ventspils Augstskola. That is Latvian public money doing exactly what an innovation instrument should: carrying a patented, peer-reviewed technology across the gap between promising models and measured results.
Metal, not renders
The most telling frames in the video are the least glamorous ones: machined flanges, precision gauges, welding sparks, a workshop bench covered in fasteners. Laboratory-scale transparent chambers will let the team observe fluid dynamics and heat transfer directly, while metallic chamber hardware is prepared for the dual-chamber tests. And the standing discipline of this page applies unchanged: the target of ~1.36 kWh/kg at 70 MPa remains a CFD-modelled figure, not a measured result — benchmarks per Pereira et al. (2024), Energies 17, 4906 — and the campaign running through late 2026 exists precisely to put it to the test. When measured results exist, this page will carry them, whichever way they come out.
Ventspils, on camera
The video makes a point we are glad to amplify: beyond the technology itself, the project contributes to industrial development in Ventspils and across Latvia. The work draws on local machining and engineering services, gives researchers at Ventspils Augstskola access to simulation tools, laboratory setups and thesis topics, and puts a regional Latvian university on camera doing work that a French refuelling-station manufacturer has already paid to build on. That is what "Made in Latvia" looks like from the inside.
The page keeps its promise
This is how the Innovations page will work from here on: launch feature, then updates when milestones are real — a video, a commissioned test stand, a measured result, a signed pilot. If your team is building hydrogen technology in Latvia and can show the same kind of substance, the page is open to you. The HYCODUQ's project HydroQell entry has been updated; the next update will come when the laboratory delivers its answer.
