hydrogen

[nivaman]

has anybody played about with hydrogen?.
in a diesel or petrol engine, what were your findings?.

[floyd fan]

I am just in the process of building a hydrogen booster, I'll let you know how things turn out.

[Ray_Jnr]

i am also in the process of building a hidrogen generator to fit to my 300tdi

[diff22000]

[terence]

Are you all nuts ?

I give you a scenario .......... Hindenburg.


I assume these machines are a bit more sophis, that a 9v battery and a cup of water ??

Intreagued , checked the date no its not 1st April

[diff22000]

[Rossko]

Yup, basically a cup of water and a 12v battery.

No chance of 'Hindenburg' events because there's no significant storage of hydrogen. The generators make 'Browns gas', a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, and its used as its made.

Claims are made that the 'magic configuration' of each of the many varieties of gear somehow produces monatomic hydrogen gas mix, rather than regular H2 gas, and by a miracle this releases more energy than you put in. Hmm, not convinced at all, but I've never tried it.

Claims are also made that it uses 'spare' electricity from the alternator. That part I know is cobblers, if you take electric from the alternator it loads the engine, ie uses power. If you don't take any electric there's only the windage/bearing losses which you're stuck with anyway. No such thing as 'spare' electric.

Claims are made that ordinary combustion is grossly inefficient, and the miracle gas acts as a catalyst to release more energy from the regular fuel. There may be grains of truth in that, it could work like that on old carb engines.

Also bear in mind that most of the air consumed by an engine is Nitrogen, useless for combustion. Displace some of that useless stuff with a ready-to-burn oxygen/hydrogen mix and you'll get more bang for each puff. The downside is the energy cost to make the gas.... me I believe in the laws of Thermodynamics. "Get owt for nowt, lad"

cheers, Ross K

[pope]

Oh, thank god for that, and here was me thinking there was a world wide energy crisis when all we needed was 12v and a glass of water.
Wonder what the hell Honda was doing spending all those billions of yen developing that hydrogen fuel cell thing, perhaps no-one bothered to tell them it was all so simple!!

[terence]

the cruel irony here POPE is all you need is a 9v battery and a glass of tap water.

hydrogen and oxgen split between the anode and the cathode..

Cant think what Honda wasted all that money on.

the dodgy bit is compressing and storing it , without another LOS ALOMOS...

eeeek.. look at the lovely mushroom

[Rossko]

A tank of hydrogen is no more dangerous than any other tank of compressed gas, y'know like the ones used for air suspension and LPG.

Google for 'hydrogen bus fleet', theres a lot around ... because hydrogen suits bus usage patterns. Tank capacity is limited but buses don't need long range. Tank filling is slow but that's not a problem when you can schedule it between routes. In my view the eco-benefits are doubtful - the city streets are nicer because the pollution is made elsewhere at some coal-fired power station instead but its entirely practical.

This run-your-car-on-water business is rather different ; the hydrogen/oxygen mix is generated on the fly and consumed as its made ; no storage. If only there were a source of 'free electric' it'd work rather well !!

cheers, Ross K

[:)]

The laws of thermodynamics have a term called entropy which is a measure of the amount of energy NOT available to do work. No electrochemical energy transfer can occur at 100% efficiency and this is indeed the case when water is electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen. At best you will get about 70% of the energy in the electricity turned in chemical energy. Take account the (huge) inefficiency of generating the electricity and that of heat engines when it turns it back into mechanical work the system can not work.

I have seen pseudo scientific articles claiming some improvements by using hydrogen but none have ever stood up to even basic analysis.

Sorry, but unless you have a free source of hydrogen it isn't worth doing.
--
Tim.

[Nathaniel]

Could something be driven using the waste heat from the engine? Stirling engine? Generating electricity for the hydrogen generator/traction batteries?

[:)]

Possibly, but the only "good" heat source is the exhaust. The potential energy is determined by the difference in temperature between the hot and cold sides, which means the coolant temperature is too low to be particularly useful.

Stirling engines have the potential for high efficiency but the temperature difference needs to be high which requires the use of exotic materials and difficult engineering with regard to expansion and contraction. To get good power to weight the working fluid (usually hydrogen or helium to reduce inertia) needs to be at high pressure further adding to the complexity.

Just as an aside, another possibility is a solid state electrical generator ... using a massive number of thermocouples in series/parallel (you will only get about 5-7% out though)
--
Tim.

[pope]

Entropy is actually the tendency of energy in a CLOSED system to become less capable of providing work, which of course precludes all perpetual motion devices. This liberation of Hydrogen is not a closed system because the water is being added as a fuel plus you are adding your electrical power. However, if a 9v battery, i'm assuming we're talking about the usual little square battery here, could actually provide enough electrical power to convert enough water to supply a significant amount of energy we would not have the desperate thirst for oil that we do.
Energy in/energy out. A 9v battery can only provide 9v worth of shove, however you actually convert that energy into motion, it's not like lighting a fire where the chemical reaction becomes self sustaining as long as you add fuel. As soon as you remove the charge from the water the liberation of your Hydrogen ceases.
Of course, a big 9v battery running perhaps a 1000 amps can provide a very big shove but such a battery with present technology would be unfeasibly heavy and we would bump into the inevitable law of diminishing returns, and, as has been said, where do you get your electricity to charge your battery from?
Any attempt to charge your battery from excess energy generated by your engine would certainly become a closed system and that would bump into good old entropy. No such thing as a free lunch.
Anything that sounds too good to be true almost certainly is.

[:)]

[Rossko]

Well, there's a couple of people giving it a go, so we should wait for the reports.

I do think there is a chance that streaming in a bit of H/O mix to a 'orrible inefficient engine might improve combustion efficiency enough to be measurable. The more efficient the engine is already, the less to be gained.

Besides, according to all the websites we're ignoring the miraculous properties of monatomic hydrogen

cheers, Ross K

[pope]

Burn efficiency would be far better achieved by adding oxygen not hydrogen, mix it with a bit of nitrogen to stop it getting out of control and voila, massive increases of efficiency out of the same amount of fuel input.
I wonder just what "monatomic" hydrogen is supposed to be? Hydrogen, if my memory of o-level chemistry serves me, has one proton, one neutron and one electron, don't really see how you could get more monatomic than that!

[terence]

O2 would be catastrophiclly unstable , as stated adding % Nitrogen would stabalise it but belive it or not id rather play with hydrogen.

[nivaman]

[quote=""]

[:)]

[floyd fan]

Well I got mine producing gas today, its still on test and I havent connected it to the car yet. I have built it from things I have to hand so its a bit Heath Robinson, but its cost nothing so far. I have used an old water filter housing into which I have put two double helix windings of stainless steel wire. I cant connect it for more than a few seconds at a time as I need to replace the power cable as they are not heavy enough for the Amps it drawing, but when I do connect it to a battery gas starts pouring out straight away and I've had a few nice bangs when I ingnite the gas. It will be intresting to see if I get more MPG, I have a 20yr old 90 TD and I get about 20-25 MPG at the moment. I'll keep you informed of how things go.

[terence]

Im watching this with Interest and amazment.

Its morris wilks meets George jetson........ amazing


it will still be like driving a BOMB but every pioneer suffered for their cause.

See Curies and Radium.

good luck

[Rossko]

For those worrying about the composition of the gases involved here ...

"O2 would be catastrophiclly unstable " - that's funny, air is over 20% oxygen and seems stable enough in general.

Bear in mind the objective here is not to run the engine totally on the products from the electrolyser - we're talking about adding a small percent of H/O mix to the normal air intake on its way to meet the normal fuel in the cylinders.

"mix it with a bit of nitrogen to stop it getting out of control" yup we're using mostly air at 78% Nitrogen so that's covered

Combustion is a complex process. Common sense says if we add H & O in the right proportions they will just recombine to water ... but it is just possible that a slight enrichment of oxygen content and the presence of free hydrogen will do 'something funny' to the usual burning process of the hydrocarbons in the regular fuel, creating unusual intermediate hydrocarbons perhaps. I dunno!! In the end we can only make CO2 and H2O in the usual way, but there is more than one way to get from the starting complex hydrocarbons to that. Going through one chain of reactions cannot release more total energy than going through a different chain, but its theoretically possible that the energy may be in a more useful form - e.g. more pressure, less heat - and so give more miles per gallon. I don't really believe that though

".. wonder just what "monatomic" hydrogen is supposed to be?" Ahh well that's the secret ingredient y'see. Schoolboy chemistry, hydrogen gas is H2 - two H atoms in a molecule as H2. The super special electrolysers are supposed to create a proportion of just H as well as H2, free atoms just looking for work to do ... umm, right. Quite why these free H don't bump into each other and form H2 before even leaving the electrolyser isn't clearly explained.

Adding this hydro/oxygen mix will certainly increase the power output of the engine. What I cannot buy is that increase being even equal to the power drain of running the electrolyser ... quote "need to replace the power cable as they are not heavy enough for the Amps it drawing" Car alternators run at best about 60% efficient, so for every kW the electrolyser soaks up you'd need to gain 2kW of engine power to break even.

It'll work for some people ; remember that sticking a magnet on the fuel line or lead shot in the tank gives dramatic MPG improvement for some folk too

cheers, Ross K

[pope]

Nivaman, you have misquoted me, it was Tim who mentioned "bottom lines", there was a clue there in the signature at the bottom of your quote.
What I actually said was "anything that seems too good to be true almost certainly is"
I do find it hard to see how adding hydrogen is going to improve fuel efficiency, you will get exactly the same energy from your charge of diesel plus an added bang on top from your hydrogen.
I would think that you would need to be fairly careful of pre-ignition and timing issues because it would be a fair bet that Hydrogen is a little more volatile under the extreme pressures and temperature of a diesel combustion chamber. In fact, I would think a petrol engine would be a far safer bet than a diesel, much lower compression ration and much more forgiving of firing imprecision.
My mention of Oxygen mixed with Nitrogen shouldn't have been such a surprise. I was referring in a slightly sarcastic way to a Nitrous oxide system, very simple to set up, kits readily available from Ebay and serious efficiency gains as anyone at Santa Pod would be happy to demonstrate. The trouble comes in using that gain to improve mpg rather than performance.
I am very interested in hearing the results of your experiment, hope it does go well, we can all jump on it if it does!

[danno83]

I've got a water4gas system on my niva, and the fuel consumption has gone from 14.3L/100km's to 11.6L/100km's.

and before you ask what else has been done, I disconnected it for a test (to see whether it was actually doing any good) and consumption went back to 14.3L/100km's

I've got mine connected via the vacuum hose into my carbie. seems to do the job well.

[floyd fan]

Danno83: Interesting, do you have any pics of your set up?

So in English you have gone from about 20MPG to 25MPG thats a 25% increase in mileage. Do you know what output of gas you are getting, ie how many litres per minute. So far I can only get about 350 - 400 mils per minute. I am now working on two cells in series to try and improve the output.

[YotaDave]

[:)]

I bit of extra info:
Peltier pumps are usually silicon semiconductor devices and therefore have an upper temperature limit a bit over 200°C, for the hot side - but manufactures often specify quite a bit lower. They could be used with an exhaust as long as there was a mechanism to stop the hot side getting beyond limits.

A similar (but technically different) thermal generator is the to use the thermoelectric voltage of dissimilar metals, as per a thermocouple. You would need to stack a huge number together to generate a useful voltage, but it can be done.

I should also be remembered that they generate power on the basis of a thermal difference, so you need a code side (radiator?) as well as the hot side. Neither are particularly efficient as power generators, but if you are using waste heat then anything is batter than nothing.
--
Tim.

[Ray_Jnr]

any news on the project? i have stainless wire here and some other bits and bobs but the work has been put back for other jobs that have been more important, im hoping to have a prototype by the end of next week.

if everyone listened to nay sayers then no one would have any fun.

[floyd fan]

I'm trying to find time to fit mine, just too busy so far.

I'm getting about 400ml per min and have decided to put it on and see if there is any improvement in MPG.

I initially used 1mm SS welding wire, in my second attempt I twisted three Lengths together to give a greater surface area and got a better output.