Brad Clayton Posted July 12, 2007 Share Posted July 12, 2007 Saw the add for hydrogen retro kits, and have heard alot of buzz about hydrogen and water powered engines (electrolysis) and so on. Any body got any input on this? Are these guys for real with this stuff? I guess anything is possible, I mean we did put a man on the moon, or..... did we? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Warman Posted August 22, 2007 Share Posted August 22, 2007 In 1969, my eyes were glued to the television as Neil Armstrong made his famous statement.... He went there with less computing power than a hand held calculator. However, at one point in time, my few remaining brain cells were absorbed with the notion of electrolysing water to create O2 and hydrogen.... and using this to power a vehicle.... With the technology available at that time, it was a defecit scheme... more power was required than could be regained. The thought of hydrogen fuel cells resurfaces every now and again, but does anyone really want raw hydrogen being slopped about by the guy next to you? (Think "Hindenburgh). Pure hydrogen is, basically, a fire looking for some oxygen (IMHO)... and I would prefer to remain as far from it as I can. However, there is a lot of research going in to alternative energy sources.... This old planet has a real problem looming on the horizon.... One faction wants to produce bio-diesel from grains and ethanol from corn... yet we continually swallow up prime farm land with housing developments. Somewhere along the line, we have to admit that the almighty dollar ain't all it's cracked up to be.... "what's for dinn3er tonight, m'love?".... "Garlic roasted one dollar bills, if I can find some garlic.... five dollar bills for desert....". Extreme? Yes.... But is it unthinkable? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DamageINC Posted August 22, 2007 Share Posted August 22, 2007 I saw one dude who actually made a fully functional torch that ran solely on water... Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregH Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 It all comes down to batteries. Not in the literal sense, but in the sense of energy storage. Hydrogen, ethanol, fuel cells, gasoline, diesel, even winding up a rubber band - they are all forms of energy storage. What needs to be done is to find a method of energy storage that is loss-less, efficient, safe, and portable. Take hydrogen, for instance. There is currently one popular method for deriving hydrogen - electrolysising water. Takes massive amounts of electricity to make a significant amount of hydrogen. It's not a very efficient energy conversion (from electricity to hydrogen). Storing it is a nightmare. You have to pump it up to an exceptionally high pressure to get a high enough energy density to be convenient, ie. get enough mileage out of a tank of fuel, and take up about the same space. The conversion efficiency from hydrogen to heat (inside the engine) isn't very efficient either. So what is the benefit? Very safe byproducts coming out of the tailpipe. Nice, but not the best solution. Ethanol, methanol, and everything else we can derive from a renewable resources have their own set of compromises. High cost and low efficiency to turn corn, soybeans, or switchgrass into useable fuels. And tailpipe emissions that are more harmful than hydrogen byproducts. Diesel and gasoline are non-renewable. But we've gotten pretty good at converting raw crude into useable fuel. Of course, we're still fighting emissions... Batteries are nice. But they have a really low energy density. This means you'll need a lot of battery to go a short distance. No emissions from the tailpipe - nice again. But this is a form of "emissions transfer." You've gotta charge your batteries. Most people would do this from their houses. This means, the electric grid would need to provide you with your normal electrical demand, plus the demand for your car. More energy going to each household means more work for the energy plant. And that means more emissions, and higher consumption of whatever fuel the plant uses. Fuel cells are nice an efficient, but they are very delicate and pretty weak. The cost to manufacture them is pretty high as well. So, what are our sources of energy? We've got fossil fuels (diesel, gasoline, natural gas), renewable fuels (ethanol, methanol, vegetable oil), photovoltaic (solar cells), photothermic ("mirror farms" that focus light onto steam towers), nuclear, and hydroelectric. There are smaller, "fringe" sources such as using bouys riding waves while being anchored the ocean floor, geothermal which uses the temperature difference between air and the ground, wind, and a few others. There are even theoretical ones like harnesssing zero-point energy - which is energy that comes from quantum fluctuations (at least that's the easy explanation. it's pretty far out there). Just for trivia, can anyone guess what the only true source of energy is in the known universe? The fusion of hyrogen into helium in stars. Every single energy source we have either comes directly from sunlight (photovoltaic), indirectly from sunlight (wind, hydro, fossil, etc.), or from byproducts of star destruction (nuclear). What we (as a species) need to do is to find an environmentally friendly way to capture this energy, store it, convert it into useable forms, transfer it to the point of use, and then use it to do work in the most efficient means possible. Sounds easy, huh? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad Clayton Posted August 24, 2007 Author Share Posted August 24, 2007 Indeed.....not sure what we've been waiting for. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad Clayton Posted August 27, 2007 Author Share Posted August 27, 2007 Quote: I mean we did put a man on the moon, or..... did we? I love to get conspiracy theorys going, I was wondering when someone would bite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kyle E. Grathwol Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 Quote: I love to get conspiracy theorys going, I was wondering when someone would bite. Speaking of conspiracy theories and hydrogen power; Go rent the movie "Who Killed The Electric Car". Unbelievable. A gentlemen in the fuel industry told me that the reason gas prices are so high is because the oil companies are building up capital to install and control the hydrogen infrastructure (and continue to hose us). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony302600 Posted October 5, 2007 Share Posted October 5, 2007 I think we should all find 7.3's and run them on used atf like in the fmc forum /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/rofl.gif Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DamageINC Posted October 5, 2007 Share Posted October 5, 2007 Yeah and the oil companies totally bought the design patents for a 100+mpg carburetor too, right? Right?? I dunno, I am not exactly a scientist or anything but I highly doubt that there's enough energy available in the gasoline we fill our vehicles with to *EVER* allow us to deliver such small amounts of fuel required for that kind of mileage, and still create enough power to allow a vehicle to get out of it's own way. We all know that, to make power, we've gotta move air in and out of the engine. To do that, the oxygen must be burned, properly. And a specific amount of fuel will always be required to maintain proper burn temperatures and times based on the amount of oxygen entering the cylinders. Gasoline is just not really a super-potent fuel, unfortunately, I don't think we'll EVER extract that kind of mileage out of dinosaur-powered engines without some very very impressive cylinder head design, VERY very lightweight engine components, and equally lightweight vehicles. OR some magical carburetor. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregH Posted October 8, 2007 Share Posted October 8, 2007 You're right. With current conventional engine design, there is no way to hit 100mpg. Lighten the vehicles, improve the engine design, and we'd still be really pushing to clear 50mpg. And we start getting into the realm of safety concerns - being such a light vehicle... Bruce Crower came up with a very interesting design - the six cycle engine. I apologize if he's been discussed here before - can't remember where I first heard of his engine design. If you're not familiar with his design, google it. Interesting reading, and quite an innovative design. With adequate refinement, it could be a real contender... What would really be nice is to convert the entire volume of gasoline into useable energy, instead of the exceedingly low percentage that we have now. If there was a way to convert the entire mass into energy (remember e=mc2?) and actually use the energy to move the vehicle with no waste, it would only take 1 drop of fuel to power a full size vehicle 200,000 miles. Obviously, we can't do that, nor will we be able to do that in the future. There will always be waste (damn entropy!) Nuclear power is an interesting concept. It utilizes energy conversion through e=mc2. Uranium-235 (among others) is easily fissible, which means it will easily fall apart. When it does, plutonium, curium, and other isotopes of uranium are made, as well as a significant amount of heat. Where does the heat come from? It is energy from e=mc2. If you add up the mass of the fuel before it enters a nuclear reactor, and compare it to the mass when the spent fuel comes back out, you'll find that you've got less mass. The lost mass was converted directly into energy. Sweet! Nuclear reactors are closed loop. There is no "exhaust pipe" or "intake" for the radioactive stuff. (there is for the support mechanisms. Typically water from a nearby source goes through a heat exhanger, flashes to steam, drives a turbine, and is released back to the environment.) You put the fuel in, retract the control rods, and the reaction starts by itself. You throttle the reaction with the depth of the control rods, until the fuel is spent. Swap the fuel for fresh, and away you go... Fission is nice, but fusion is better. Fission is the breaking apart of things - in this case atoms. Fusion is the combination of things - again atoms. In stars, the main fusion fuel is hydrogen - it fuses into helium. The two hydrogen atoms weigh more than the result - one helium atom. Again, the lost mass is coverted directly into energy. This reaction loses considerably more mass than fission reactions with uranium, and therefore produces a lot more energy. Also, the reaction doesn't rely on radioactive components, so the danger from that is gone. However, fusion requires such high temperatures and pressures that it's not feasible with current technology. It is possible that in the future it will be viable... There is another technology that is very interesting. Joseph Newman (Neuman?) from my home state of Mississippi had a very innovative revelation in the 1980's. Messing around with electric motor design and some fundamentals of electromagnetic theory, he determined that if the coils in a motor armature are of such a length that the electricity in the coil cannot make it all the way through the coil before the commutator breaks the circuit, then a back EMF (electromotive force) will spike through the system. The voltage of this EMF is supposed to be pretty high when measured open circuit. He decided to try out a prototype - a large motor, long windings, powered by a relatively small battery. Kick start the motor, and away it goes. Now the trick - the battery that is powering the motor won't die. It is continuously recharged by the EMF spike. In fact, a dead battery connected to the system will be recharged. Ok, so this smacks of perpetual motion... Where is the energy coming from? We're recharging a battery, overcoming friction in the motor, and presumably producing enough torque from the motor to run some sort of generator for practical use. Turns out that the EMF spike is being powered by the annihilation of copper atoms in the windings of the motor itself. Hmmmm.... e=mc2... an exceedingly small amount of mass would produce an exceedingly large amount of energy.... Remember the gasoline requirement for an e=mc2 vehicle? 1 drop for 200K? So why don't we all have a pool-table sized motor and generator in everyone's garage all powered by dead "D" batteries from the kid's toys? And why don't we all have electric vehicles that are being recharged by the aforementioned pool-table power plant? Well, as is the ending of most stories of innovation and creation, the inventor, Mr. Joseph Neuman, is insane. He's currently running a cult of some type, is a pracicing polygamist, and probably not the sort of gentleman you'd invite to watch the game with.... An electric motor company in the US contacted Neuman some years ago to offer their services. An engineer was assigned to work with Neuman and assist and observe the motor construction. His report was a scathing testimony to Neuman's insanity and lack of basic understanding of motor design. In the end, Neuman stole the prototype and it has never been recovered. Does the Neuman motor work? It's never been proven to work, nor has it ever been shown to not work. Sad that the solution to the energy needs of the future could be in the hands of such a person... Anyway, look it up! Interesting reading.... http://www.josephnewman.com http://www.josephnewman.com/JN_Theory_by_Hastings.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Newman_%28inventor%29 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LARRY BRUDZYNSKI Posted October 8, 2007 Share Posted October 8, 2007 Holy crap, after reading that. I felt like I was in college during a lecture again. But definitly interesting /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/thumbup.gif Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DamageINC Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 There aren't enough calories left in my system to type out anything like what Greg just did, but I'll chime in and mention that I took some Nucleonics classes a while ago and amd a VERY avid pusher of nuclear power. I think that it is a very safe, extremely effective and currently accessible form of power that really needs to be much more mainstreamed. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Bruene Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 I just finished a week of training on the hydrogen powered E-450 bus. It is an awsome machine. The only emission that it puts out is NOx, but nothing more than any gasoline powered vehicle does. All that comes out the tail-pipe is steam (which makes the right-side mirrors a little useless when it's super cold out). Driveablity is not all that bad, it is a little under powered at highway speeds, but city speeds it does just fine. Once fuel storage and supply issues are worked out, I think this is going to be one heck of a product! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vloney Posted February 24, 2008 Share Posted February 24, 2008 We are the servicing dealer for the University of Rolla's e450 shuttle busses. They are v10s with 6 huge hydrogen tanks in the rear. Theres a monstrous framework protecting the tanks (can you say, Hindenberg?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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