Ok this is continuation of this thread:
https://www.thirdgen.org/techbb2/sho...hreadid=241782

But it's about Hydrogen combustion instead of ethanol.

What I'm reffering to are things like this:
http://www.unitednuclear.com/h2.htm

The idea of running your car on hydrogen, what I'm interested in finding out is not stuff like hydrogen manfucaturing is a net-loss process or somesuch but more engine specific issues.

I mean is there a powerloss in running with hydrogen instead of gasoline or is that simply untrue? What are the ups and downs of buring hydrogen in your engine?

 

I can think of one negative. I would never drive a car with a tank full of compressed hydrogen.

 

Why not? It's safer than driving around with a flimsy sheetmetal tank full of gasoline.

 

Yeah have you seen the test photos about hydrogen cars vs. gas cars. The gas car englufs in flames in seconds, while the hydrogen tank has a vent that shoots flames like a torch up through the trunk. The hydrogen car is much safer and the car never starts on fire.

I'd love to convert an engine to hydrogen for my ME senior design project. Then convert my 3rd gen is gas goes really high or we run out of gas.

 

Thanks to metal hydrides you don't need compressed hydrogen, with those you also get better storage per volume and you could cut the tank in two and set fire to it's innards and it would just glow like a cigarette, but this is a solved technical issue, no what I'm wondering is if you can get as much "oomph" out of your engine with H2 as with gasoline.

 

actually if I understand the theory of how a hydrogen engine is supposed to work, it dosen't take hydrogen gas you fill up your tank with ultra purified water. I don't know the specifics but I think it somehow extracts the hydrogen from the water.

 

No, gas has more power in it then hygrogen. All those cabron to carbon bonds store alot of engergy.

 

Not to sound like a smartass but thats like taking tanks full of carbon dioxide and water vapor and trying to get gasoline from them to run your car. It costs more energy to get hydrogen from the water then youd extract from burning it and turning it back into water. Good ol' entropy at work.

 

as I said I'm not very sure at all how it works, however I could have sworn it dosne't involve driving around with a tank of hyrogen

 

Not calling you out or anything. Just making a statement. Yes, storage is definatly one issue with hydrogen. Theyre trying to get as much as they can in as small a space as possible. Chemical means of storage seems to be able to store the most per unit of space.

 

Electrolysis, but it won't work, thats just like a fairly tale, the hydrogen must be generated separatly, the car cannot do it.

 

Actually it has more than twice the chemical potential energy of gasoline, but what I've heard is stuff like density and compression and such that matters...

 

IIRC, there is more energy in gasoline then in hydrogen when your just purly burning it. Just like theres more energy in diesel fuel since its all just long chains of carbon. Dont have any numbers offhand to support that, though.

 

There's so much monkey-spank and twisting of the truth out there, it would be funny if these people weren't trying to dig into your pockets.....

So they give you that "twice the 'energy density'" thing, and quote the figures by weight. Well, last time I looked, liquid hydrogen weighed about 1/10 per volume of what gasoline does; which means, in simple terms, the you need 5 gallons of liquid hydrogen to produce the same energy as 1 gallon of gasoline. Hmmm....

So, let's take a perfectly prepared hydrogen car, and set it on fire in a controlled fashion, and assume that all protections will always work perfectly, every time; and lets compare that to the messiest possible uncontrolled accident involving gasoline. Well, there's a famous public uncontrolled hydrogen fire some of you may have heard of.

Bottom line is, anybody can distort the facts any way they want; but the fact remains, we have a little more work to do, as a species, before "hydrogen power" is anything more than a buzzword to lure investor moeny into Ponzi schemes.

 

ok my mistake, I was thinking fuel cells.

 

Yea but from my understanding they claimed the accident was X4 because they coated the inards with aluminum and espestos.
Actaully 1st design gas tanks in fNord Pintos would blow up just like the hindenburg.

 

I think theres other stuff involved as well. They found that the exterior covering burned like mad in tests. Thats what caused the bright billowing flames in the photo. What they say is that the coating burned first setting off the gas bags as it went. Some speculate that if they had used a less flammible coating that there may have been more time to handle the accident. Dont know what they could have done. Burned to death more slowly, perhaps?

 

The skin of the Hindenburg had a layer of iron oxide coated with cellulose butyrate acetate and powdered aluminum. Iron oxide and aluminum are used in the well-known thermite reaction, which burns at something around 5000 degrees and has been used in the welding of railroad rails and the theft of ATMs and payphones. Cellulose butrate acetate is similar to nitrated cellulose used in guncotton and explosives. It is possible that the designers of the Hindenburg realized the error of their ways since zeppelins built after the Hindenburg disaster used calcium sulphurnate and powdered bronze in the doping instead.

The Hindenburg was also filled with a tremendous amount of uncompressed hydrogen gas which burns very quickly with a nearly colorless flame. It is worthwhile to observe in the famous videos that the Hindenburg did not explode violently, but burned from end to end in a uniform, albeit spectacular, manner.

 

Who does and where? The chemical potential energy of hydrogen is higher, it's density is not.

But by chemically binding hydrogen to metal hydrides you get more storage density than liquid hydrogen, secondly storing it this way removes the danger of it exploding.

However the storage issue is a technical issue thats pretty much resolved thanks to metal hydrides, the issue is running the engine on it and getting enough hydrogen for combustion, I gather you'd have to increase compression, possibly for more efficiency you'd get new high compression pistons.

Yeah but you know, reading the site I have linked to before you talk might help, because right now I don't think you're talking about this company.

I don't think so, Ford is developing a hydrogen combustion engine, the trick is to get high compression, i.e. get more hydrogen in the same volume.

Really, who are these "they" you are talking about, it doesn't seem to be United Nuclear.

 

Actually it's the density thing, there's simply much more gasoline than hydrogen per volume when uncompressed.

 

Found this file, good reading on hydrogen in ICE's

http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogena...fs/fcm03r0.pdf

Interesting:
TPI is port injection right? Are there any of these direct injection systems for firebirds? Like these LS1 or LT1 or whatever they are supposed to be?

 

What are your units? You do get alot of net energy from forming the bonds that compose water but gasoline packs alot of carbon and hydrogen into a small space and it forms a reasonably stable liquid at room temperature so you can have alot of energy stored in a small space, and its safer then compressed hydrogen as well. The metal hydrides take care of the problem but there are probably saftey issues as well with that judging by how unstable the battery based technology can be.

Im with RB on this one. Hydrogen power will come about but its still has unresolved issues, like, how are we going to make all this hydrogen? Nuclear power? Chemical? In its final form hydrogen will probably be utilized by fuel cells since it offers more efficency then an IC engine but there too are some problems. Fuel cells require the use of precious metals such as platinum and there simply isnt enough platinum mined every year to come even close to meeting the demands of having hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year. One thing theyre trying to sort out is how to cut back on the need for rare elements in production. Lastly, theyll also have to have the technology down pat and be able to produce cheaply or theyll never force out oil based forms of energy untill oil runs out.

 

What do you mean units? These are simple facts you might find in a physics or chemistry book, the Chemical potential energy of gasoline is 44 megajoules per kilogram, 142MJ for hydrogen.
Hydrogen OTOH is far less dense, thats what makes all the difference.

Well it is more effective because while it's proportionally weaker it's also denser so you get alot more gasoline in the same volume than you get hydrogen.

Metal hydrides are not a new invention, prize is the issue with them.
There's hardly anything unknown about this technology.

I dunno what his point really was.

That is only an issue if we're approaching this like some kind of world comittee of alternative fuels and implementing this world wide but right now this is smallscale only, down to the personal level.

We're not talking about saving the world here though, and yes fuel cells are far more effective, but do you want to rip out your beatiful V8 and put an electrical motor driven by a fuel cell there instead?

I don't, I love the internal combustion engine and it's "feel" and I am approaching this from a personal perspective, many of the issues debated here are for the bigwigs in the goverment to decide, we're just seeing if this might suit our own selfish purposes, in the here and now, or atleast a year or so in the future.
With the gas and electricity prices here I'd save loads of money in making hydrogen myself through electrolysis at home.

EDIT:
Though globally, the hydrogen ICE is far easier for the average joe, he doesn't have to buy a new car and it'll use good old fashioned technology, though the issue of making hydrogen on a grand scale is problematic.

 

BTW - What IS the lightest known metal?

 

Hydrogen becomes a metal under certain laboratory or extreme conditions, so that would be the lightest by far. But other then that the lightest true metal is lithium, followed by beryllium.

 

Units can distort things a bit. In one kg, theres alot more hydrogen on a per molar basis then gas, so yeah, hydrogen makes more energy jsut because of its sheer numbers as oposed to gas. On a per mole basis or by density gas has more energy. A similar mass of hydrogen takes up alot of space as oposed to the same mass of gasoline, which is part of the reason for all the research on how to store it. I remember hearing that if you had a gallon of nitroglycerin and a gallon of gas, the gas would have more energy. Of coarse, since the efficency of an engine is inherently limited, alot of that energy, something like 70-80%, is just given off as wasted heat.

 

You must have missed the PBS special. they will use solid hydrogen. Nothing is under pressure. Guy said the matrerial use to hold the hydrogen could also be used as a crash guard.
Even if exposed the hydrogen will not escape.

 

Ummm stick both leads of a battery charger into a bucket of water, turn it on and instant hydrogen. Hydrogen can be made on site at the gas station. no hauling all over the earth, each gas station would make what they sell on site with plain old water and electricity.

 

Did like only half the people here see the pbs special with alen alda?

The one company took a ford focus and made it run on hydrogen with very little mods. It was still a regular engine just ran on hydrogen. It was very peppy too.

 

I like my v8 as well, but all engines are limited by thermodynamics and these old fashioned v8s are certainly no exception. Hydrogen will undoubtebly be expensive early on if they had to make it on a very large scale and get in a distribution network, so efficency and fuel use would matter. Making hydrogen by electolysis is pretty inefficent.

Playing with the numbers, if you had a 500 watt (j/s) transformer that was 100% efficent at making hydrogen, it would take you about 80 hours to make one kilogram of hydrogen. I used to like making hydrogen with acid and electrolysis, and electrolysis wasnt very efficent. Most of the energy went into making clorine, heat, and stuff. Now... if there was an alternative fuel, like alchohol, that was cheaper on a per unit energy basis, I would use it. But, unfortunatly there isnt really anything cheaper and easier to use right now then gas.

 

ummm... cars use ALOT of energy. A AA battery and some wires aint gonna cut it. Youll need fusion (non existant as of now) or neuclear energy to really produce enought of it to be usefull.

 

Thats fine... But hydrogen isnt readily avialable. If it was dirt cheap and at every station in town, then id be more then happy to use it.

 

American Scientific Frontiers on PBS is awesome!!!

 

where did I say AA batteries. But a battery charger will produce hydrogen. [since were on a car site assume a car battery charger not an AA one.]

watch that show on PBS and all your complaints will be answered. There were at Greenland where they want to switch to all hydrogen power. SO they are not Dependant on importing oil. They already have a shell station with its out hydrogen factory on site. about the size of a tool shed. It just like the gas station, you pull up n fill your own car.

hydrogen is easy to make. The solid fuel cell with no pressure is the ticket. any car could be on hydrogen with easy mods in a few years. But try and get the oil companies to not block it. Its why there is still so much bad press about hydrogen. The press is in the oil companies pocket.

You don't happen to work for an oil company?

 

Doesn't matter. They were mostly just *****, anyway. They made a lot of bad choices, hydrogen included. Guess they weren't quite technically advanced enough to be able to produce helium. Kinda explains BMWs and Benz vehicles, huh?

Don't start whining "Foul!", either. Both my parents were Deutsche. It just happens that their parents were bright enough to move here in the early 1900's.

I believe there are a few more issues involved. Moving from a petroleum economy to a hydrogen economy is no small feat. You can bet if there is money to be made, the energy companies (like Exxon/Mobil, all the Standards, Texaco, Kerr/McGee, etc.) will all have their hands in it. They already have experience in energy distribution, chemical processes, etc. They don't own all the oil reserves in the world, so they would stand to benefit just as much as anyone else.

 

A hydrogen conversion isn't that complex tecnically speaking, thats one of the things that make it so attractive, depending on what kind of injection you use you can have less efficiency with hydrogen or you can get more than with gasoline.
And it is possible to run your car on both gasoline and hydrogen providing you got the technical knowhow, or order a kit like the one fron United Nuclear(assuming that it all works out for them).

Yes it is, thats why hydrogen cars aren't usefull for the majority.
On a personal scale, even with electrolysis I could have use.

Well the hydrogen generator fron united nuclear can when connected to the wall outlet generate enough to fill the smallest tanks in 2 days, it's not fast and for you americans it's more expensive than buying gas, for me though where gasoline is 5.35 a gallon it's 50% cheaper than buying gas.

 

Too slow though, and so energy intensive that implementing it on a widespread basis is impossible.
It'll only work for a few enthusaist people right now, like you can have your own station at home where you can fill tanks of hydrogen with this process and then fill the cars tanks with that, and even that is gonna take you some time.

 

Have you considered other types of fuels? Alcohol wouldnt be a bad choice. Like the hydrogen youd have to tune the ecm to work with it and make sure everything can resist the alchohol but it would be an easier conversion. IIRC, though, alcolol requires lower AFRs so it would have to be much cheaper then gas in order to be atractive. Basically since the air requirements for an engine are fixed Id have to add alot more alcohol then gas to keep it fueled and that would mean that Id have to trash my present fuel system since nothing would be able to keep up with the flow rate. Hydrogen may have a similar problem. You may have to use so much of it that it would no longer be economical.

 

Hydrogen want lots of air(34:1 A/F ratio as compared to the 14,7:1 ratio for gasoline), with high pressure injection you'll get a better burn than with gasoline, maybe 15% better combustion efficiency.

 

http://www.unitednuclear.com/

Many new updates, most interesting, they will be selling kits this summer, this is good, now it will be possible to document consumer feedback and see what potential problems might arise.

There's still the issue of hydrogen embrittlement I wonder about.

And what about the heads, hydrogen combustion requires higher compression to be at its most efficient so as far as I've heard on other sites they will have to be replaced with high compression ones too, maybe aluminum ones?

Which makes me wonder, would the L98 aluminum heads from a 'vette fit my engine? I mean there should be no difference whatsoever, same engine but different heads from factory.

 

I personally wonder about engine durability. Hydrogen combustion would be excellent if you were using pure hydrogen and oxygen. But you're not. You use air for combustion. Air tends to have all sorts of other elements, Nitrogen, Sulfer. All kinds of fun stuff. Now introduce Pure hydrogen atoms, looking for a material to react with. What do you get? Nitric Acid, Sulfuric Acid....I think it would interesting to see what by-products are formed as a result of a hydrogen ICE before we go mass-producing them. People sometimes forget Air doesn't mean 02.

 

Back from the dead. Neat topic, though.

From my (often inadequate) understanding, the hydrogen-powered vehicle is a good concept, as far as just the car goes.

Fuel cell vehicles are more problematic, as it takes platinum to make a fuel cell, and platinum is pretty expensive and rare. If we started making fuel cell vehicles a lot, we would have a platinum shortage pretty quickly. Plus, fuel cells wear out over time, and would need to be replaced.

The flip side to a hydrogen-burning car, is that storage, trasnport and maufacturing of the hydrogen is still pretty clumbsy and inefficient. The car would get fabulous mileage and burn pretty clean, but the cost to make the hydrogen the car is making would outweigh the advantages the end user would see, on an overall scheme of things.

Converting plant material to alcohol-based fuels is another solution, as plants need just a few things - sunlight (totally free) water and some good dirt. Sun energy is completely free, so methods to harness that as a power source would pay off the best.

I could go into the Oil Peak mess, but that would probably generate a lot more heat then light, here. Suffice to say, I really think that a hydrogen-powered car is a red herring and without a LOT of money dumped into an ifrastructure to ship, store, process and distribute the hydrogen, it won't go anywhere.

 

What would be needed is a source of plentifull energy, that is nuclear power, I am a huge nuclear power advocate and I have read and researched as much as is possible over the years regarding it and I am so incredibly proud of my country(finland) for building another reactor, I just wish they'd build a few more while they are at it.

Actually, sun power is economically one of the worst options, the process that makes solar panels create alot of toxic waste and they are incredibly expensive.

Compressed hydrogen is not really that bad an option, there are some new really good tanks actually and there is another option coming.
And two keys for a hydrogen infrastructure are decentralization and cheap plentifull electricity.

So far this might be interesting for enthusaists and such though.

 

I agree. The burning of hydrogen itself wont pollute, but do they still plan to use a steam/methane synthesis to produce the H2? If so, this production of the fuel will cause pollution in the form of CO. And how do they plan to bring the steam to very high temperature for the synthesis without using another form of fuel to heat it? Natural gas...petroleum? If it costs more to make the hydrogen than it releases when burned, what is the point?

 

Nuclear power & electrolysis is what will be required, people always, always just ignore this.

As for why, it's clean(cleanest) and can be made domestically and can be used with ICE's and for fuel cells at the same time.

 

Like I said, I realize that the H combustion is clean. I was unaware that they were planning to use electrolysis to produce it, I was addressing the CO emissions if they used a hydrogen-methane synthesis.

 

Fusion power would be the hot ticket to go with, and I wish we could really get the ball rolling on it.

Fission energy has some storage problems for the expended nuclear products, but nothing we can't tackle. It does work, though, fission produces a lot of power and the modern construction of today's plants are really safe. The only problem with fission energy is that it's very expensive to build run and maintain a plant. The building materials that go into it are expensive, have to be dug out of the ground, refined, assembled, shipped and all that goes into making something brand new. All those processes require a lot of energy to be expended, mostly in the form of ICE's for shipping, machinery and other indirectly-related things. A lot of stuff goes into building something from scratch, if you think about it. Plus, only a few coutnries can really afford to build one, let alone run one. You've invested a lot of money into a plant now, you're lucky if the energy it produces would allow you to 'turn a profit', in terms of energy. Plus, uranium is pretty expensive and there's no guarantee that we won't exhaust our stocks of that, either. I see fission as only a partial solution.

Wind power is feasible at some locations - they scrapped an idea to use wind power here in Hawaii, despite the near-constant trade winds. Then there's geothermal, wave-action generators, and some other sources of power we could harness.

Fusion power would be a potentialy cleaner solution, and produce more energy, but will we ever manage to produce the desired reaction - and harness it? If so, sign me up for a hydrogen-powered car.

 

There are actually no plans for making it, I am just saying the only realistical alternative for a hydrogen economy(if one will ever exist that is) is to have plentifull electrical energy and the only thing that can achieve that is nuclear power, anything else will fall short by magnitudes, if fusion power becomes available and plentifull then the hydrogen economy is a reality, current nuclear technology is capable of it as well but will require a massive increase in the amount of plants there are.

 

This is an incredibly interesting thread... We just went over this stuff in my thermodynamics course, as well as my brother gave me some literature on it from the Oil Companies point of view...

And yes, oil companies are the big players in the "energy" game, they are the ones bankrolling research into alternative fuels and energy sources, because they know we're running out of dino juice, and they still want to be on top. So don't worry, they're not the bad guys.

Nuclear power is great to produce the electricity for electrolysis... However we aren't going to have enough materials for the radioactive process to continue it for long. Fuel cells rely on platinum, and if we built fuel cell cars to replace gas cars ( just as a fantasy here, overnight, replaced every gas car with a fuel cell...), then we'd have to replace the platinum part periodically (like replacing a fuel filter), and we'd have something like 1 year, then we'd run out of platinum.... On earth, not the platinum that we can find easily, just all of it. Ever.
So fuel cells can't really work out that well in the long run, sure all these sources are great to help out.... But in the end

We're ****ed.

Biofuels, and grain-type alcohols are my personal favorite... It's renewable, storable, etc... It'd take an uncomprehensible amount of land to grow enough "stuff", (something like the land mass of Africa, all wheatfields, if we were to power every gasoline engine on earth with grain alcohol...)
But hey, alcohol powered cars are close enough to gasoline cars that they'd still be fun. -J

 

Actually nuclear power even with all the absurd triple-redundant safety measures and whatnot that goes into every facet of it is still cheap enough that it won't be that many cents more expensive than coal powered electricity after you've factored all that in.

And uranium is actually one of the cheapest fuels there are right now, current known mineable reserves of cheap uranium will last 1-200 years, with the reprocessing of spent fuel we are looking at thousands of years of pretty cheap fuel available.

Here:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
Take a look at these price comparisons:

Nuclear 2.3
Gas-fired CCGT 2.2 (With Kyoto penalties: 3.4)
Coal pulverised fuel 2.5 (With Kyoto penalties: 5.0)
Coal fluidised bed 2.6 (With Kyoto penalties: 5.1)
Onshore wind 3.7 (With backup: 5.4)
Offshore wind 5.5 (With backup: 7.2)

Nuclear is beaten only by gas plants and those release CO2(and they are location dependant), while this is not an issue for non-kyoto countries it matters alot in the UK, the prices are in pence/kilowatt hours, you can also see that wind power is by far more expnesive, it'd be more economical to burn coal and pay the kyoto treaty penalties than use wind power.

Nuclear power looks really inviting, and if you built alot of those you could shut down alot of oil burning plants that are wasting precious oil that should by all rights go to vehicles instead.

I am 100% behind Bush on his nuclear initiative, even though he scares me by repeatedly saying nucular instead of nuclear.

I don't give windpower a second thought myself, it's absurdly expensive and even places like Denmark, one of the biggest users of wind power only get 3% of their power from it and for all the money wasted on that.... Windpower is just an utter disaster through and through.

We'll see when it's ready, even so there are no real problems with nuclear, current methods of long term storage are acceptable, besides the really dangerous stuff is the type that exhausts itself the fastest, you know the more radiactive it is the faster it will loose said radioactivity, on average spent fuel will be as radioactive as when it was first dug up out of the ground within 500 years of storage, which is really just a piece of cake with the current methods we have set up for storage.
Then there are new and interesting methods of neutralizing waste up and coming too...