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hydrogen car plans ???????????
peterriley2 - 25/9/06 at 08:27 PM

check this here, do any of you reckon this could work/have any ideas what it does/is, or see any small print that says it doesnt work or something??? if not i see a change of plans in my fuel tank...

nib1980 - 25/9/06 at 08:30 PM

sorry to upset you, I work for an OEM reserching advanced technologies, and if this was possible from a book, we would have bought it by now! (not saying we haven;t done it though)

But it certainly won't be Locost!

happy motoring

suparuss - 25/9/06 at 08:36 PM

didnt they do a hydrogen powered cannon on scrap heap challenge once? they had some sort of bright thing in some water that made hydrogen appear to fuel the cannon. obviously i know next to nothing about it but if they can do it on scrap heap it cant be that hard.

Rich_T - 25/9/06 at 08:41 PM

We lloked at this idea some time ago. I forget the basics involved but you end up with something resembling a kettle and a power supply along with some other bits and pieces to seperate the hydrogen.
Heres the thing, we came to the conclusion that in order to run a vehicle off hydrogen alone youd need around 12 or so 'kettles' plus plenty of electrical power to run them. We came to the conclusion that it would be good to use alongside petrol but not replace it. The problem occurs when the engine is under full load, it consumes way more hydrogen than can be produced. If there was a way to run on hydrogen when say motorway cruising but revert to petrol under full throttle or load it would be fine. This should be relatively easy to control on a modern engine by tapping into the ecu.
Hope that makes sense

Rich

nitram38 - 25/9/06 at 08:41 PM

You need energy to split the water into it's componants.
Sort of defeats the object of the excercise!

peterriley2 - 25/9/06 at 08:41 PM

thats exactly what i thought, and why i didnt buy the plans... it just reminds me of the guy (cant remember his name) who made a highy efficient fuel cell, then mysteriously died.
im gonna email the seller and ask how much it would cost.

peterriley2 - 25/9/06 at 08:50 PM

okay i just found this sort of explains it a bit further, i cant imagine how the non electric version works though....
says can be built for $50???

Catpuss - 25/9/06 at 09:05 PM

According to New Scientist the practicalities have pretty much been worked out and early road going prototypes could be out in 3 years.
They are pretty much a zero emissions recycling process.

What you do is use Boron (from what I read). The water his heated up to around 800 deg C and passed through the Boron. This produces Boron Oxide and Hydrogen.

The Boron Oxide can then be collected and processed back to Boron by something (forgot the compound but its a chloride). Using solar reflector pannels its possible to heat the reducing agents up with near free engergy.

The actual cost of water powered systems comes from the Boron this works out to be about the same as current petrol prices.

The result is that the petrol tankers delivery Boron instead.

Of course this mean the oil companies can have a nice Boron cash cow and concentrate on oil for other fuel/lubrication purposes as the sources dwindle.

From past experiences of hydrogen power (in the 80s) one big problem is build up of hyrdrogen in the crank case. I know of one local Uni where the crank exploded. Thankfully the guy workign on it wasn't injured badly. They went for a sort of hydrogen enriched petrol mix using, IIRC Zinc Hydride to store the gas.

smart51 - 25/9/06 at 09:20 PM

quote:
Originally posted by nitram38
You need energy to split the water into it's componants.


The Sun (not the paper). for the price of a PV cell, some jars and a couple of electrodes, you can electrolyse water into H2 and O2. You have to presurise the H2 to get a useful amount into a car and thats where the problems lie.

MikeRJ - 25/9/06 at 09:44 PM

quote:
Originally posted by smart51
The Sun (not the paper). for the price of a PV cell, some jars and a couple of electrodes, you can electrolyse water into H2 and O2. You have to presurise the H2 to get a useful amount into a car and thats where the problems lie.


You'd need a BIG array of PV cells to get anything like enough hydrogen in a reasonable length of time. You can't just stick electrodes in water either, it doesnt conduct well enough to electrolyse at any noticeable rate. You need to add more ions to the solution ( a bit of washing soda would probably do the trick).

The bottom line is that there is no free lunch, you can only take out of a system what you put in and to get the equivalant of a tank of petrol thats a lot of electrical energy e.g. a 5 gallon tank of fuel holds about 720 megajoules of energy. That is the equivalant of 200kilowatt hours. At current prices it would cost you about £46 to fill the tank from your mains supply.

nitram38 - 25/9/06 at 10:12 PM

Energy in = energy out + losses.
Conversion of energy always cost something.

zetec7 - 25/9/06 at 10:35 PM

Kind of reminds me of the story of the guy who put reeeeaaallly tall tires on the back of his car to get better fuel mileage - he figured he wouldn't have to even start the engine most of the time, 'cause he'd be going downhill all the time....

Chippy - 25/9/06 at 11:03 PM

If you do a search on the web for hydrogen cracker, you will get hundreds of hits. One of these, I forget which, actualy goes into the mechanics of using the system, and it is possable to produce enough gas to run the engine by fitting a 240v alternator to power the cracker. They used battery power to start and run till the alternator took over. Have absolutely no idea if it would work, but the site seemed convinced that it did. I would think that any serious research on this would be slammed by the oil companies, after all the world revolves about oil, and the combustion engine. Ray.

Kamikza - 26/9/06 at 06:41 AM

i got the plans for it il post it it isn i pdf.and any body got plans on how to conwert to electric and can we post pdf. on this site

nitram38 - 26/9/06 at 06:55 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Chippy
If you do a search on the web for hydrogen cracker, you will get hundreds of hits. One of these, I forget which, actualy goes into the mechanics of using the system, and it is possable to produce enough gas to run the engine by fitting a 240v alternator to power the cracker. They used battery power to start and run till the alternator took over. Have absolutely no idea if it would work, but the site seemed convinced that it did. I would think that any serious research on this would be slammed by the oil companies, after all the world revolves about oil, and the combustion engine. Ray.


GM have a Hydrogen fuel cell car in the exit of GM Test track at Epcot.
And there it will remain, for several years until it actually is a viable project.
You will need a lot of energy to breakdown the water and the alternator will load the engine, the engine will need more fuel.....................you can see where this is going.
Airships worked because they are lighter than air and use a virtually non-depleting amount of Hydrogen (today helium).
Cars are heavy and need a lot of energy to get them going and use energy fast.
The problems GM have is one of distance.
They cannot carry enough fuel to propel the car too far.
If a hydrogen car makes it to our streets, it will probably look like one of those funny city microcars.
Its a few years away yet!

tks - 26/9/06 at 07:50 AM

as far as i recon the problem lies in the engine

because thats the one that dedictates the consume of the process...

with a 2.0litre engine we will need a hell of H2 not? sow i guess

that we need to increase efficency.... maybe a wankel engine is more efficient...
or even a bike engine..

or just an electric motor wich some of smart transmisson like the earlier dafs (variomatic)

i think that the best way is not to use the car and to increase the use of public busses etc.. thats where you can increase eff.

Tks

MikeRJ - 26/9/06 at 08:36 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Chippy
If you do a search on the web for hydrogen cracker, you will get hundreds of hits. One of these, I forget which, actualy goes into the mechanics of using the system, and it is possable to produce enough gas to run the engine by fitting a 240v alternator to power the cracker. They used battery power to start and run till the alternator took over. Have absolutely no idea if it would work, but the site seemed convinced that it did


These crackpot free energy web sites would try to convince you that back is white.

This absolutely can not work and is doomed to failure. The thermal efficiency of a 4 stroke engine is about 25-30%, i.e. it can only extract this much energy from the fuel. Clearly it's efficiency would have to be over 100% in order to generate the fuel to power itself and provide useful power to drive a car etc. at the same time. Such a device would be essentialy a Perpetual Motion Machine, it just ain't happening.

Burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine is really not ideal, though it does solve the emmisions problem. Hydrogen really lends itself to powering electric cars via fuel cells which are currently around double the efficiency of a 4 stroke engine.

MikeRJ - 26/9/06 at 08:48 AM

quote:
Originally posted by tks
with a 2.0litre engine we will need a hell of H2 not? sow i guess

that we need to increase efficency.... maybe a wankel engine is more efficient...
or even a bike engine..


The wankel is less thermaly efficient than a 4-stroke piston engine. A bike engine will have very simmilar thermal efficiency to a car engine.

The efficiency of the 4-stroke engine is essentialy limited by it's compression ratio, which is why diesels acheive better efficiency. Hydrogen can tolerate a higher compression than petrol, so this helps a little, but the improvement is quite small.

Quite an interesting document I found on running internal combustion engines on Hydrogen: http://www.avt.nrel.gov/pdfs/fcm03r0.pdf#search=%22hydrogen%20engine%20compression%22

Kamikza - 28/9/06 at 01:37 PM

Peteff - 28/9/06 at 02:16 PM

I'll have a read of that later, any body got an old car they don't want.

MikeRJ - 28/9/06 at 05:11 PM

That document is chock full of bad science.

You start with water, put energy into to split it into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen, then burn them to combine them back to water.

You do not somehow get more energy out than you put in to start with.

Imagine an engine producing, say 50bhp. At a generous 30% efficiency, this means we are actualy burning enough fuel to create 50/(30/100) = 166bhp. 166 * 0.746 = 124kilowatts.

In a 12volt system, you would need a current of 124000/12 =~ 10000 Amps to generate this power. I reckon the average Lucas alternator would have some trouble...

Kamikza - 29/9/06 at 04:00 PM

BUT THEY HAD IT IN THEY CAR HAHAH YES I KNOWE THAT IT DOSENT WORK I TRIED TO GET ANY H2 AND ALL I GOT FROM A 12V 14 A WHAS NOTHING

Schrodinger - 2/10/06 at 10:58 AM

From memory (1960's when I was at school) you have to use distilled water otherwise the terminals contaminate very quickly, it will still not be efficient enough to run a car though.

David Jenkins - 6/10/06 at 03:25 PM

How about this one?

peterriley2 - 6/10/06 at 05:27 PM

i didnt buy the plans, but looking at them im pretty happy i didnt... i emailed to ask how much it would cost to build, and how long it would take to build, his reply pretty much said it would take as long as i take to make it, and would cost as little as i could get all the parts for... this didnt exactly inspire confidence, and i think he finished with 'happy bidding' or something similar. he obviously didnt write the manual, and had probably never read it...

MikeRJ - 8/10/06 at 12:46 AM

quote:
Originally posted by David Jenkins
How about this one?


Fantastic, shame it's a bit expensive to suggest to the Mrs. as a stocking filler for Christmas though

This will likely be using a small fuel cell to convert hydrogen directly into electricity. Unless it's actualy rocket propelled of course