OT: Hydrogen fuel cell for cars..

Hi,

Giving away patents for a dead end technology might not be that bad of an idea :) Apparently fuel cell cars have about half the effective fuel economy of an electric car (according to a video of Elon Musk talking about fuel cell cars (or fool cell cars I think he is quoted as saying.

cheers, Jamie

From the sun - obviously. It's where we get almost all our energy. Nuclear fission releases energy that wasn't generated by our sun, but uranium is ge nerated when heavy stars burn through all their fuel and ends as super-nova 's, so it's an academic distinction.

The point about hydrogen is that you can generate it with solar power durin g the day and store it indefinitely. Hydrogen is obviously not a "primary" fuel - any more than oil is - and it's not a particularly dense store of en ergy, even if you liquify it. Aeroplanes that burnt liquid hydrogen rather than JP4 would need much larger fuel tanks to achieve the range that curren t aircraft can manage.

You lose energy when you extract hydrogen from water, and again if you burn it as fuel in a heat engine. Solar cells and electrolysis would still capt ure a great deal more of the sun's output than growing plants do.

As for increasing global pollution, what's the pollutant?

You have a habit of posting fatuous comments, but this one is sillier than most. Being as silly as John Larkin might be necessary to be as commerciall y successful as he is, but I wouldn't bet on it.

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Absolutely.

Now there is a doodad to convert your car to part water. Friend of mine bro ught on over. It produces hydrogen which is injected onto the intake system of a car engine. If you can do the pure hydrogen (which this doesn't in it s cuyrrent incarcation, which makes it even more dangerous), theoretically the O2 sensor should tell the computer to cut back the fuel. (duty cycle of the injectors)

So we get some beer and hook this thing up on the bench to a battery charge r and we have a bucket of water for the gas produced to go, why ? So you ca n ignite it withut the danger of the flame backing up into the hose and blo wing the jar to pieces.

Cheap materials, those stainless steeel pot scrubbers, a sock and a glass j ar, abd water and bakind soda. I imagine the water and baking soda need to be replenished from time to time.

But then I was looking at the ammeter on the charger. It was pulling maybe

15 amps and was puling the voltage down to 8 volts. In a car with a ral bat tery and alternator that voltage would stay up and it would pull even more.

At what point is the energy extracted by this method exceed the drain on th e alternator to feed it ? the electricity is not where the energy comes fro m, it is the water. But I have doubts as to whether that even breaks even. Maybe I should find a way to measure the amoount of gas it produces somehow .

Anyway, in its current form it puts out hydrogen and oxygen gases. That mea ns the O2 sensor in th car is not going to react the most desirable way, I think. More O2 in the mix will probaly also negate most of the effect of th e EGR valve. So you get less carbon in the exhaust but more N2O.

Unless you make enough of it to displace the nitrogen in the atmosphere...

Total battery/electrolysis over internal combustion migh be viable one day but it needs alot of development. It is not a good idea to have huge tanks of that shit so making it on the fly is a huge advantage. Plus I don't know , if the hydrogen and oxygen sit in a tank together will they recombine int o water and you're back where you started ?

There's a good reason they fight wars over fossil fuels. they're the best t hing going at the mooment.

Well, we have oceans full of oxidized hydrogen... so you're really asking where the energy comes from to separate it out. Fusion, fission, wind, solar, hydroelectric - those can all work.

There's no Carnot efficiency in a fuel cell, it is NOT A HEAT ENGINE. It's a battery. The major efficiency issue may be the 'charging' of storage tanks (not compressed gas, but intercalation dissolved-in-solid storage), which requires some long times and thermal pumping.

It is stupidity, not silliness, when burning coal to generate the electricity that WOULD be used to run the electrolysis. Nobody will use solar panels exclusively for that purpose, and at most 1% of energy generation is solar; many places in the US it is zero percent.

Exactly!

You are correct concerning Carnot efficiency in a fuel cell, BUT..the electricity needs to be converted to work AKA driving a wheel.

a Tesla is close to 90% efficiency from battery to road

-Lasse

Yup... you should. Measure the amount of hydrogen produced per kilowatt-hour, and measure (or calculate) the amount of power you can generate by burning this much hydrogen.

As I see it - if the goal is to use the energy from burning the hydrogen, to both drive the car and also generate enough more power (via the alternator) to electrolyze enough water to generate an equivalent amount of hydrogen... it won't work. It will never break even. If it were otherwise, you could have a perpetual motion machine... electrolyze water into hydrogen, burn it, cool the exhaust to reclaim the water... lather, rinse, repeat.

I think that if you do the research, you can find (or measure) the amount of electrical energy needed to electrolyze a specific amount of water into hydrogen and oxygen. You can also find (or measure) the amount of energy released (heat generated) when that hydrogen is burned with the necessary amount of oxygen.

The latter will be (at most) equal to the former... and that's assuming zero losses and 100% efficiency, which you'll never get in practice. The energy efficiency of a heat engine such as a internal combustion motor is a lot less than 100%, unless you happen to be able to heat-sink into the mass of Pluto :-)

You're mistaken in saying "the electricity is not where the energy comes from, it is the water". The electricity is what provides the energy needed to break the chemical bonds in the water, freeing the hydrogen and oxygen. When you burn hydrogen and oxygen, the formation of the chemical bonds is what releases energy (as heat). The energy released during burning cannot exceed the energy required during electrolysis.

Measure it and see for yourself.

Now, it's possible that adding some hydrogen to an automobile's normal fuel mix might somehow increase the efficiency with which the remainder of the fuel burns, at least slightly (e.g. by increasing the combustion chamber temperature?). I'm doubtful as to whether this would be anywhere near enough of a benefit to be worth the energy cost of cracking water into hydrogen.

I do recall seeing systems which purported to increase internal combustion efficiency by injecting a small amount of water (un-electrolyzed) with the fuel. If I recall properly this lowered the combustion chamber and exhaust temperatures slightly... in effect, diverting some of the combustion energy into the creation of steam (increasing the combustion chamber pressure) instead of having this energy just flow out the tailpipe as heat in the exhaust (or be lost into the engine coolant).

At some point there will be a bacteria that has a waste product of hydrogen. I believe there are some now, but I don't know the efficiency.

Hmm. hydrogen producing bacteria produces 610,000 hits. Probably better, scholar,

It's a hope, if LENR doesn't pan out. :-)

Mikek

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They should have named their first model "Coil".

They would have sold even more and have an even bigger backlog to fill.

I would enjoy owning a Tesla Coil.

ts".

en?

lear fission releases energy that wasn't generated by our sun, but uranium is generated when heavy stars burn through all their fuel and ends as super

-nova's, so it's an academic distinction.

uring the day and store it indefinitely. Hydrogen is obviously not a "prima ry" fuel - any more than oil is - and it's not a particularly dense store o f energy, even if you liquify it. Aeroplanes that burnt liquid hydrogen rat her than JP4 would need much larger fuel tanks to achieve the range that cu rrent aircraft can manage.

burn it as fuel in a heat engine. Solar cells and electrolysis would still capture a great deal more of the sun's output than growing plants do.

han most. Being as silly as John Larkin might be necessary to be as commerc ially successful as he is, but I wouldn't bet on it.

It wouldn't. Using hydrogen to store power doesn't make sense if you can ge t away with burning coal or methane.

We've got a choice - keep on burning fossil carbon and dumping the CO2 prod uced in the atmosphere until we've driven anthropogenic global warming far enough that even Republicans can notice it, or go over to renewable energy sources while agriculture still works.

Once that particular penny has dropped, a lot more power generation will co me from solar panels and wind farms. Using hydrogen as form of power storag e may make sense then, but I suspect that better batteries may beat it out for everything except air-transport.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

According to past conspiracy theory there was a carbeurator invented to do just that a long long time ago. Legend has it that GM or Ford or whatever b ought the patent and shelved it. Why the story doesn't say like Standard Oi l or something is not clear. I do not know if it is true, but it is no secr et that car companies and gasoline companies are in cahoots. One builds the product that needs the other. And they all want money. If fuel was not sta ndardized it would be a mess. Like saying the FCC is a plot to keep "undesi rables" off the air, the FCC does have a very important legitimate reason t o exist, aside of the political of course. Theories aside, it simply doesn' t matter because without this cooperation you would recieve noting but gibb erish. If not for some "conspiracy" between the oil and car companies you o wuld not be able to drive down the road.

But that was just a story and while it might be true, I would like to see t he patent number. Nonetheless, fossil fuels beat other energy sources becau se we are stealing it. The energy was put in there millions of years ago an d we are raking it up. It is still more expensive to heat with electricity than gas because they have to DO something to get electricity. Gas just his ses out the ground and they stick a pipe in and sell the shit. And shit is ptobably the right word.

Electricity, well I guess we could hydrolyze on it, tank it up and see what kind of mileage we get but my guess is it would not be good. The whole thi ng is energy conversion. We have never created one iota of energy. It is a matter of extracting it. When they have to DO someting to get electricity, that doesn't mean they made it. It all came from the same place. So does th e energy that fossilized the fossil fuels, it's just that that energy was p aid a long time ago.

The real point is if you can save any money doing thes things, and it is no t likely. The setup costs for anytihng viable are too high to start with. h ow long are you going to live ? I mean, setup a house runs on solar and win d, dig a well so deep that they could frack next door and not bother you, a septic system that is self renewing and all that. And then all you pay is porperty taxes, maybe phone, internet, but it all runs cheap electricity wi se, except for refrigeration. Dig a cellar.

So, where we at about $300,000 for a shack out back ?

Oil, opiates and a few members of the periodic table are why we war. And oi l and gas are at the top of that list. We'll see what kind of shape Gazprom is in when April comes.

I read this as: "Our technology could make us filthy rich if not for a few serious problems. Please fix them for us."

I don't see what the Carnot cycle has to do with this. Hydrogen can be stored by means other than extreme cooling and compression. More ways is probably what Toyota is looking for.

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If it worked, it would be in production.

One thing often lacking in "efficiency claims" is the real world. I had occasion to meet with a guy who claimed he increased his auto gas mileage using locally generated Brown's gas. Ignoring the obvious "conservation of energy problem", I launched into a discussion of why his measurements were insufficiently precise to support his claims and offered to build him an accurate measurement system.

I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to debunk it so the guy who introduced us would quit this foolishness and apply his significant creativity to something theoretically possible that might make him some $$$.

During this discussion the real issue was disclosed.

Turns out that he had a device between the ECU and the injectors that allowed him to modify the injector timing. He would drive down the road, reduce the fuel/air ratio until the engine died, then back off until it restarted.

Here in the real world where we expect excellent "driveability" and long engine life, even if it did give him some mileage increase, the result would not be acceptable.

Most dramatic claims are made by people who have no theoretical basis for their experiments. They ignore the big picture and become fixated on their tiny piece of the whole. The results don't stand up under scrutiny.

You just need some high temperature (above 1000 C) and water dissolves into hydrogen and oxygen. No need for electrolysis.

One method to generate such temperatures is to use a 4th generator nuclear reactor. Of course, when one suggest this to the proponents of hydrogen economy, they run screaming away :-).

Sure. Use a nuclear reactor to generate a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (which happens to be explosive). When the mixture explodes it spreads nuclear waste over a wide area.

Run screaming away is a socially responsible reaction. Stopping some fool from building it the first place would be even more socially responsible.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney