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hydrogen to run engines

Started by Tom L, August 27, 2014, 07:58:13 AM

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Tom L

had my wife's cousin over last weekend and this guy was a trip, he has built a container that he powers some tubes inside the container with 12 volt battery that when set up correctly and water is added, he produces hydrogen out of the container. enough to power a 5 hp engine off of a lawnmower, and continually run that engine on basically water.

pretty smart thinking, he plans on upping the scale and trying to run his truck off of the hydrogen produced. and then a generator . his thinking is to generate that 12 volt power, produce hydrogen to run the generator and produce electric from the gen set to power things around the house.
hope it works for him.

he says the technology has been around since the 40's and for some reason no one uses it, or someone in the power chain prevents them from doing this on a broader basis.

Gary_C

Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

Ron Wenrich

I think the lawnmower technology is along the line of GEET.  It works on small engines, but you have a problem when you get to a bigger scale and when you have a variable load.  Its sort of like the gas vapor thread is on here where a guy converted his motor to run on vapors.  It works much better on lawnmowers. 

The technology to run cars and generators on hydrogen is out there.  The problem is finding a way to produce enough hydrogen cheaply.  I know they do it in Iceland, where they have a bunch of geothermal heat to help the process.  I also know there are methods of doing it with natural gas.  Unfortunately, the economics aren't there for replacing hydrocarbons with hydrogen.  I've also tried to go the route of adding hydrogen to your air mixture to get better gas mileage.  It doesn't work, as not enough can be produced. 

There's lots of technology that's been developed over the years.  Much of it doesn't work.  It's great to think there is a conspiracy of deep pockets that would keep the technology out of other's hands.  But, how feasible is it that all this knowledge was lost and never came to the forefront, either in the US or any other place in the world? 
Never under estimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

sharp edge

Right now deep pockets is doing every thing they can think of to put down the greenies. IMO

SE
The stroke of a pen is mighter than the stroke of a sword, but we like pictures.
91' escort powered A-14 belsaw, JD 350-c cat with jamer and dray, 12" powermatic planer

Paul_H

Hi
Tom,I have a small engine repair shop and would be willing to build an exact copy of your wife's cousin's device if he would allow you to post the full plans and I'm sure others here would build one also also. My thoughts are that the engine would slow and quit as the battery lost charge but am more that willing to give it a try and post the results here.
Science isn't meant to be trusted it's to be tested

Tom L

Quote from: Paul_H on August 27, 2014, 01:48:20 PM
Hi
Tom,I have a small engine repair shop and would be willing to build an exact copy of your wife's cousin's device if he would allow you to post the full plans and I'm sure others here would build one also also. My thoughts are that the engine would slow and quit as the battery lost charge but am more that willing to give it a try and post the results here.

I don't have a drawing , only what he told me in our conversation. he is planning on charging the battery with an alternator off of the engine , thus making his own fuel as he goes. and keeping the circle intact.

gary C, that is funny, he specifically said if we no longer hear from them , we should assume we know what happened   LOL

beenthere

Quotehe is planning on charging the battery with an alternator off of the engine , thus making his own fuel as he goes. and keeping the circle intact.

Sounds like a new invention for perpetual motion.  That will be a real breakthrough.  Just water it.
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Ianab

Quotehe says the technology has been around since the 40's and for some reason no one uses it,

Main reason is that it doesn't work.... It's not that you can't make hydrogen with electrolysis, that's easy enough. You can run an engine on hydrogen (like pretty much any flammable gas).

The problem is that it takes more energy to split the water into hydrogen (and oxygen) than you can get back by combining them again. With the efficiency of the average internal combustion engine you might hope to get ~25% of the power back? It pops up again every few years, usually someone looking for investors or selling plans.  ::)

Same issue faces commercial hydrogen powered vehicles. It sounds great on paper because the exhaust gas is water vapour, so much less pollution from the car exhaust. But where you you get the hydrogen from? Make it from Natural gas, or build a new coal fired power station or a Nuke plant? Just creates more pollution (because of efficiency losses in the processes), in some other area.

There is no free lunch...

Ian
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

Paul_H

When I was a kid I had a go-cart and wanted to drive it with an electric motor powered by a battery and charged by a generator hooked to the wheel. One push to get it moving and coast forever :)

I was telling a guy my age about that a little while ago and he wondered why it wouldn't work and even after I explained it he was still insistent so I offered him the parts for free if he would build it and bring it by when he was done.  :D
Science isn't meant to be trusted it's to be tested

Jeff

This is going to be a very crude way of saying this, but I think it is the best way to describe how this won't work.

  Is there a single creature on this earth, that maintains life, by simply, and only, eating it's own excrement? That is the biological equivalent of this mechanical question.
Just call me the midget doctor.
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sharp edge

To make hydrogen is easy... sneak past Canada go to the artic circle... where their lots of heavy
wind... make wind farms... make hydrogen cells... then sneak them back here. 8) 8) 8)  I think a hyd. cell is
about the same thing as  batteries.

SE

P.s. We don't own Canada yet, so we have to sneak.
The stroke of a pen is mighter than the stroke of a sword, but we like pictures.
91' escort powered A-14 belsaw, JD 350-c cat with jamer and dray, 12" powermatic planer

Compensation

I have made these things, actually quite a few. They are neat to play with but take alot of juice to run. It is neat to stick the tube in water and light the bubbles all the way till the displacement lets your fireball into the tube itself and blows the top off the generator. I just always thought about my poor alternator the whole time so I disconnected it. If you use the same principal in a open bucket, you can remove rust from one piece of steel to a sacrificial piece.
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Brucer

TANSTAAFL.

... or, as Ian explains, the inefficiencies at each step will stop the cycle. Your wife's cousin needs to learn about the first law of thermodynamics.

As for producing hydrogen from water, it's no big secret. I did it as a kid. Cut a penny in half (they were made of copper in those days); solder each half to a wire to make an electrode; connect the wire to a model railroad transformer; make a solution of water with a bit of baking soda (to make it conductive); fill a couple of tubes with the solution (I used metal tubes that fancy cigars came in); invert the tubes in a jar of the solution; stick one electrode up into the base of each tube; turn on the transformer. Be sure it's a DC transformer!! Or use a 12 volt battery.

One tube will fill with hydrogen, the other with oxygen. The solution in the tubes gets driven out as they fill with gas. The hydrogen tube fills first.

Be very careful with they hydrogen. I once saw a guy in the emergency room with his forearm looking like a piece of charred meat. He'd used a grinder on a pipe in an industrial plant, and some of the residue in the pipe had reacted to half fill it with hydrogen.



Bruce    LT40HDG28 bandsaw
"Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers."

Delawhere Jack

Quote from: Paul_H on August 27, 2014, 04:05:27 PM
When I was a kid I had a go-cart and wanted to drive it with an electric motor powered by a battery and charged by a generator hooked to the wheel. One push to get it moving and coast forever :)

I was telling a guy my age about that a little while ago and he wondered why it wouldn't work and even after I explained it he was still insistent so I offered him the parts for free if he would build it and bring it by when he was done.  :D

As a kid I drew up plans for a boat, powered by something like a shower head pointing out the back. The water came from a pipe that ran up from the bottom of the boat, forced up by the displacement of the boat ..... :-\

Delawhere Jack

Not saying that any of you would, but......

If you ever decide to make your own hydrogen in an Erlenmeyer flask, using H2S04 and zinc.......
And you put a thistle tube and a stopper in said flash.......

DO NOT USE A MATCH TO SEE IF IT'S REALLY HYDROGEN COMING OUT OF THE THISTLE TUBE!!!!  ::)

Don't ask me how I know this.......

Southside

Quote from: Delawhere Jack on August 28, 2014, 01:56:50 PM
Not saying that any of you would, but......

If you ever decide to make your own hydrogen in an Erlenmeyer flask, using H2S04 and zinc.......
And you put a thistle tube and a stopper in said flash.......

DO NOT USE A MATCH TO SEE IF IT'S REALLY HYDROGEN COMING OUT OF THE THISTLE TUBE!!!!  ::)

Don't ask me how I know this.......


Now that is funny  :D :D :D  Reminds me of the time in high school chemistry class when we were supposed to be measuring the temp at which salt water boils or something along those lines and I had "discovered" a formula for homemade nitroglycerin, however I had not discovered the dangers of such a potion.  Well rather than boiling the salt water I was boiling the "solution", which subsequently turned into a mushroom cloud of sorts over our lab station.  :o  Never saw the chemistry teacher run so fast.... and never did I cover my tracks so fast.
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Ianab

Running an engine on hydrogen has some interesting technical issues, but none of them break the laws of physics.

The problem is, where do you get the hydrogen from?
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

Gary_C

Quote from: Ianab on August 28, 2014, 07:52:07 PM

The problem is, where do you get the hydrogen from?

You make it by obtaining some gasoline and using it in an engine generator to produce electricity that you use to make hydrogen from water and then use the hydrogen to run the BMW. Whew, that's hard work.

Or you could simplify and just use the gasoline to run the BMW and save a lot of conversion losses.  ::)
Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

Jeff

I would think the ultimate answer would be to have solar that produced hydrogen. I know its possible, but no idea if it is scalable.
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

Ianab

Quote from: Jeff on August 28, 2014, 09:03:55 PM
I would think the ultimate answer would be to have solar that produced hydrogen. I know its possible, but no idea if it is scalable.

I imagine it would scale up quite well. Just line up more solar panels and electrolysis units...  Then it's a practical way to store that solar energy, and carry it around in a tank in your car.

Economically practical is the problem  ???
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

Delawhere Jack

To really grasp how much energy is contained in liquid fossil fuels, consider this:

One gallon of gasoline will propel a small car 30-35 miles or more. Try pushing that same car that distance by your own strength.

I've read that one gallon of gas run through an internal combustion engine produces the equivalent output to an adult male working continuously 8 hours a day for 30 days.....

Besides uranium, there are no known practical fuels that even come close to the energy density of liquid fossil fuels.


Ianab

Well technically Bio-diesel or alcohol, and even hydrogen, are comparable energy density, and aren't "fossil" fuels.

But they are along the same lines chemically, and there is no way to make them for free. The energy has to come from some place, sunshine, nuclear reactor, hydro power etc.

There are also ideas floating around of running a car on Aluminium. The aluminium is part of the battery, and by oxidising it you can produce electricity. But even that's not a free lunch. Eventually all the aluminium becomes Al oxide, and the battery is flat. Then you swap it for another one and send the old one back to the smelter where they use a huge amount of electrical energy to convert it back into metal again. Again getting this to work on a practical scale is the problem, but at least it's not breaking the laws of physics. You can trace the energy through the process.

Ian
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

Ron Wenrich

From what I've found, you can't bring the production costs down on hydrogen to make it competitive.  I've seen figures for natural gas that the hydrogen is triple the cost, when looked at on a $/btu basis.  Using 10 cent electricity ends up being 9 times as expensive as btus from natural gas.  Solar would have to come in at making electricity at 1 cent to make it competitive to natural gas.  These aren't making hydrogen on the fly.  The other thing to look at is the efficiency differential between fuel cell technology and internal combustion technology.

Also, to get electrolysis at low voltage, they have been using metals like platinum and iridium.  Seems like some grad students in Stanford have come up with making hydrogen using iron and nickel as catalysts and using AAAA batteries.  That would make solar a whole lot more feasible.  But, they're still not talking about putting water in your tank and making hydrogen on demand. 
Never under estimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Gary_C

Hydrogen has always been considered as the future when we run out of fossil fuels just because it is not economical to make as Ron pointed out. Plus there are enormous technical challenges in producing, storing, and transporting quantities of hydrogen.

Two of the methods of storing hydrogen involve either pressures of 10,000 psi or temperatures of -253 centigrade which is close to absolute zero. NASA has used the 10,000 psi method with composite tanks and fuel cells on the space shuttles to generate electricity simply because weight is more important to them than money.

Unless something changes drastically, solar produced electricity will never be used to produce hydrogen because the electricity is much more valuable because maximum solar energy occurs at exactly the same time as maximum energy demand for air conditioning.

Hydrogen and electricity are considered energy carriers and not as actual energy sources. So without some technological development, it probably will never be economical to produce electricity and then make hydrogen with the electricity. But electricity has storage problems that cannot be solved with any battery technology to use electricity in transportation.

So hydrogen absolutely works in both internal combustion engines and fuel cells, but to use hydrogen in transportation still has a long way to go because of the storage problems and the problems of production.

And then there is the "Ka Boom" problem.  ::)
Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

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