New Hydrogen Breakthrough?

[FUNKED1]

Originally posted by Nifty
nice avatar Mak!    Go Vincent!

Vincent is a *****.

[Brenjen]

There have been a butt load of people running their vehicles on used cooking oil for years, what is in the exhaust off of that stuff?

[LePaul]

Originally posted by FUNKED1
Vincent is a *****.

LOL Maximillian!

Everyone knows R2's rock  

[Hangtime]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
This is not new and has been invented by several people, in one form or another.  The latest being some guy from Colorado who claims his Honda runs on water and breaks down the water, in real time, to run the car.  No gasoline needed.
He claims it gets a couple hundred miles per gallon of water, and the exhaust contains nothing harmful to the environment.

In unrelated news, distilled water prices in central colorado today hit a new high, topping 12 dollars a gallon...

[Holden McGroin]

The best reported efficeincy for electrolysis under laboratory conditions is about 95%, or the energy within the hydrogen produced is 5% less than the energy put into the process.

Getting better than 95% is going to be difficult due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and that nasty always increasing entropy thing.  In any conversion process, energy in must be greater than energy received.

Most industrial processes are probably lucky to get 50%.

Ain't nobody gunna run their car on water.

[Vulcan]

Bridges... get yer cheap bridges.... going for a song....

[xNOVAx]

Gah.. apparently nobody watched the friggen video.. nevermind my posting of this..

[rpm]

And there was this guy in Vernon, Texas that built a cold fission reactor in his garage...

[lazs2]

the real key is cheap or free electricity   As holden points out... that is what is needed to make hydrogen cars worthwhile.

lazs

[lukster]

I watched the video, was very interesting. The guys claim that they can generate about 1,700 liters (or was it 17,000) of aquagen every hour at about $.70/hr. They also said that it's use in their car reduced the gasoline consumption by about 50%. If their report is true, this could be very big.


Can't find the video now, maybe it was a farce and CNN dropped it.

Or, maybe, the oil companies destroyed it and killed everyone in the company and are looking for everyone that watched it. I never really believed those guys, honest.

[lukster]

I suspect the guys in the video may have meant they are producing this fuel at $.70 per liter but I don't think that's what they said. Here's an interesting article on the fuel.

http://www.blazelabs.com/n-aquagen.asp

[Goomba]

I'm afraid I might disagree with a point;

Hydrogen is most definitely a powerful energy source...and the most plentiful in the Universe.  The Hindenburg reference is right on point...that's pure energy release from combusting hydrogen.  In fact, it has a very high energy density, which is one of the reasons it's attractive as an energy source;  a plentiful fuel with low energy density is bulky, inefficient and inconvenient.

It does not act like a battery...it does not 'store' energy in that sense, and does not take energy input from another source.

Fuel cell development is progressing quite well, as far as I can tell, and test fleets are rolling as we speak.

I see two major hurdles to this otherwise very good fuel source;

1)  As Holden points out, we need an improvement in the means by which we can aquire H2.  While it is the most common element in the Universe, it does not exist on Earth (for the most part) in it's elemental form.

2)  We need a new distribution infrastructure to move the fuel from production to end user.  This is a big ticket item, no doubt.  However, when oil was discovered in plentiful quantities and commercial uses for it were developed, there was no distribution infrastructure.  Now, there is.  Clearly, market demand and current technology can make this an entirely realistic effort.  Imagine the costs of an infrastructure building program weighed against the benefits of energy independence and massively reduced emissions...

I still consider hydrogen/fuel cells to be the most legitimate, long-term, environmentally responsible solution to the current global energy situation, when the aformentioned issues are addressed.

The best part would be marginalizing those homicidal lunatics in the Middle East by nearly eliminating demand for their one and only product.

[vorticon]

hydrogen fuel cell just runs an electric motor right? so the only thing making it more likable than electricity is it weighs less than batteries...why not use it for straight combustion?


of course, you could just give a smaller amount for researching recovery from oil shale (which iirc, you have several billion barrels locked up in) and tell the middle east to keep there filthy oil.

[Holden McGroin]

Originally posted by Goomba
I'm afraid I might disagree with a point;

Hydrogen is most definitely a powerful energy source...and the most plentiful in the Universe.  The Hindenburg reference is right on point...that's pure energy release from combusting hydrogen.  In fact, it has a very high energy density, which is one of the reasons it's attractive as an energy source;  a plentiful fuel with low energy density is bulky, inefficient and inconvenient.

It does not act like a battery...it does not 'store' energy in that sense, and does not take energy input from another source.

If one electrolises water, it takes more energy to seperate the hydrogen from the water than exists in the hydrogen produced.

Hydrogen (seperated from water) is the stored energy of the production process. Water is the "ash" of a hydrogen oxygen combustion. You must replace the energy of the fire in order to seperate the elements.

If one seperates hydrogen from hydrocarbons, burning the hydrocarbon directly would yeild more heat than burning the seperated hydrogen.

The if you burned the stuff it took to produce the hydrogen in the Hindenburg, you could have destroyed Lakehurst NJ, not just an airship.

[Debonair]

not true if you take the H2 & put it in a fusion bomb.  your alternative fuel enviro-car will be teh fast also