Hydrogen Q's
Hydrogen Q's
(OP)
Hello everyone,
I'm CuSO4 (copper sulphate), very inquisitive by nature.
I have a few questions,
- Can hydrogen gas be implemented (and used as hybrid (gas/Hydrogen)) into the current gasoline combustion engine? if so, how?
- How can we improve electrolysis of water?
electrolytes? electrodes?
Thanks in advance
I'm CuSO4 (copper sulphate), very inquisitive by nature.
I have a few questions,
- Can hydrogen gas be implemented (and used as hybrid (gas/Hydrogen)) into the current gasoline combustion engine? if so, how?
- How can we improve electrolysis of water?
electrolytes? electrodes?
Thanks in advance





RE: Hydrogen Q's
I don't have any knowledge as to how to improve the production of H2. Most H2 is currently gathered from the decomposition of a hydro-carbon chain, usually methane. My understanding is the bond with carbon is much weaker than the bond with oxygen.
RE: Hydrogen Q's
Can electrolysis be improved? Sure. But ultimately you still need to provide the difference in the internal energy between the products of electrolysis (hydrogen and oxygen) and the starting material (water). There are losses in this process which can be optimized, but the law of diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly. You can expend enormous amounts of effort and money to shave a few more percent off the losses. The same goes for the fuelcell end of things.
In my opinion, hydrogen and fuelcells are over-hyped and are being used as an excuse to avoid doing the hard work of energy conservation. There's no technological fix to this problem: all production and consumption of energy comes with some environmental harm. The best way to reduce the harm is to reduce consumption by eliminating waste.
RE: Hydrogen Q's
Fuel cells have a high power to weight ratio, fuel cell vehicles do not as the fuel cell in its current form needs many anciliary equipment, humidifers etc. hydrogen storage making the car large and heavily and slugish performance.
BMW, Ford and Mazda all put money into hydrogen internal combustion engines.
there are many fuel cell buses runing through various city, Damiler crysler, mercedes benz are responsible for these.
Ford now sell hydrogen powered internal combustion buses, converted V-10 diesel engines. sold to various transport companies.
It is all well and good to stand back with an engineering degree and state the technical hurdles that need to be past to create a hydrogen infrastructure. But it is not upto us engineers to determine the outcome. Social political and economical issues outway the initial obvious hurdles.
might I draw parallel with edison whom invented the light bulb before any kind of electrical distribution was in place, his invention superceded, oil lamps, coke fired lamps etc. what followed was amazing, the invention of power stations, electrical grid, switchs, etc.
hydrogen is in a similar boat. we all want a vehicle that doesn't pollute our air. The companies above have got the ball rolling it only a matter of time. and yes we need to produce hydrogen from renewable sources before it is of great environmental benifit.
we do not need to increase the efficency of the electrolysis process we just need to start creating renewable soruces of electricity at cheaper rates ;o)