Hydrogen Q's 3

[CuSO4]

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

 

[safetydan]

GM and a couple other car companies have experimented with using H2 in the combustion chamber of an IC engine. Several modifications have to be done in order to run the engine on H2 but you will see a significant decrease in engine power output. Because of this, it isn't commercially feasible to use H2 as a combustible fuel. H2 provides a much better power to weight ratio using the H2 in a fuel cell, and increased efficiency.

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.

 

[moltenmetal]

The trouble with hydrogen as a "fuel" is the production and storage of hydrogen, both of which are energetically lossy propositions. Hydrogen isn't a fuel per se, it's merely an energy storage medium produced from other fuels or other energy sources. If your original energy source is a fossil fuel, regardless which one, from an energy efficiency point of view it is wasteful to make hydrogen from the source fuel if you can use the fuel directly for the intended purpose. If your source of energy is a renewable one like wind or solar, making hydrogen as a means to store off-peak generation capacity for use in non-generating periods (i.e. calm days or at night) has some merit, but is not the only option for energy storage and may or may not be the most efficient one. Until we have the renewables capacity to completely replace our existing fossil fuel electrical generation capacity, we shouldn't be wasting any of it to make hydrogen.

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.

 

[HydroScope]

Hydrogen powered combustion engines range from 83% (port injection) to 120% (direct injection) of GASOLINE engines.

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)