Hydrogen Generation for Diesel engine

MULLEY · Post by **MULLEY** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:07 pm

Found this, does this work & will it do what the manufacturer say's or is it a load of tosh?

http://www.yorkshiregreenfuels.co.uk/hydrogen_kit.asp

There appears to be 2 different methods of using it:

Electorlysis - http://www.yorkshiregreenfuels.co.uk/electrolysis.asp

Chemical - http://www.yorkshiregreenfuels.co.uk/chemical.asp

If it does work, what are the potential fuel savings?

Does it affect the performance of the car?

BX Meteor · Post by **BX Meteor** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:23 pm

It sounds feasible, apart from the huge amounts of material one would require to produce the Hydrogen.

Look st it this way. If a car does 40mpg and if they reckon it can replace 25% of the fuel, and if your tank is say 10 gallons, then you're going to require the equivalent of 2.5 gallons of material for each 400 mile trip.

Assuming a 100% conversion efficiency (unlikely) then one would need to electrolyse 2.5 gallons of water ....but at what rate does it convert the water to Hydrogen. If it is slow, then one would need to do it overnight and somehow shove it into a Hydrogen tank. God help you with that !!!

As for the chemical method, no idea, but sound even worse to me.

The best method of Hydrogen production that I have heard of so far, is "fracking" of the deep coal layers beneath the UK ....burning it in situ which would produce methand and Hydrogen and CO2 ...and reuquires CO2 sequestration to be "green".

If electrolysation of water was a good idea, then someone would by now have proposed building wind turbines by a lake (eg Windermere) and electrolysing the lake to produce Hydrogen.

Another argument against Hydrogen was that the H2O would flood everywhere when used in the car ....but apparently about 50% of present fuels are emitted as water vapour anyway.

As for the safety aspect, there are many arguments that a Hydrogen tank is safer than e tank of fuel. If you split a tank of fuel, it spills all over the road. If you split a tank of Hydrogen, it just goes up into the air.

If you threw a lighted match into a half empty tank of petrol, the vapour and air mixture will explode. As far as I know, a Hydrogen tank cannot be "half empty" in the same sense i.e. it cannot contain air, so it cannot explode. If the Hydrogen starts to leak into the passenger compartment than you have a dangerous situation, because no-one would know, whereas if petrol vapour leaks you can smell it. That is the only major argument against Hydrogen, maybe H2 sensors would be required around the car.

citsncycles · Post by **citsncycles** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 10:05 pm

A generator of this type can generate enough hydrogen to run a car engine - someone in the USA managed to convert a Beetle based sand rail to run o hydrogen generated by electrolosis back in the 80's, but it had several issues:

It needed to be plugged into the mains for a while to generate enough hydrogen to start the engine with.

Although when running the engine drove a big alternator that kept the hydrogen production going, if the engine stopped so did the hydrogen, and you couldn't restart.

The water consumption was quite high, so the car had a limited range.

According to the inventor, when he turned down an offer from an arab consortium to buy the system up on condition he did no further development, he was driven into hiding, which was supposedly why the above issues were never solved,

The system available here would certainly produce hydrogen, but whether it would be in such a quantity as make a difference to the performance or fuel consumption I couldn't say

Willy · Post by **Willy** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 10:38 pm

Read this if you want to know why hydrogen will never live up to its expectations portrayed in the ignorant and sensationalist media.

However, it does work well as a fuel "additive" as mentioned above - especially in diesel cars although I haven't had time to read through what's on those sites. Google "reformed exhaust gas recirculation" which can improve fuel efficiency by about 20%. Not wanting to plug one of my lecturers there or anything

What Meteor says about the burning coal underground to produce syngas has weirdly been tried in cars before - producing hydrogen by heating biomass or coal - it was penned in the cold war as a way of surviving fuel shortages:

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » Fri Feb 03, 2012 4:21 am

There is a guy in Wellington, NZ working on this type of project aimed more at trucks though.

He showed me the prototype they were using in the test lab they had set up. Looked an interesting project. This was about 4 years ago now so not sure the state of play on the project. During the fuel price crisisi these ideas got quite popular seems that with the recession etc alternative fuels are not such a priority.

Post by **Defender110** » Fri Feb 03, 2012 11:01 am

There is a very clever electronics guy here at work who has developed and made his own hyrogen cell system that he has fitted on his old Ford Probe to assist the petrol engine and it's economy.

MULLEY · Post by **MULLEY** » Fri Feb 03, 2012 10:55 pm

Ford Probe, it still makes me smile

I'd like to see some realworld results rather than lab results tbh, it would be interesting to see how much better the fuel economy would be with one fitted. It also works on petrol & lpg cars as well.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » Sat Feb 25, 2012 9:33 pm

Found the article about the water powered diesel engines

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industr ... l-a-winner

Willy · Post by **Willy** » Sat Feb 25, 2012 9:48 pm

kiwi wrote:Found the article about the water powered diesel engines

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industr ... l-a-winner

Surely that's the same idea as EGR - except with water instead of recycled combustion products?

Reduced local burn temperatures -> less NOx production yes, but I'd be interested to know how it allegedly improves fuel consumption. AFAIK traditional EGR (MAN, Scania) has about a 3% reduction in fuel economy.

electrokid · Post by **electrokid** » Mon Feb 27, 2012 9:23 pm

I'd like to see some realworld results rather than lab results tbh

It's not likely - 'free energy' systems are such a hot potato that most people who get something successful running usually keep it to themselves.

Simple electrolysis won't produce enough hydrogen though - google 'pyrolysis' which is one of the alternatives.

MULLEY · Post by **MULLEY** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 8:23 pm

Just reviving an old thread that i started this year, has anyone got any experience of using Nitrous Oxide with a diesel engine?

I've been thinking about adding it to my txd to give the car more get-up & go to make the car more fun & to make overtaking safer.

Yeah, i know i could get a tzd turbo diesel (got one it bits), but i like the idea of the nice uncomplicated engine bay on a n/a diesel (no turbo & less hoses etc), with the extra performance at the push of a button, woooohooo