hydrogen conversion on a tzd

tzd · Post by **tzd** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 4:41 pm

Hi everybody, with the ever increasing price of diesel I'm thinking of doing a hydrogen conversion on my TZD. It will be a system where hydrogen is produced as the car is turned on and not stored in a tank. has anybody done this ? and are there any dangers I should be aware of?
Apparently it reduces diesel consumption by about 20%
take a look at this video to see more.

Cheers Kev.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 11:38 pm

Have a read of this. I spoke with one the guys behind this project a few years ago when I was getting an interior from a TZS he was braking (he wanted the engine for his pug 405

)

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

I am sure you dig deep enough you can find an email or contact number to find out from these guys.

Philip Chidlow · Post by **Philip Chidlow** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 11:42 pm

Hi Kev, but I have to say... if you can't afford to run a diesel BX (and even I can - just about! lol!) then maybe cars are just not for you at the moment

This conversion will cost initially and there's some debate as to whether it produces real economy anyway. And if it was that good... well, wouldn't it be far, far more widespread (as in haulage companies et al?).

Rather more seriously - and probably more sensitively - WVO is probably going to give you equal savings - assuming you have a Bosch pump.

tzd · Post by **tzd** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 11:50 pm

Hi Phil,
take a look at the video on youtube I've posted on this site. I'm going to make the hydrogen converter myself as I am quite good with stuff like that. I estimate it will cost me about £15 all in.
I need my car and if I can cut down on the cost of running it then I will.
As for there not being this technology more wide spread, it's not in the interests of the fuel companies to let this become widespread.

kev

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » Sun Apr 01, 2012 8:29 am

tzd wrote: it's not in the interests of the fuel companies to let this become widespread.

You related to my mate Graham? He has been working on alternate energy souces that he says will kill the Oil barons for years. Heck he is so pparanoid he put silver foil lining on the inside of the exterior road facing walls of his house, to prevent microwave interferance from the people he claimed was after him

H2O fuel from water theres the problem they just dont like. With the amount of rain we have had this summer here in theory I should be as rich as an arab oil baron

Serious side though but yes saying diesel is expensive shows signs of not being able to afford to run a vehicle full stop.

axbx · Post by **axbx** » Sun Apr 01, 2012 10:35 pm

This is quite interesting, if I can make my car use 25-50%less fuel i certainly will, when all the equipment needed is what shown in the video..

But isnt it quite dangerous in case of a collision or leakage of Hydrogen gas etc? Maybe not in a diesel wich has no ignition..? And doesnt car batteries contain sulfur, wich can ignite hydrogen gas?

Please update on the progress with this!

Gibbo2286 · Post by **Gibbo2286** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 8:45 am

tzd wrote:Hi Phil,
take a look at the video on youtube I've posted on this site. I'm going to make the hydrogen converter myself as I am quite good with stuff like that. I estimate it will cost me about £15 all in.
I need my car and if I can cut down on the cost of running it then I will.
As for there not being this technology more wide spread, it's not in the interests of the fuel companies to let this become widespread.
kev

This nonsense has been going on since I was a boy in the garage in the 1950s, doesn't it occur to you that if it was simple to run cars on hydrogen the oil barons would be selling it instead of spending billions searching for oil in remote deserts and under the oceans.

We had systems like your offering back then, water injection into the carb intake and it did/does improve performance a little (you may have noticed cars run better on rainy days) but you needed to carry many many gallons of water and the engine life was considerably reduced by the damaging effects of that water.

The only way that hydrogen will ever become a viable car fuel is if and when they manage to make hydrogen fuel cells at an economical price and mass build the electric cars to to run on them.

BX Meteor · Post by **BX Meteor** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 7:00 pm

/\ Rather abruptly put there Gibbo, but, you're right.

Instead of me going through all the calculations myself, I googled "hydrogen by volume from water" and then "current to get hydrogen from litre of water".

This is because you need to know
(a) how much gas you will get from 1 litre of water
(b) how much electrical current it will require to produce it

(a) this questioner asked how much Hydrogen from a gallon of water. He meant an American gallon, which is about 3.78 litres (yes Americans are smaller than Brits). In that link, it was worked out that one US gallon gives 4,700 litres of Hydrogen.

That is fantastic, but, how much energy do you need to do this ?

(b) this website does the full monty !! this chap saved me the whole frigging calculation, it's all there. To summarise his calculations: To convert 1 litre of H2O to H2 and O2 by electrolysis will require 3.658 kWh : a 100% efficient cell should generate around 4.5 litres per minute of H2/O2 from 480W of electrical energy: it would take 6.8 horsepower to generate 3 horsepower worth of H2/O2 .

So the electrolysis of water using a car's engine is not going to improve mpg. However if you electrolyse the water at home using the grid, and then store the H2/O2, and then mix it into the inlet manifold, then you ought to see an improvement in mpg. But this will be highly dangerous, and I have no idea how to calculate if the saving in car's fuel bill is better than the increase in house electric bill.

Putting it very simply in-car: even at 100% conversion efficiency, the energy you put into electrolysis of water cannot be less than the energy you capture. i.e. even if you produce work from H2/O2 at 100% efficiency, the work energy you get will not be more than the work energy required to produce the current to get the H2/O2 in the first place. Otherwise, if one ran a machine entirely on H2/O2 made by electrolysing rain water, it would be a perptual motion machine if it electrolysed the water itself. Whether the engine runs entirely on H2/O2 or on a 25% mix of H2/O2 , the non perpetual motion aspect is still true for that part of the process. If the process is not perpetual motion, then it cannot give the claimed gain in efficiency.

EDIT: I notice that they actually say on their website "We know that splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis requires more energy than you get by burning the hydrogen produced. But in our case HHO gas acts as a catalyst to better burn your gasoline and is increasing your engine efficiency". Well if you have an engine that's thermodynamically inefficient (bad at converting fuel->heat->work), or is shoving unburnt fuel out the exhaust, then it's an old engine design, and/or it's done too many miles .... this would apply to a significant number of large petrol engined cars and large diesel trucks in the USA (the market for HHO kits), where some claim an increase from 15mpg to 16mpg (6% increase in mpg), though it's more likely due to additional tweaks performed on the engine, or a placebo on driving style. It all looks a bit hit and miss, if this is such a good idea, European and Japanese car companies would have implemented it rather than spending a lot of R&D improving the combustion chambers of engines. If something is too good to be true, then it isn't true.

I know that Wikipedia isn't a scientific reference, but before doing anything go to "Fringe science and fraud" here and read this as well

pmh · Post by **pmh** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 3:04 pm

If you wish to do it on the cheap, why not use town gas - just inflate an old lilo and put it on the roof rack.

http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00 ... 970c-320wi

I suppose you could put it the back if you have an estate BX, but be careful with the cigarettes!

http://roofbag.com/ could be a neat solution?

BX Meteor · Post by **BX Meteor** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 8:05 pm

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