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Jun 29, 2009 16:36:52 GMT
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Anyone here run one on a retro? ive been looking into it for a few weeks with the idea of feeding hydrogen into the airbox of the polo.... I'm wondering if that would be safe.... the timing on the car at the mo is spot on so doesnt pop back up... but if i was to let flamible gas in above the carb (i.e airfilter) I'm wondering if it would ignite back up the inlet..... this whole idea is just an experiment because why not lol
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Jun 29, 2009 16:39:15 GMT
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I think it'll go bang personally. Lights up too easily compared to petrol.
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Jun 29, 2009 16:43:37 GMT
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Very hard to store as well, it'll even seep through metal, sounds iffy to me, if you want instant extra power get a proper nitrous kit, hydrogen is even more flamable than petrol vapour and burns with an invisible flame that radiates virtually no heat, just to give you an idea about how dangerous that is, fire fighters look for hydrogen fires by walking along with a broom held out in front of them so they can see the end of it catch fire rather than finding it by walking into it and catching fire.
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Volvo back as my main squeeze, more boost and some interior goodies on the way.
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Jun 29, 2009 16:45:23 GMT
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hydrogen has a low octane and it burns at really high temps.
that means less power and more heat, bmw did it with a v12 and got half it's normal power.
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Jun 29, 2009 17:11:56 GMT
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not realy out to get power gains more ecconomy than anything... the final result is a mix of hydrogen and oxygen called browns gas., its designed to enrichen the fuel mixture meaning that it needs less fuel to run as the air is more flamible... meaning less throttle needed and more MPG ...... the possibilty of it going bang has entered my head. but i want to get into playing with electricity again.. by making my own gas generator for this.. i love the idea of making a self contained electric vehicle no matter what it is... either bike or car not realy bothered.. just to think ive done that would give me the satisfaction i need  cant stop reading about nikola tesla lol |
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Jun 29, 2009 17:36:40 GMT
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i see no reason why it would be unsafe to inject the gas above the carb, but i wouldn't.
can't be that hard to drill a hole in the inlet manifold.
how are you gonna regulate the amount of gas going in? or are you gonna just switch it on when cruising at speed?
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Jun 29, 2009 17:45:08 GMT
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the amount of gas going in in theory is regulated by the butterfly. as the amount of gas created isnt a great deal... the plan is to have an switch to turn if off in traffic for instance so that it doesnt feed off it too much, i think above the carb to inject it would be better tho.... just to make sure i can govern it at least a small bit..... if ya get what i mean?
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Jun 29, 2009 17:46:39 GMT
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LPG is gonna work out a whole lot easier and cheaper, if injecting hydrogen was a sensible idea it would be more popular, cant see your insurance company being to happy about you carrying hydrogen tanks about, they'd want it certified as safe but i dunno who you'd get to do that for you, plus theres the cost of actually making the stuff, unless your using solar power to generate the electricity your using to make the hydrogen its not going to save you any money, it may actually be MORE expensive.
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Volvo back as my main squeeze, more boost and some interior goodies on the way.
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Jun 29, 2009 17:52:01 GMT
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water and salt or substitute in a jar.. pass electricity thru stainless plates inside the jar. and filter the gasses throught a pipe. thru another jar to capture moisture and into the inlet. not realy too expensive  |
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Jun 29, 2009 17:52:06 GMT
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Don't get me started on browns gas and gas generators. Basically, for it to work you have to break the rules of thermodynamics. You put electricity into water and get hydrogen and oxygen. You then burn this hydrogen and oxygen, and it turns back into water, only you have a net energy loss. Doesn't work. Can't work. Won't work. If it did work, we'd have been doing it decades ago because the technology is so so simple. Anyone who claims to have it working is dilusional or out to con you. In a 100% efficient world you'd get out the same energy as you put in, so you put in 10kj of electrical power, and you'll get 10kj worth of energy stored in hydrogen. Unfortunately the process is massively inefficent, as is the car engine, and the alternator - you're looking at 30%-50% efficiency at each stage, leaving pretty much nothing. Sorry.  It's great to see people experimenting and thinking outside the box, but in this case you'll get nowhere. |
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Last Edit: Jun 29, 2009 17:56:23 GMT by cobblers
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Jun 29, 2009 17:55:26 GMT
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people seem to have had gains in mpg from it... and smoother running cars.. even people that (supossedly) didnt beleive in it working (tried it like me to see if it would) but the gas given off does ignite. so surely flamable inside the combustion chamber??
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Jun 29, 2009 17:57:54 GMT
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people seem to have had gains in mpg from it... and smoother running cars.. even people that (supossedly) didnt beleive in it working (tried it like me to see if it would) but the gas given off does ignite. so surely flamable inside the combustion chamber?? The gas is flammable, no doubt about it. It's a similar reaction tot he gas given off by a charging car battery. The thing is, you have to put a lot (many many times) more energy into creating the gas than you get from burning the gas. |
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Jun 29, 2009 17:59:35 GMT
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it may well burn just fine, but if its costing you more energy to make it than it gives you back how is it any benifit? just because its simple it don't mean its economical, making hydrogen ALWAYS uses more energy than the hydrogen can produce, the only way its economical is if you can get free electricty to make it in the first place, and then you need to be able to store it and get it into the car safely.
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Volvo back as my main squeeze, more boost and some interior goodies on the way.
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Jun 29, 2009 18:03:19 GMT
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I quote my last post on this: What are you getting at? I saw that Mythbusters Episode (Which, incidentally is an entertainment show, and while usually quite scientifically accurate their testing methods aren't always all that good) Nobody is denying you can run an internal combustion engine on Hydrogen. You can. It is a flammable gas, like LPG. The water itself is an electrolyte, adding salt/ baking soda whatever will just increase its conductivity to allow more current to flow, and it will create hydrogen faster, but use more current to do that. Just increasing the voltage has the exact same effect. I've made a similar thing to de-rust metal, and it created about as much hydrogen as the guy in the video did as a by product. Lets do the maths: It was pulling 4 amps at 12volts, for 5 minutes. That's 48 watts for 5 minutes. A watt is 1 joule per second, so we have used 14400 Joules of energy getting this hydrogen out of the water. With that I filled a freezer bag with Hydrogen (I tested it by throwing a match in, it was definitely Hydrogen) I would estimate at the very absolute most, with the wind behind it a litre of Hydrogen. The energy density of Hydrogen is 10790 Joules per litre. So even with very optimistic maths, you have still used more electricity to create the Hydrogen than you are getting from it ,about 75% efficient. Lets, on the other hand assume that somehow someone quadruples this efficiency. It's not out of this world to assume that someone could do it four times better than a bloke in his garden with a bucket and a car battery, so we are 300% efficient. 25 Horsepower is 18.64 kilowatts, or 1864 Joules per second. We'd need (assuming a very optimistic figure of 30% efficiency for a car engine) just under 1 litre of Hydrogen PER SECOND to achieve that sort of power output, plus another 9 or so horsepower to run the (Magic, 100% efficient) Alternator to produce the electricity to produce the stuff in the first place. So again, even assuming massively optimistic efficiencies for engines and ignoring all sorts of issues such as the weight and size of the kit needed to produce 5 or 6 litres of Hydrogen per second, running a car on water is just not going to happen. Wikipedia put it much more elegantly though:
Many alleged water-fuelled cars obtain hydrogen or a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (sometimes called "oxyhydrogen", "HHO", or "Brown's Gas") by the electrolysis of water, a process that must be powered electrically. The hydrogen or oxyhydrogen is then burned, supposedly powering the car and also providing the energy to electrolyse more water. The overall process can be represented by the following chemical equations:
2H2O → 2H2 + O2 [Electrolysis step]
2H2 + O2 → 2H2O [Combustion step]
Since the combustion step is the exact reverse of the electrolysis step, the energy released in combustion exactly equals the energy consumed in the electrolysis step, and—even assuming 100% efficiency—there would be no energy left over to power the car. In other words, such systems start and end in the same thermodynamic state, and are therefore perpetual motion machines, violating the first law of thermodynamics. And under actual conditions in which hydrogen is burned, efficiency is limited by the second law of thermodynamics and is likely to be around 20%. More energy is therefore required to drive the electrolysis cell than can be extracted from burning the resulting hydrogen-oxygen mixture.
In short, The first and second laws of thermodynamics would have to be broken before it would work. If we could go around Violating laws of thermodynamics willy nilly, having a car that ran on water wouldn't be our top priority. |
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Jun 29, 2009 18:09:23 GMT
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ok i wont bother
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Jun 29, 2009 18:16:03 GMT
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Read my posts and I come across like I'm preaching and almost having a go - I'm not, just trying to save you some money and time |
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Jun 29, 2009 18:16:27 GMT
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I'm trying to think of a way to say how much I enjoyed this thread - it's build up and then it's abrupt ending - without anyone thinking that they won or lost. Great enthusiam, great questions, great answers. Thanks everyone!
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Jun 29, 2009 18:42:27 GMT
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haha lol, just not gonna bother trying if its as much of a waste of time as said... cant see the point. all the info ive found seems to point toward it working. where as the info cobblers found says otherwise and to quite an extreme. I'm going to look into it more and see what happens... although the mythbusters experiment did show a car can run from it.... so if the creation of the browns gas was more economic it could work
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Jun 29, 2009 20:46:09 GMT
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Don't be put off retrowagen, spend your brain cells thinking of a way to convert the only truly free energy (sun light) into forward motion. A combustion engine is something like 25% efficient(after 100 years of development), doesn't stop people. The era of free dino oil isn't gonna last and the man who cracks the energy problem is king.
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Jun 29, 2009 21:05:16 GMT
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yeah i don't personally think battery therefore solar energy is the way forward tho.. the batteries will never be good enough , and if they need charging its all going to be coming from a overworked coal powerstation.....
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cant stop reading about nikola tesla lol
It's great to see people experimenting and thinking outside the box, but in this case you'll get nowhere.
