hydrogen power

shortbus= said:

This is very old school! from around the early 1900's. It was called "Producer Gas"

There were a few farm tractors that used wood, coal, or even grain to make the gas. If I remember right it is only effective with low compression engines, under 5:1 compression.

Lindsay publishing has a book or two on the subject.

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I know it as "woodgas". I heard that in WWII Japan, they had no petroleum left for civilian use and ran the buses on woodgas. Also, saw a rumor that North Korea's running farm equipment on woodgas. Seeing as they have no petroleum industry and no way to import much, this is kinda plausible.

Actually, woodgas is not a bad technology for replacing gasoline in a few applications. However, the gassifier takes awhile to start up, so it's not a turnkey start, and a primary problem is that wood has far lower energy density than gasoline. You'd need carry a huge truckload of wood to equal the mpg of a tank of gas. Of course, it's not helping the environment to cut down the forests for your car, it's for fallen wood and very possibly other waste plant material like corn husks and paper mill sludge. But again, energy density problems. Not so bad for a fixed location like a generator near the source of the waste matter where you just shovel it in.

Here's a set of construction plans:
http://wood-gas.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/woodgas12.pdf

cobra1 said:

then dont use electricity to produce the hydrogen then, by putting in electricity into water to get hydrogen out is simply a waste of time. frequencies, high voltages, etc do no good, you will not get a gain in output from any electrolysis,
If you want a useful source of hydrogen it needs to be made via reversable/regenerative chemical reactions.

i.e aluminium in sodium hydroxide + water has the potential to produce 1200l of hydrogen gas @ stp
this occours at a near uncontrollable rate, once the aluminium is consumed it can be recycled back into aluminium.

however by simply adding colloidal lead @ 20ppm this causes the aluminium to be regenerated after being consumed, this makes the reaction continue for longer, i saw someone do this experiment and achieved over 1700l of hydrogen from 1kg of aluminium.

it is on this regenerative basis that i am able to produce hydrogen gas in excess of 150l from just 40g of zinc

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I have done this too. Aluminum in muratic acid or Auminum in Sodium Hydroxide makes a lot of hydrogen gas at room temperature but it contains a lot of worthless unwanted crap that has to be removed. It gets so hot it boils the water so the gas contains steam that turns to water. It contains ammonia and some other stuff. I pipe the gas through a container of lime it removes just about every thing but the hydrogen. Muratic acid, alumium and lime get used up it is expensive to keep buying that stuff. A gallon of muratic acid it is $25 and a trash can full of aluminum soft drink cans and a 20 lb bag of lime will make enough gas to fill an 8 foot diameter weather balloon. If you count the value of the aluminum cans that could have been sold at the scrap yard plus the acid and lime $35 plus sales tax = $38.50 to make about 134 cubic ft of hydrogen gas. That is enough gas to drive several miles and more than 10 times the cost of gasoline. It is fun to experement for sure. An 8ft weather balloon is $10 these days and it has some pretty amazing lifting power. Put that balloon inside of an old military parachute and strap it on I can jump 20 ft into the air. I think if I had enough hydrogen to reduce my weight plus the parachute to only 1 lbs I could probably jump over houses, trees and small buildings. The parachute would let me down easy since I would weigh only 1 lb.

Your getting ripped off on the muriatic acid at $25 a gallon! Around here its an on the shelf item at the local home building supply center for round $4 or less a gallon!
Same with lime as well, its dirt cheap. And aluminum goes for about 30 - 50 cents a pound.

I recommend you check out some videos on youtube, what these guys are talking about is splitting H2O with brute force .. but if you can research this subject more your find water can be split using its resonance frequency to reduce energy... there are even patents pending that prove the point. search for "Stan Meyer H2O Cell" and see what you get up. I give free advice to ppl who need it so email me at gary(at)alterntech.com and I will send you some links documents and designs... good luck on your venture...

The theory about using resonant frequencies to split water are flawed, firstly because there is no single resonant frequency, secondly because any frequency would have to be induced mechanically, look up sonoluminescance (sp)

i have replicated myers work and like others have failed, so theres either a secret ingridient mising in the patents or it doesnt work full stop.
i have also replicted the work of bob boyce, and again the figures did not amount to bobs claims. Bobs cell has a frequency generator giving off 3 seperate frequencies which are supposed to be resonant frequencies.

Gary350, my cell doesnt use any type of acid or even aluminium, i have however experimented with aluminium and Gallium,Indium,Tin Alloys, this process looks like a promising method of creating hydrogen for vehicles, it creates pure H2 nothing more, but does boil the water if left uncontrolled.

I currently use a different method which is fully controllable, stays cool, infact it gets colder as it runs unless you heat it up. and i can turn the reaction on or off without the need for external power supplies, currently only the electronics require and external power supply, but with a fuel cell this could be eliminated.

Water can be considered the "ash" from burning hydrogen- hydrogen oxide. Trying to get hydrogen from water is very similar to my putting huge amounts of energy into the ash from my wood stove, to convert it back to wood, so I can burn it again. IMO, hydrogen is an idiotic fuel source, since there's almost zero free hydrogen on this planet, and hydrogen powered devices (like cars) are doomed to financial failure. It always takes more energy to generate hydrogen than you get back from the hydrogen. Google up Don Lancaster (Guru's Lair) and read what he has to say about hydrogen.

CH

My this is an old thread. I would say i have to disagree with hydrogen being doomed to fail. Hydrogen itself is not a fuel source it is an energy carrier, a fuel is something that is burnt and cannot be recovered, hydrogen can always be recovered as when burnt it forms water.

Anyway, since this thread i have had a long term project on the go, so far i am able to produce quite good amounts of pure H2 from nothing more than sunlight. This if done on a large enough scale could potentially be used as a source of cheap hydrogen.

I am planning on turning this experiment into a full scale working model that will produce around 1kg of H2 per day, thats around 11,000 litres @ STP

Hydrogen itself is not a fuel source it is an energy carrier, a fuel is something that is burnt and cannot be recovered, hydrogen can always be recovered as when burnt it forms water.

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Huh? What para science chemistry are you using?

As far as I know all chemical reactions are reversible but some are just not worth the efforts required for humans to do it in a manufacturing or mechanically/chemically engineered process.

We can't convert CO2 back into O2 in a practical, cheap, or as efficient way as plant life does but that does not mean its an irreversible chemical reaction.

thats what i meant to say