Fuel Reformers for Home Power or Cars & Tractors

If you are interested in building and experimenting with fuel reformers for much better fuel efficiency there is a group of experimenters sharing information at:

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Fuel reformers are used in the oil industry to make hydrogen. Small units can be built for a car or genset and the refomer's hydrogen content output burns more efficiently giving the equivalent of a big octane boost. Also the waste heat of the engine gets utilized by the reformer so it is no longer wasted.

This group is for experimenters only.

Fuel + steam can be cracked with engine exhaust heat plus a catalyst or a plasma or both together.

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This technology has been around a long time but car makers won't use it.

Here are some examples:

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Here are many more patents ignored by car makers:

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Naresh

Reply to
narivasant
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I was under the impression that hydrogen is very LOW octane. That is, it ignites VERY easily. Octane has nothing to do with the energy content.

Also, what do you do with the carbon not used? Sure, you can make pure hydrogen out of most hydrocarbons if you work at it. But the carbon molecules contain a lot of energy potential. If you throw them away you are certainly improving greenhouse gas emissions, but it will certainly be wasteful of energy.

Reply to
Don Stauffer in Minnesota

Hydrogen has very wide flammability limits (A/F), low ignition temperature (very prone to pre-ignition), but high octane rating (low susceptibility to auto-ignition (end-gas reactions).

Reply to
Dyno

How can it be very prone to pre-ignition yet low to end gas auto- ignition? This sounds like funny physics.

Reply to
Don Stauffer in Minnesota

Knock/detonation occurs in the end-gas region and is dependent upon the temperature/time history of the end-gases. For hydrogen the critical factor is time. With hydrogen combustion the reaction rate is so fast that there is insufficient time for knock to occur.

Reply to
Dyno

Not really. I don't believe the reformer will work, BUT. Adding hydrogen makes the fuel start burning more reliably than gasoline because it is easy to light. It also causes the fuel mixture to burn faster and more completely. This means you need less spark advance. More importantly, the fuel burns fast enough there is LESS end gas, and that endgas is exposed to LESS heat (for a shorter period of time) so the endgas does not dis-associate and few if any "free radicals" are produced which cause detonation..

Reply to
clare at snyder.on.ca

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Reply to
holachiquitaec

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:1192298765.396666.135370 @e9g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

Ya sure. as early as 2004 eh! must have not worked out so well. KB

Reply to
Kevin Bottorff

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