Hydrogen Reactor For Cars

Them proplem is of cource where are you going to get enough corn to produce enough Ethanol to replace the 220,000,000 barrels of gasoline that is consumed in the US every day? Where will the reformer be, in the vehicle or in the fueling station. How will all the Ethanol get to the fueling station, particcurly when one will need more Ethanol to produce the energy of gasoline? Even if we answer all of those questions, who can afford the car that has a $25,000 worth the fuel cels under the hood?

Teh best we car expect for ANY of the renewable fuels is that they will help to slow the growth in the need for crude oil over the next fifty years. ;)

mike hunt

Powering cars from alcohol to hydrogen Anna Salleh ABC Science Online Monday, 16 February 2004

Hydrogen-powered cars could be one step closer following the development of a new compact reactor that produces hydrogen from a renewable energy source, according to new U.S. research.

Gregg Deluga and fellow chemical engineers from the University of Minnesota report how they generated hydrogen from alcohol in the current issue of the journal Science.

"This process has great potential for low-cost H2 generation in fuel cells for small portable applications where liquid fuel storage is essential and where systems must be small, simple, and robust," the researchers wrote.

Efficient production of hydrogen gas from renewable resources is one of the key factors holding back the much mooted green 'hydrogen economy', which includes cars running on hydrogen fuel cells.

Ethanol, an alcohol derived from grain like corn, has been one of the renewable hydrogen sources researchers have explored. It is easy to transport, relatively non-toxic and some vehicle engines already burn it directly.

But Deluga's team used ethanol indirectly, to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell the researchers said would be three times as efficient as burning ethanol directly.

"Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20% efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60% efficiency," the researchers wrote.

So far, the process used to convert ethanol to hydrogen, steam reforming, is slower and takes up more space than the method Deluga proposed, which is called partial oxidation, said Australian chemical engineer Professor David Trimm from Sydney's University of New South Wales.

"A partial oxidation unit is much smaller than a steam reforming unit," he told ABC Science Online. "That's a definite advantage. And partial oxidation is very much faster than steam reforming."

Deluga's method relies on rapid burning of an ethanol and water mixture in the presence of a catalyst made from the metal rhodium. An automotive fuel injector vapourises and mixes the ethanol-water fuel. This then passes through a porous plug containing the catalyst and emerges mainly as hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide.

The whole process generates heat and temperatures more than 700°C keep the process going.

The reaction takes only 50 milliseconds and has none of the flames or soot usually involved in ethanol combustion, the researchers said. When coupled with a hydrogen fuel cell, the researchers said the new reactor could generate enough hydrogen from 46 grams of ethanol for 350 watt-hours of electricity.

But they said that the final hydrogen gas produced was not yet pure enough to be used in a car engine since it was contaminated with water. The hydrogen was also contaminated with carbon monoxide, which presents an environmental problem and can damage car engines.

"We believe that simple changes in the experimental conditions and catalysts should be capable of reducing these undesired species by factors of at least two," they said.

But Trimm argued that even such a reduction they would still have a long way to go to meet environmental standards. "And what would happen to hydrogen yield?" he asks. He also said that rhodium was a very expensive metal.

Another way of producing hydrogen is by solar-powered hydrolysis of water, a method Professor Charles Sorrell of the University of New South Wales is investigating.

Sorrell believes the water hydrolysis method has the advantage over the Deluga method by not producing greenhouse gases.

Nevertheless, he said it was "nice to see rapid advance to apparently successful levels" and there were "no front runners" in terms of which technology was ahead.

Sorrell has been involved in negotiations to develop a Co-operative Research Centre for Hydrogen based at the University of New South Wales. The production of renewable hydrogen is one area it would examine.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Sometimes, when you're up to your butt in alligators, it's hard to remember that the intial objective was to drain the swamp." ~ Unknown ~

Its such a joke that the middle east has so much of the worlds oil reserves, nobody would give a crap about them if they didn't, and the whole area would be as poor as africa.

An engineering friend and I both concluded that it's better to just burn the hydrogen in an IC engine.

Those fuel cells are still very expensive and present a number of maintenance problems particularly with extreme weather. By the way I live 1 km from the industry leading fuel cell research house- Ballard Power. Unfortunately they are struggling, another top management change recently.

Their promises of a practical working fuel cell engine is always several years in the future.

They almost had a BIG BLOWUP a year ago. The truck delivering hydrogen had the hose come off and they had a serious fire at the hose end. A

0.5 KM radius area was evacuated for about 12 hrs. until the hydrogen burned off. Firemen were there hosing it down to avoid the whole truck blowing up.

GM exhibited an experimental vehicle, at the NYC International car show, in

2005 that had an 320 HP V6 IC engine, designed to burn hydrogen. The future standard car will more likely be such a vehicle, with an on board reformer that will produce hydrogen from gasoline. No new, trillion dollar, distribution will need to be built. The hydrogen will burn cleaner and far more efficiently than gasoline. In addition only one type of gasoline will need to be refined, store or transported. No additive will be needed to suit the various environuts. Refineries will not need to crack and thus produce less gasoline and get more of the profitable carbon stock out of the crude. Overall that should reduce the cost of production dramatically and lead to lower retail price to consumers

mike hunt

You obviously know very little about the current subject. In order to do it the way you propose, your vehicle would have to be hooked up to a water supply hose while you drove it.

You need a source that is "rich" in hydrogen and water is not. The sun on the other hand...

Group: alt.autos.gm Date: Tue, Apr 25, 2006, 11:50pm (EDT+6) From: snipped-for-privacy@dizum.com (Nomen=A0Nescio) The President went before the corn producers today and delivered an awe inspiring speech touting ethanol. He's a real fan of alternative fuels. Going one step further by reforming ethanol to yield hydrogen makes an awful lot of sense, except it leaves a carbon residue. EtOH =3D H + CO (non balanced). Somebody should bring Mr. Bush up to date on this latest twist to break our addiction to oil; it'll give him the goose bumps! A much better approach is to use the reformer to extract H^2 from H^2O! Using that process, we could simply fill our fuel tanks with water and

*burn* it in our internal combustion engines! The only residue from this conversion is pure oxygen, sort of like having an Ionic Breeze inside your muffler. This technology is not new, having been first demonstrated in the 1949 movie, Free for All. In the movie, Robert Cummings drops a tablet in a barrel of water and it instantly becomes high-test fuel for his outboard motor. Folks, we're talking here a penny per gallon gasoline. Somebody should show Mr. Bush this film while he's hot on gas; it'll give him a hard-on!

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "Sometimes, when you're up to your butt in alligators, it's hard to remember that the intial objective was to drain the swamp." ~ Unknown ~

Bottled water costs more than gas at the local 'Stop and Rob.' I had to go inside at a gas station, because the credit card thingy was not working. There was a gal bitching to the poor clerk because she had to pay nearly $40 to fill the tank on her Lexus. She walked out with a carton of cigarettes and a pack of bottle water that cost her $50 ;)

mike hunt