A future hydrogen-fueled burn?

[some seeing eye]

The world is slowly, too slowly, thinking about a transition away from burning fossil fuels to carbonize the atmosphere.

A replacement fuel is hydrogen gas. It burns with air to produce water, possibly some nitrogen oxides because the air is 70% nitrogen. It combines with air in a fuel cell producing water and electricity.

The global energy economy is fierce in seeking the lowest price. So without a price paid for carbon, new energy sources have to fight for acceptance. We also have a weird phenomenon of non-carbon energy source lobbies attacking one another because they are the "perfect energy source" and all the rest suck.

Hydrogen can be produced from natural gas, which is stupid. It can be produced from natural gas with carbon capture and underground storage-sequestration, which hasn't worked yet at scale. It can also be produced by something like fermentation from fast growing cheap biomass, like switchgrass. It is an energy storage system. Or it can be renewable hydrogen by separating water into hydrogen and oxygen gases by electrolysis.

The electrolysis route can soak up excess wind and solar at zero or negative electricity price.

The hydrogen can move in pipelines and compressed in tanks.

So maybe someday Hellco has hydrogen? What would hydrogen poofers look like? There are starting to be hydrogen-fueled fuel-cell-to-electric-motor bicycles, with a week range on the playa. And your camp hydrogen tank could run a camp fuel cell generator and heat your water for showers!

[Molotov]

Hydrogen has a very broad explosive ratio when mixed with air. Much more hazardous than propane. Witness the Hindenburg and how fast it went up.

[Skuzzy61]

Hydrogen gas is very tricky. It can permeate steel can, eventually, cause welds to fail and steel to become brittle. Work with fiber reinforced polymers has been successful, but permeation is still a problem, fortunately it has little effect on the polymer. Great care must be taken in creating the containment vessel, or you could end up with a flame path over the surface of the vessel.

Also the vessel(s) must be in the open air. You cannot enclose them without risking a hydrogen fire.

When hydrogen burns, it is very difficult to see the flame. You also have to control the hydrogen and oxygen mix to slow the fuel burn so it does not create high levels of NOx. Just blowing hydrogen into the air will cause high levels of NOx to form. Slowing the burn rate also causes a color shift from the near transparent blue flame to a yellow flame which is easier to see.

I think mixing hydrogen with natural gas would be a safer bet.

[M F Bonz]

It’s been done.

Smiles ~
I couldn’t get one of my camp mates away from it.

[Skuzzy61]

Hehe. That was not pure hydrogen in those bubbles or they would have burned pale blue.

[M F Bonz]

Yea I know.
Just an example of what people have built.

I also think it might be very Dangerous storing a whole bunch of hydrogen around the city. It’s just a really bad idea. But that’s just me.


I can’t find it or i’m just too lazy to look. but …in seems like in 2008 someone was building a hydrogen powered mutant vehicle on playa.
You put trash in one end and I think it was supposed to turn that into Hydrogen then that powered a big block motor with a blower and top fuel Exhaust on it.
I heard the motor run but it never moved. I don’t know if it was running on hydrogen when I heard it. It shut off before I could get close. I think they received a grant for it but couldn’t finish it before the burn. So they brought it anyway and then worked on it on playa.

Le chat nor did some work on it. I think he even rewired there pipe bending machine for them.

If you talk to the right people… you might find out even more might exist.
I don’t know.
Where’s the couch when you need him… never mind.

Do you remember “Omega”?
Before the Internet.
I loved their hardcover set for designing /building stuff.

[Simon of the Playa]

Hydrogen has a very broad explosive ratio when mixed with air. Much more hazardous than propane. Witness the Hindenburg and how fast it went up.

more explodey is always a plus.

[M F Bonz]

Laughs ~

[Token]

Yea I know.
Just an example of what people have built.

I also think it might be very Dangerous storing a whole bunch of hydrogen around the city. It’s just a really bad idea. But that’s just me.


I can’t find it or i’m just too lazy to look. but …in seems like in 2008 someone was building a hydrogen powered mutant vehicle on playa.
You put trash in one end and I think it was supposed to turn that into Hydrogen then that powered a big block motor with a blower and top fuel Exhaust on it.
I heard the motor run but it never moved. I don’t know if it was running on hydrogen when I heard it. It shut off before I could get close. I think they received a grant for it but couldn’t finish it before the burn. So they brought it anyway and then worked on it on playa.

Le chat nor did some work on it. I think he even rewired there pipe bending machine for them.

If you talk to the right people… you might find out even more might exist.
I don’t know.
Where’s the couch when you need him… never mind.

Do you remember “Omega”?
Before the Internet.
I loved their hardcover set for designing /building stuff.

Chicken John built the dragster.

That was a gasifier. Throw in garbage into a low O2 reactor and produce CO gas and run it through the engine. CO —> CO2.

AFAIK, it did drive a few hundred feet.

[M F Bonz]

Yeah I think that’s it.

That’s why it Didn’t come up under the hydrogen fuel search. Doh!

The drawings looked cool.
Never saw it finished.

[M F Bonz]

I remembered something about this year’s ago. The proof of concept seemed like it was a welder or Torch of some type.

Pulled from the Internet.
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

[Skuzzy61]

I remembered something about this year’s ago. The proof of concept seemed like it was a welder or Torch of some type.

Pulled from the Internet.
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

The reason you do not see this being used is due to the volume of hydrogen it takes to power a car, as an example. Just think about it. It only takes a bit more than 1kg of hydrogen gas to create the same amount of energy as 1 gallon of gas. However, that 1kg of hydrogen has a volume of about 397 cubic feet. To get that volume of hydrogen into the same space as 1 gallon of gas, you would need about 3,000 psi of pressure.

Point being, it is impractical to use the above method as the size of the diffuser would be significant in order to produce the volume of hydrogen needed in order to be useful.

There are a lot of people trying to figure out these issues and we are still a long way off.

[M F Bonz]

I was kind of wondering why we didn’t see more of it. Seemed promising at the time.

[M F Bonz]

Back in the late 1970s
I worked at a electric/rewind/water pump/well shop.
We also did warranty work for Grangers Products.
I was so young then.
We had lots of fun in that shop.
For a Proof of concept.
We slapped a 5 hp three phase motor on a VW bug mounted to the Transmission no clutch.

We had a 100 foot cord plugged into the shop.
My job was to flip on and off the power and if Doug went past a marked point… PULL the PLUG!!!!

The other proof of concept for that involve an adjustable speed motor some old armature‘s some brushes and boxes and boxes of old random capacitors hooked together.

An Analog phase converter to convert from DC 12 v to three phase… it was fucking scary.
Yeah it’s obvious…none of us were Engineers.

[Miura-7]

This is what I want to hear! The only variable nobody seems to want to discuss is, how to use the least amount of hydrogen to get the job done. Even if it did explode, it would go straight up. So I’ve heard?

[M F Bonz]

I find it all interesting but I just know enough about it to sound stupid.
Smiles

I think the aluminum alloy would be fun to play with.

[Skuzzy61]

This is what I want to hear! The only variable nobody seems to want to discuss is, how to use the least amount of hydrogen to get the job done. Even if it did explode, it would go straight up. So I’ve heard?

The pressure tanks holding the hydrogen will not explode. It needs O2 to burn. Even if you punched a hole in a tank, it would simply burn off as not enough O2 could get into the tank to cause an explosion due to the high rate of burn.

The only real risk of explosion comes if the tank is stored in a partially enclosed space where enough O2 can get in and mix with the hydrogen.

I am not sure what variable you think is not being talked about. Using the least amount of hydrogen to accomplish any given task is a natural by-product of all the implementations. It is difficult to produce a lot of hydrogen on the fly.

There are teams of people all over the world trying to solve all the problems associated with using hydrogen. From how to create it (the gas does not exist in nature), without causing other ecological issues, to how to use it safely and economically.

At this moment hydrogen gas costs about $15.00 a gallon. This the lowest it has ever been. Long term storage is still an issue. Better polymers have come along to help that, but it is still a long way from being viable for the long term.

[M F Bonz]

Thanks Skuzzy61.
I do appreciate the knowledge.

[M F Bonz]

The rest of the story.
Dave and Doug were brothers. Dave owned the Business.
Doug had a desire to start getting into building electric cars. Dave was interested but cautious.

Doug wanted to use some solid-state switches that can turn on and off fast enough to create 60 cycles.
In the 70s they were hard to find and astronomically expensive as I remember.
Dave didn’t want to spend the money because he said it wouldn’t work.
So Doug pulled some commutators off some old armatures from the boneyard and put it all on a shaft with brushes and some bearings at the ends. Then he hardwired them together to somehow split them into three phase.
Power came in with brushes on one or two commutator I think… but I’m not sure and then it went out three commutators and out the brushes. It was just quickly put together on the test bench.
It seems like he used a component out of a weed eater to convert some voltage or something.
I don’t remember what kind of motor he used to spin it …probably something from the boneyard.

It wasn’t built for a load, it was just to show his brother proof of concept.
He kept adding capacitors to try and buffer the voltage.
Every time I went out on a service call… he would have a new box of capacitors added by the time I got back.

It looked like Frankenstein‘s lab in the shop when he had it running. Flames came off the commutators and brushes.
It was crazy.. especially when a dead short capacitor pops.
It was probably blowing PCB smoke all over the shop. I know for a fact we had some.

Laughs~ what he was trying to build is kind of common in most appliances today. I mean …is a starting switch and start winding on a motor even a thing on new appliances anymore?

He ended up getting one switch.
But the problem then was how do you switch it on/off between three switch’s in sequence at 60 cycles.
The technology didn’t exist then.
Or at least it wasn’t being shared.

Doug rewound motors at the shop
extremely intelligent but a lot of fun.

I miss those days in the shop.

Okay… I’m clearly Bored and I need to occupy my mind.
I think I’ll go build something.

[Miura-7]

Yup! Build something. I’m waiting on a 72v 125ah Lipo 4 battery, and a 72v 45ah Delfast Ebike to be delivered. (My birthday present to myself.) I’m going to try not to dismantle it and let it collect dust, because I found something better. Bad habit of mine! I’m never bored, just ignorant.