With a gallon of "Hydrogen Fuel" Could I drive farther with a Fuel Cell to electricity to "go" vehicle or a matched piston engine driven one? It seems to me with the inefficiency of electric motors, a piston engine would take me further on that gallon of Hydrogen Fuel. Plus the piston engine could be more easily made versatile to run on other flammable compressed gases too such as CNG. A fuel cell is not so versatile yet? Ideas? BTW if you look real close at my avatar, I detest unregulated EMF exposure as has blossomed in the electric car industry. Moi View attachment 24184
The Peswiki article that accompanies this write up..... is certainly impressive!!!!! http://www.theorionproject.org/en/hydroxy.html
Hey! Dey stole dat idea from Uncle Ferd... Researchers claim hydrogen energy advance 11 September 2014 ~ Researchers at Glasgow University have claimed a breakthrough in producing hydrogen fuel from water.
Why Fuel Cell it to Electric Motor propulsion. Why not just "bang" it through a mechanical engine. And if that mechanical engine could also "bang" heavier gases up to propane, wouldn't that be wonderful. Moi r > g View attachment 29954
No. Just No. Electric motors are far more efficient. For instance: http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric/efficiency
The problem is where do you get the hydrogen? Many folks think we can just pull it from water, but it's very inefficient to pull hydrogen from water only to convert it back to water again. 90% + of the world hydrogen comes from a familiar and much more easily accessible source - hydrocarbons.
PEM, (polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cells convert H to 'amps' and amps drive motors which in that configuration are much more efficient than ICEs (internal combustion engines). The fuel cell/electric motor combo efficiency can be > 70%! The main problem with fuel cells is the cost. So, Ford and a couple others are using H directly in IC engines due to cost advantage and the technology is proven, among other reasons. Personally I am not happy with the industry and politicians nearly ignoring pure alcohol fuel as a fuel! Its my opinion that the oil industry is busy behind the scenes blocking alcohol as a fuel. Oh well what else is new? reva
Hydrogen/electric hybrid ,may be a great option....my problem with hydrogen is the exhaust, yeah it's only water vapour but water vapour where I live is an issue in winter, the roads will turn into ice covered skating rinks... I'm not sure energy companies are trying to kill alternate fuels many of them are investing in alternate fuels...they all the end is coming for oil as a fuel...
Electric is extremely efficient as an energy source for cars... instant torque, minimal moving parts...only the range issue needs to be fully resolved and the automotive IC engine can be retired to a museum...
Was wondering about the Volt concept. It does not just rely on electricity, but with the combined engine, it seems the more logical choice. We are considering an alternative car, but don't want to be reliant on electric, simply because recharging stations are not easy to find, and often seem to be out of service (by personal observation) for whatever reason. We have also noticed more compressed natural gas station coming up, so it seems we are expanding on alternatives, giving everyone a choice.
I don't really know much about the Volt. I thought it was all electric, not a hybrid. Yeah, that might be best at this time. Full electrics still have problems and I wouldn't get one yet. The motors are fine, it's the energy storage that's the problem. But I think they will be viable soon. A new generation of supercapacitors are right around the corner which will store as much energy as the current batteries do, but will be much lighter, not contain toxic materials, and will charge up very fast (like about as fast as it would take to fill up your car with gas). Natural gas is interesting and seems to be a good alternative, but I think you'd have a much better chance of finding a place to plug in to electricity than to find a place to refill NG.
Hmmm' I lived in AK for about five years in anchorage/eagle river, then in colder Fairbanks. It was far different than here in Ea TN and a learning process. I thought I knew how to drive in cold weather, well I do. Here in the mountains we set record cold but up there its the extreme cold and the duration of cold that causes problems eh? Still in AK water vapor wasn't a problem but other forms of water were! For example, black ice was a problem. The first drive on the glen Allen parkway was in winter after a record long cold snap of minus 40 days. I've seen black ice before but they treat the roads different up there. Here they salt before it sleets or snows etc. Up there they watch it snow sleet etc and do nothing until after a lot has fallen. Then they usually use fine chat rock the roads. Well as I said I was doing about 75 mph in my ram-charger dodge 4X4 on the GA parkway (!) 'So what' you say...well I was going backward at 75! before I could crap my pants the ice god switched ends again and I was going forward,,,, Just some AK trivia. Anyway you said water vapor is a prob. Does the vapor freeze on the roads? I haven't heard of water vapor making problems here in the mountains or in AK. Maybe its because the air was relatively dry in AK and its not cold enought here in the smokies to cause problems? Lastly, I am more in favor of 100% alcohol fuel than hybrids or pure electric. Still pure alcohol has water vapor as a major combustion by as well. Hmm' so both would be a problem for our frozen brothers and sisters up north. Another way to power vehicles would be a ultra major infrastructure project, but it would eliminate the range problem of the batt power pure electrics. That would be to embed electric induction devices in the roads. Not all roads would have to be modified at first just the major ones. Power could be transferred by magnetic induction or other means. Of course the power would just like in the battery electrics be generated by coal oil gas or nuke power plants not good! So we are back to alcohol lol! After a rethink, I tend to agree that oil companies may not be hindering bio fuels but something seems to be. Maybe its simply the fear of investing multibillion dollar amounts with so much uncertainty, ie government regs etc etc. And with fracking and other means of petrolatum extraction gaining traction along with fossil fueled vehicles becoming remarkable fuel misers the 'mother of invention' has gone on holiday for a time? reva
I'm no expert on h2o but it would seem to me tens of thousands of cars emitting h2o at sub freezing temps can't do anything else but coat the roads with ice crystals which would be polished into ice by traffic....maybe I'm wrong... the delay in developing alternate energy could be caused by a "wait and see attitude"...no company wants to spend billions on researching a new fuel only to see another option become dominant....as soon as one becomes the obvious winner every uncommitted energy corporation will join that direction in R&D..electric, hydrogen, alcohol, which one will become dominant?
This is a time for government. Weights and Measures Department. We all know what a D Cell battery is. Its' size and power. Different companies may produce proprietary D Cell batteries claiming theirs' is "better", but it is still a D Cell battery for all uses / purposes. And we have the same standards for car batteries. We need a standard of an interchangeable electric car battery. Not Tesla's, GM's, etc. One should be able to pull into a service station and swap out a depleted battery for a charged one, for a fee. Quick as pumping 15 gallons of liquid fuel. This is a rare time government should step in and establish a standard electric car battery that can meet the above goals. Industry once competed over color TV. NBC's mechanical rotor was a contender for the electronic color TV the government decided to establish as a standard. With interchangeable electric car batteries capable of a 350 mile radius, the range is competitive with gasoline powered cars. Yes We Can ! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Water vapor, ah yes, a Green House gas too. How much humidity added around a L.A. Freeway freeway ? Harmless Water Vapor exhaust should be required to be condensed and stored for fresh water use. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As for efficiency of "banging" a liter of Hydrogen vs Fuel Cell it. I would want to see it done to believe the physics. Sometimes, the real world doesn't live up to theory or other numeric representations. Moi My Wish List is a BiFuel CNG/Gasoline 4WD Ford Expedition, factory direct. No EMF r > g No
The efficiency of what? If you're converting water to hydrogen that's about 70% efficient. If you're using a fuel cell that's around 60% efficient. That leaves you around 42% efficiency. We haven't included the infrastructure needed to generate and transport enough hydrogen for everyone. But wait, where did the energy come to convert hydrogen into water? In the case of hydrogen cars, the energy doesn't really come from the hydrogen, the hydrogen is just being used to store the energy like a battery. The energy comes from, presumably, an electrical source which is still mostly coal or natural gas. You'll get twice the efficiency from electric vehicle anyway, and we've already got a pretty good infrastructure for transmitting electricity. There may be renewable sources for hydrogen, but certainly not a on a scale yet that could support a modern society.
No need for that.When the next generation of supercaps comes out, those things will be obsolete anyway. One thing to remember about hydrogen: it has less mass than other gasses. That means that if you want it to push a piston, it will take more hydrogen than other fuels would take, because it will have less kinetic energy. Then there's the fact that electric motors are much more efficient than internal combustion engines. This has already been tested and found to be true in reality, not just on paper.
You still have a charging problem with a supercap. Let's say you have an 85kwh supercap (the size of the Tesla S battery). Let's say you have a 400 volt source Let's also say you want to charge the system in 5 minutes, which is a reasonable "gas" stop. 85000 Wh * 60 = 5,100,000 Wm 400V * 5m = 2000 volt-minutes 5,100,000/2000 = 2550 amps!!! That's not going to happen. Let's limit it to a reasonable 70 amps. It would take 182 minutes (3 hours) to recharge fully.
RevAnarchist.......... if you were the judge on the Stanley Meyer case........ would you allow his opponents to add some sort of white powder to the water running the Stanley Meyer dune buggy engine? http://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/stanley-meyers-and-zero-point-energy.42388/
If you have several caps in series (like cells in a battery), then you could have separate (parallel) charging wires. Then you could divide the amperage evenly among them. For instance, with 2550 cells, you could divide that 2550 amps down to 1 Amp per. This may seem like a lot, but it's actually the same thing Tesla Motors did with the Roadster using small batteries. The Roadster uses a pack of 6,831 lithium ion cells.
You could, but you'd need 2550 connections. Those connections would need positive and negative, so at least 5000 wires capable of at least 500V / 1 amp continuously. That's if we leave off the monitoring circuits. How many plugs and sockets do we need on the car to do this?
Better to be able to swap out a depleted battery for a charged one, within 15 minutes, huh. Moi r > g View attachment 29990
Not so easy on some cars at the moment, but the Tesla can do an automated robotic battery swap in 90 seconds. http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/21/autos/tesla-battery-swap/
You could probably do it with a single connector with a lot of pins. I'm not an engineer, but I'm confident that some brilliant engineer can make it work. If we were talking about building an internal combustion engine, I'm sure you could come up with plenty of technical hurdles that I wouldn't have the answers for in that case either. But the pros do it every day, and I have faith in their abilities.
So what if the battery you get won't hold a charge, or has some other form of damage? And that would require stations to be set up all over the place that not only have the ability to charge them (which would be all you'd need with the supercap plan), but would also have to have tons of batteries lying around. You're probably also looking at having to have a "full-service" shop, driving up costs, as opposed to a simple plug-in which would be self-service.
