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Truckers Choose Hydrogen Power
hipernoico writes to tell us Wired News is reporting that hundreds of semi trucks now on the roads are being partially powered by hydrogen. From the article: "These 18-wheelers make hydrogen as they go, eliminating the need for high-pressure, cryogenic storage tanks or hydrogen filling stations, which, by the way, don't yet exist. These truckers aren't just do-gooders. They like Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Injection, or HFI, system because it lets them save fuel, get more horsepower and, as a bonus, cause less pollution."
The trucks aren't using hydrogen as their main source of fuel. They are using hydrogen to enhance the combustion of the diesel.
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This pdf file might be helpful (or search for it on google to see the html version).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
This is not the first marketable apparatus using this technology. H2N-Gen has their very own unit that will cost about 4 grand, will fit under your car's hood, and will be on the market by March. There's been several articles on this (and a recent one in Popular Science, December issue). Here's one http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000373059415/
I assume that their hydrogen source is probably mostly produced from electricity from coal burning plants.
Umm, No...read your own quote: Electricity (from the alternator in the engine) is used to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The fact that water weighs in at over 8lbs is fairly moot -- gasoline weighs in closely, so adding a tank that holds a few gallons of water is not a major addition to trucking weight. Additionally, FEWER emissions. All in all, a good idea, if it is all that it's cracked up to be.
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Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
quote...
Through electrolysis, the Hydrogen Fuel Injection (HFI) kit generates hydrogen and oxygen, which are injected directly into the intake manifold. Published data show that hydrogen burns nearly one order of magnitude faster than petroleum fuels, thus approaching ideal thermodynamic cycle; and hydrogen has a shorter flame quench distance, allowing flames to travel closer to the cold zones, thus improving combustion. These hydrogen properties improve engine performance and emissions.
Not quite. BMW has been researching and promoting hydrogen cars for some time now. They installed a hydrogen refilling station in Munich in '99(IIRC) and more are on the way, some in the US. The interesting thing about the BMW hydrogen car is that it can burn either hydrogen or gasoline so you can burn hydrogen when its available but not be hampered by the current dearth of hydrogen stations. As for the source of the hydrogen, Electricity generated from solar power is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. . The range on the 750H is only 400 km right now. The other trade-off of course is that there is still combustion so it's not as clean as fuel cell cars. Nonetheless, it's a start and not a bad way to transition us into a hydrogen economy.
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The trucks are NOT "partially powered by hydrogen" except in a meaningless technical sense. The trucks are generating small amounts of hydrogen that they have generated (somewhat inefficiently) from water and alternator electricity, using energy derived from diesel fuel as usual. They then inject some of that hydrogen back into the engine for a cleaner burn.
Diesel engines produce soot (dirty filthy polycyclic aromatic compounds) which represents wasted energy and this is merely a way to cut down on the inefficiency represented by the unextracted energy leaving the exhaust. The mechanism by which adding hydrogen to the air-fuel mixture actually accomplishes this involves some complicated physical chemistry beyond the scope of the article- which goes into a misleading nonsequitur about how trucks might use hydrogen-powered fuel cells someday.
A very clever system, I hope whoever came up with it has a patent on it, I'm not a big fan of IP, but that sounds like a real invention.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Do you have any idea how much fuel a truck buys at one time? I usually fuel when I get down to about quarter tanks, which that means I will getting about 175 gallons, using your average of 2.759 gallon comes out to about $483. This fill up will get me about 1200 miles, being that My truck is an team operation with an average of 4500 miles weekly. This adds up to a lot of money out of my pocket monthly/yearly. Trucks most generally do not get good fuel milage. So every little bit that can help save on fuel consumption helps in the long run.
Exactly. What's confusing people is the assumption that the hydrogen is being used to power the vehicle. The article summary is quite misleading.
Think of the hydrogen here as something a bit like a spark plug, though IIRC diesel engines have something a bit different from spark plugs. Spark plugs used stored power to initiate combustion, spending stored chemical energy in the battery to release more chemical energy fromm the fuel. The hydrogen here is using stored chemical energy to release more energy from the fuel than would normally be released. The chemical energy from the hydrogen doesn't power the vehicle, just like the chemical energy from the battery doesn't; it's the diesel fuel. The benefits are higher fuel effeciency.
You get the hydrogen for free basically, especially if the vehicle were equipped with more advanced ways to generate electricity like regenerative braking. This isn't in violation of thermodynamics or anything, it just squeezes a little more effeciency out of the system than you'd otherwise get.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Why is this so confusing?
You're suggesting replacing a small, on-demand hydrogen generator with 1) a hydrogen plant, 2) distribution network, and 3) storage tanks.
The tanks alone could cost more than the electrolysis device.
Sometimes (most of the time) there is no such thing as economy of scale. Anything that 1) can be automated (most everything), 2) doesn't suffer from inherent physical limits (like Carnot efficiency), and 3) can be scaled down, should be made as small as possible.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Thats because Hydrogen is injected into the engine as a gas. You would need to cool or pressurise the diesel & H2 mixture during distribution and storage if you mixed them at the refinery.
Methanol and water injection do that to gasoline engines, too. See the War Emergency Power rating on WWII US fighter planes for an example of water injection, and MW-50 for an example of methanol/water injection in German fighters. They work by cooling the intake charge, which inhibits detonation, allowing more boost to be used.
Mind you, he was talking about methane, and methane is not the same thing as methanol.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
> Virtually all race cars run on Methanol too.
For "virtually all" read "Indy Cars"
F1 cars run on unleaded petrol.
Nascars run on 110 Octane gasolene
etc. etc.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
A so-called "Diesel" engine works by compressing something until it heats up enough to ignite a bit of oxygen mixed in with it. You can use almost anything in a diesel engine as fuel, provided you adjust the compression appropriately. We use diesel because it's relatively cheap, for a hydrocarbon, and part of "relatively cheap" is "easily available near the highway".
Diesel is essentially the same as the kerosene in your camp light, the fuel oil in your home heating unit, the jet fuel in the airplane you last rode in, and the solvent you might have cleaned your paint brushes in. And any one of them would light up just fine in a diesel or jet engine without modification, and it's hardly news that people do, from time to time, use alternate fuels in those engines when necessity arises.
One fuel people sometimes use in Diesel engines is vegetable oil. It works fine, and essentially that's what BioDiesel is. It's neither particularly rare, difficult, or even new to use it provided you can find it. Farmers, mostly, have been users in the past, and it was not unheard of in the 1930's for the tractor to be running on corn oil or whatever the farmer had lots of and couldn't sell, or at least couldn't sell at a price that allowed him to buy an equivalent amount of diesel fuel from hydrocarbons.
The question for BioDiesel is basically: do we have enough extra corn, cottonseed, canola, peanut, coconut, or [enter locally grown oilseed] to run our trucks and jet engines while still feeding ourselves, and de we eat enough fried chicken and french fries to use the waste oil to run all our trucks, buses, and airplanes. I tend to believe not, but I'm open to contrary evidence.
f you are swayed by celebrities, I can tell you that there is a restaurant that gives it's used french-fry oil to Darryl Hannah, who uses it in her diesel engined vehicle. Kind of a wild child, that one, but hippies do some things right, occasionally.