Slashdot Mirror
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.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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/
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.