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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."
Perhaps we should investigate additionally using methane as a source of fuel for these trucks. Not only could we keep these guys in business, but in some cases (such as trucks that haul cattle) they might actually produce more energy than they burn.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
That doesn't fit the rugged stereotypical trucker at all! "Goshdernit, we're gonna pollute all we need to get this convoy to San Antonio by Saturday!"
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.
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."
Could our root problem be that we consider less pollution a bonus instead of a motivating factor?
The faster and farther we get away from oil the better IMHO. I think the bonus should be the extra MPG, and the environmental impact should be the reason. We can spare a few $$$ for environmentally friendlier vehicles. I guess the real problem is, if the government does not intervene, companies will only do what will profit them, and if it does, we end up with violations of rights. Will we ever make the switch in consumer end vehicles in the long run?
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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.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
You mean some cars physically disconnect the stator wheel from the crankshaft? I'm probably a bit rusty on my car mechanics, but as long as that thing is spinning you're generating electricty. That electricity has to be enough to cover the maximum current draw of the electrics system plus some headroom, so you're always generating more power than you need.
Surely it's a No Brainer that putting the excess power back into the engine (electrolysis, hydrogen, blah blah) is Good Thing.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Are we talking about perpetual motion?
...this fuel source may not be exactly the "less" polluting alternative as one may think.
No, the trucks still run mainly on diesel augmented with hydrogen.
It's less polluting because the hydrogen boosts the performance of the engine over burning diesel alone, lowers particulates, and all that good stuff. So it does pollute less, by burning the fuel more efficiently.
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.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
Conservation of energy and thermodynamics tells us that this system has to operate with a net loss in efficiency for the *same* operating conditions. Perhaps the enhanced combustion improves the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine enough to offset energy required to produce the hydrogen and yield a 10% reduction in fuel consumption.
For all the naysayers, keep in mind, these truckers make their LIVING hauling product long distances. If this didn't work, or made the overall process less effecient, they'd know it. We're talking about their own profits it would be eating into, not some mystery lab result.
Sorry, but doubt hundreds of truckers are going to do that just to help out a company that involved in "psuedo science".
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!"Did nobody read up on this? The hydrogen helps the engine burn more of the fuel that would have been released unused. That is why you use less fuel and have lower emissions.
http://www.physorg.com/news3700.html
Now that's what I'm talking 'bout
H2 is BS.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
...they might actually produce more energy than they burn...
;)
[HOMER]
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
[/HOMER]
Shh.
When will people finally figure out that causing less pollution should be a goal, not just a pretty side-effect? Unless people do, our planet is doomed.
They made an engine that could run on water but the Big Oil companies bought the patents and hid it in a dark room and behind closed doors, black helicopters, Area51, republicans, Bob Lazar, tin foil hats, mind control beam, yada yada yada.
This is not hydrogen power. Not even close. All it's doing is generating a small amount of hydrgen to make the diesel combustion more efficient and complete. This is not perpetual motion (taking energy out and putting a greater amount back into the system), it's just a bit of fancy chemistry to make the existing diesel burn better. This has nothing to do with the hydrogen fuel debate.
...considering where the hydrogen is produced, this fuel source may not be exactly the "less" polluting alternative as one may think.
I am so f sick and tired of gd SUV wanks and oil company astroturfers trotting this one out everytime someone mentions anything that sounds at all like it's going to challenge rotten dinosaur corpses as the fuel of choice.
RTFA numbnuts! The hydrogen is generated in the engine by the alternator. Despite the vast overhead of this electrolytic separation these guys are still saving 10 grand a year in fuel which easily pays for the simple bolt-on mod within a year or too. The source of the hydrogen is no more polluting than the engine it modifies because it is the engine it modifies.
Then I notice another equally brilliant mind observing the vast additional burden of 8 lb of water on an 80,000 lb truck. Grab a snatch of a clue as it goes over your head, Sparky. By my calcuations, the entire system, water and all weighs less than the fuel it saves every day.
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA and aren't completely offended, the system basically adds a small amount of hydrogen to the diesel. The effect is similar (though the mechanism may not be...IANACE) to adding a squirt of acetone to your gas tank.
From the sounds of it
article: "Fuel efficiency and horsepower are improved because hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel, dramatically boosting combustion efficiency."
I read this as improving overall combustion efficiency. Although it's stretching their words alittle, what else could it be? The extra heat from the hydrogen must increase the efficiency of the diesel burning. It might be they spend %10 of the energy creating hydrogen (what is the efficiency of electrolosys?) and the little bit of hydrogen burning as fast as it does forces the combustion to reach an optimum temperature quicker. It can then spend more of the cycle in a more efficient state. Of course there can be other reasons that a different fuel mixture is better than others like the extra water produced by the hydrogen burning is acting as a catalytic for some chemical process.
The point being there could be some info out there that says that a 20:1 diesel to hydrogen mixture produces a 20% increase in combustion efficiency and something else that says a mechanical system is 50% efficient at producing hydrogen and that a normal diesel engine is %30 efficient converting diesel to mechanical energy then you email it to someone who's better at word problems than I am and you'll have your answer.
Anyway the only thing I found was that a 15:1 NOx mixture produces from 18% to 25%
My question, though, is why not just produce the hydrogen at a plant and enrich the diesel with it at the refinery?
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.
The effects of hydrogen injection sound similar to the effects from water injection, except that it may work better without additional engine tuning.
Water injection (often mixed up to 50% with alcohol or methanol) has been used to improve the detonation resistance of combustion engines for many years. It was pioneered by WWII engineers looking to extract more power out of their engines during takeoff and landing, but now is typically only used by people modifying or racing their cars/trucks.
In your typical combustion engine, maximum power is very often limited by a phenomenom call detonation, also called ping or knock. What happens is that during the compression stroke, the air/fuel mixture overheats and spontaneously combusts which results in a huge spike in combustion chamber pressure. If it is bad enough, it can break pistons or damage rod/crank bearings leading to engine failure.
There are a number of ways to reduce the chance of detonation which primarily involve cooling temperatures in the combustion chamber. A very common way of doing this is to add extra fuel to the mixture, but obviously this is not efficient or clean.
By injecting a small mist of water into the air/fuel mixture, the presence of water will help cool the mixture and prevent detonation, letting you lean out the engine to where maximum power is produced as well as adding additional timing advance and/or add boost (if running a turbo or supercharger).
As a side effect, the water ends up "steam cleaning" your combustion chamber which keeps carbon deposits to a minimum and your engine running well.
However, water injection does nothing unless your power output is detonation limited. In fact, if you inject water with no other changes, power output will go down a small amount.
It sounds like hydrogen injection may improve power and combustion efficiency in all situations.
Since the amount of hydrogen generated can't be that large, I imagine that using hydrogen injection in addition to water injection for heavy engine loads would be a great combination.
Hmm, maybe I better patent that idea.
When something sounds too good to be true, always look for what they skate around.
Or, look for failures of logic and/or math. Using your numbers, and the numbers of a reply to your post: his truck drives 4500 miles a week, and he gets about 7mpg (1200 miles on 175 gallons). 4500/7=640 gallons consumed a week; 2.75/gallon=$1767 in fuel per week.
Your numbers assumed that this device might allow for a 10% in fuel savings--that'd be $176/week, or x4=$707/month, or very close to what the article estimated the savings were--$700/month. On a $14K device, you'd make it back in 20 months or so-although I also question the consequences of running a (10%?) hotter engine for those kinds of periods ie does it stress the cooling system, or wear the engine components faster?
The only ones suggesting that there is some magic in the hydrogen didn't RTFA. It was pretty clear to me, at least, that the extra power/fuel savings isn't from the hydrogen burn itself, but that the energy released by that burn allowed otherwise unburned (and therefore uncaptured) exhaust particulate to be consumed.
When you go to light a fire with a match, you get more energy in return than what it took to produce the match; you burn the kindling. Here we have kindling flowing out the tailpipe because it wasn't ignited--so the hydrogen is just a match. You naysayers are forgetting that ICE aren't 100% efficient already--so this process raises the efficiency of the primary fuel source, which apparently it can do in greater gains than it took to produce the hydrogen in the first place.
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$tar -xvf
Incomplete combustion occurs because too much fuel is present per mass of air in the cylinder.
Ever have a campfire? Although you had unlimited air supply, why did you have unburned logs at the conclusion of it? Answer: because the material that didn't burn didn't reach the heat needed to combust. If you took a blowtorch to those remaining logs, you may be able to get another fire going, as the particulate that didn't reach it's combustion point the first time is burned off. With enough unburned logs, you might be able to get more energy back than the blowtorch uses. Same principal here.
At least in my view this entire system is bunk and the person interviewed must have some financial interest in the promotion of this product.
Or maybe he just knows what he's talking about, and doesn't draw conclusions from a single faulty premise.
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$tar -xvf
> ...hence it is producing (especially when the battery is full) more power than is
:)
> used, but still causing the same amount of load on the engine.
Oh God, what are they teaching kids in school these days. No. The more electrical load on an alternator the more force is required to drive it.
When a high load device, such as a high torque motor, starts up a generator will noticably bog down for a moment and the engine will rev to compensate. Trust me on this, I'm in Southwest Louisiana, Rita taught us a thing or two about generators.
Same thing on a rig with one of these puppies. If it is going to generate non-trivial amounts of hydrogen it is going to require a non-trivial quantity of energy in the form of electrical current and an alternator driven by an internal combustion engine isn't very efficient. Most use simple shunt regulators for heaven's sake! That means the power you get from burning the hydrogen is a lot less than what went into seperating it from water. So unless it makes the diesel burn a LOT better it won't be paying its way.
It will make the engine run 'greener' though, which is what this is likely mostly about.
Democrat delenda est
Air normally contains (roughly) 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, and trace amounts of a couple of dozen other molecules. This is increasing the amount of Oxygen and Hydrogen in the air entering the engine and conversely lowering the ratio of the Nitrogen, Argon and other (mostly nonvolatile) gases. This will naturally allow for a quicker, hotter, more complete burn that generates more power and less naughty parts like Nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.
I would imagine that the additional Oxygen provides a large chunk of the benefits, rather than it just being attributed to the Hydrogen.
They've actually invented a way to use some handy prepackaged "air for burning" (distilled water) that is (relatively) efficient and simple to make by using electrolysis. Not too much of it, because there it can be too much of a good thing. Try running an engine off pure oxygen and see what you get. You'd still get explosions, but they'd likely be uncontained this time around. The amount of electricity to electrolyse a lot of water would be quite counter-productive anyway.
I would imagine you could get much of the same results if you could figure out a way to filter some of the Nitrogen out of the incoming air. Unfortunately, there's no good, cheap, efficient way to do that... yet....
If you go read the manufacturer's web site they don't claim that the introduction of hydrogen itself will increase the fuel efficiency, but that the hydrogen will clean out the carbon deposits in the engine.
.001% hydrogen to air ratio in the cylinders during combustion.
The process will take "from 0 to 9 months" depending on the type of vehicle, amount of build-up, the weather, the speeds driven, the idling time, start/stop driving, etc. Once the engine is cleaned you can see up to "40% increase in fuel efficiency".
We're talking about some insanely small amounts of hydrogen here.
The standard kit holds about 4 liters of water and will run for about 12,000KM. If 2/3 of the water is converted to H and captured for use, that means there's 2,261 liters of hydrogen extracted.
I randomly took a Volvo VE D12 395 engine for specs:
12.13L displacement and 1500RPM suggested cruise RPM, I'll guess 95Km/h is "cruise".
12,000KM / 95KM/H = 124.3 hours
Hydrogen is produced at 18 liters per hour
124.3 hours * 1500RPM = 11,187,000 revolutions
11,187,000 revolutions * 12.13L = 135,698,310 Liters of displaced air/fuel mixture
If my conversions and guesses are close, that means there's
I say scrap the entire thing. Don't hack in to your electrical system and don't carry around the extra weight of the machine and water. If you want to reduce operating costs, increase fuel efficiency and reduce pollution then BURN BIO-DIESEL!! Bio-Diesel has a net zero effect on atmospheric carbon, is low cost (about $.50us/gal to produce yourself), and is a tremendously powerful solvent that cleans engines of deposits like nobody's business.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
My point is that if it's economically ripe, the truckers will be the first to use a new form of energy. If they ain't using it, it ain't ripe (unless it's an amphetamine). Moreover, "If you got it, a truck brought it."
On the downside, the alternator is now constantly loaded, which is an unusual situation and does require additional power.
Apparently the increase in overall combustion efficiency from the addition of H2 and O2 more than offsets the additional power requirement for the electrolysis. So in the end the engine is more efficient and saves money. Cleaner combustion should also lengthen engine lifespan.
It should be possible to do the same thing easily with most automobile engines. The only problem I see is ensuring that the alternator is not overloaded, which is primarily a function of the electrolysis electrode size.
This should also make automobiles easier to start, something useful in wintertime in high-altitude regions such as California where CARB gasoline is a requirement (and is a poor starting fuel).
Not exactly. Diesel engines cause ignition through compression; this is why diesel engines don't use spark plugs. Because they use compression to fire the charge (air mixed with fine particles of fuel oil) and the compression only rises to its peak for a short period, at high rpms some of the fuel particles are left unburnt because there isn't enough time to burn it completely before the exhaust valve opens and compression is lost.
And since horsepower is torque (twisting power) expressed through time (work), greater horsepower requires more rpm, all other things equal. Which makes the above situation worse.
This works because compressing a gas (the air in the mixture) causes the temp to rise (First law of thermodynamics) but only near the top of the stroke. Adding hydrogen causes the mixture, apparently, to fire quicker (at a lower temperature) so it can burn more completely, producing more power (efficiency) and less polluting compounds and unburnt fuel.
So it is not exactly a catalyst in that it has no part to play in the *chemical* reaction process. But it helps manage a diesel's combustion, appartenly, in a way that otherwise could not be accomplished.
I'd like to see an organization like Anandtech do a piece about this....