First, there is a benefit of mixing HHO into a carbon based fuel stream, particularly diesel fuel, as you can get real world 15-24% fuel economy increases diesel fuel savings, and you cut significantly into the emissions and particulates coming out of the exhaust, and extend engine life. The ROI is often less than a year and the savings can run into serious money.
The storage medium for hydrogen is the water, if you can make the hydrogen very cost effectively, make it onsite, and make it on demand fast enough to meet demand, your storage issue goes away.
The problem with fuel cells is their CAP EX is too high, their run time is too short, and if the hydrogen is matched to a long running quality hydrogen engine and genset, the comps are going to push the fuel cells to very narrow specialty applications.
Check out the website at Hydrogen Engine Center and the quantity of hydrogen they use on a variety of engines they run for power gen. All of their engines are hardened and made to run for 10 plus years on pure hydrogen.
They have 1400 engines in the field and really know their stuff. I think you guys have a new company over their called HyEngine.com or something like that. They are doing some very cool things with Hydrogen motors as well.
But these engines consume great quantities of hydrogen, so very cost effective generation is critical. It is also critical that you do not have to compress it, store it, transport it, and build an infrastructure to support it. Even if it is cheap to make, if you still have to do all of the latter, it doesn't play.
We are also running numbers on how much hydrogen we are going to need to drive an over the road truck down the road running only on HHO made on the truck.
It will take a few days to get numbers done. But we are going to need to split the oxygen out of the HHO stream, in the range of 400-1400 SLM. Any info on where we can find a filter to to do this would be helpful?
If you go to the Hydrogen Engine Center website it provides a good amount of information on quantities of Hydrogen needed to run a variety of engine sizes, although their engines are built for ground based power applications.
This might be helpful for your questions as they have done a lot of work in this area?
That works okay on low volume HHO production. But when you get north of 100 SLM the in cell membranes are overwhelmed and you get lots of production but it is HHO.
Thank you for the recall of the design and membrane in cell design.
Thank you for the heads up on compressing HHO, we are focused on getting out the H2 and using it immediately as fuel, hence our interest in separating out the oxygen so that we can burn just H2.
The reason for the quantification of H2 in Kg, is because it converts easily over to GGE measurements against diesel and gasoline and natural gas and makes comparisons effective. In addition, it is easy to compare the relative btu values of each fuel in understanding what makes sense as alternatives to what we use now.
I am in Green-tech but come out of a product integration background on a macro level rather than on the CTO level. We have made much progress in the HHO generation area and I am now looking ahead to see how we can separate the O from the Hs:)
We are also very interested in transportation and you guys across the pond are definitely ahead of the game on the macro level.
If you are using the HHO as fuel, is it pure HHO without any other hydrocarbons? Or are you supplementing existing systems with HHO injection?
I am sure it was an experience that generated "real world" data and knowledge, which helps greatly in assessing other claims like the Germans. Thank you for the update.
My earlier comment was that if we could produce 1 Kg of H2 at an energy cost of under 10 kWh, that Kilogram of hydrogen will deliver enough btus of energy to make hydrogen a reality as a source of fuel.
I think we all agree that 10 kWh/Kg H2 would change all of our worlds.
By the way, the HEC engines are pushing 43-46% efficiency running on pure H2.
Thanks for the clarification, I guess I read it that they could keep it going on a truly self sustaining basis, which led to the observation about creating more hydrogen energy than they were consuming in making the HHO to begin with.
I have seen this done many times on a short term basis, so by the title it appeared they were doing something extraordinary.
It will be extraordinary when we can put in 10 KW of electricity to make 1 Kg of H2.
How did your last build go with regard to getting to self sustaining?
The German video appeared to be straight up electrolysis so it would not be likely that they could get to a self sustaining state. If best case real world is 50KW/H2 Kg, and Faraday was 33KW/H2 Kg, and 1 Kg of H2 has 12-19 KW of power value in it, they would appear to be a good ways away from anything close to self sustaining?