Thread: Hydrogen Fuel

Honda's PRODUCTION hydrogen car.. Rumoured to be coming to Australia in 2009.

So where do you get the hydrogen from???

The Home Energy Station
Honda has operated an experimental Home Energy Station in Torrance, California, since 2003. The Home Energy Station, which generates hydrogen from natural gas, is designed to provide heat and electricity for the home through fuel cell cogeneration and to supply fuel for a hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicle.

Originally Posted by cookiesa

Honda's PRODUCTION hydrogen car.. Rumoured to be coming to Australia in 2009.

So where do you get the hydrogen from???

The Home Energy Station
Honda has operated an experimental Home Energy Station in Torrance, California, since 2003. The Home Energy Station, which generates hydrogen from natural gas, is designed to provide heat and electricity for the home through fuel cell cogeneration and to supply fuel for a hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicle.

So it's not fueled by a tin can full of water under the bonnet then ?

I will be interested to see what range and how successful the Honda will be as it is as far as I can see the only real way to make the most out of Hydrogen powered vehicals but it will still be very costly to purchase and to run.

CNG would be much more cost effective rather than converting the NG to hydrogen which will require power to do which is robbing from peter to pay paul so to speak

But thats not all of what it's about, the enviromental impact is the real reason you would do this and that would most likely be less than a Prius due to having to dispose of the batteries in a prius as well as it being heavy with electronics which are also not very enviro freindly.

There is also changing the attitude of people to how they should be using their cars.

Im still of the thought that if you work inner city then the gov should be spending money on getting you comfortable to use public transport, this would save a hell of a lot more enviro blah blah blah than any of these hydro/hybrid rubbish which is just offsetting one for another in most cases.

I should be riding my pushbike to work (7 Kms) and we should only need 1 car.

We could run trains on hydrogen meaning that they would probably use a similar amounts of electricity but with a hell of a lot less infrastructure due to not needing to run cabling for the trains etc and heavy equipment is ideal for this sort of thing and using a hydro fuel cell to run electric motors would I think make this much more viable and practical rather than expensive, not very viable selfish and impractical to run single vehicals on the stuff.

Originally Posted by isuzurover

What I was trying to point out is that the number of atoms of each is not the only issue. e.g. Acetylene C2H2 has the highest energy content on a weight basis, bacause it is a very dense molecule.

H is not a molecule

Burning olefins with H2 gas is not the same as burning parrafins.

we doint burn olefins with H we convert Olefins to parrafins, then burn them in the normal manor

Originally Posted by cartm58

At a going away reception for the receptionist at site, l was talking to an engineer who drives a Discovery D2 TD5 and he was saying that he has imported a piece of kit from Italy to convert the D2 to run on Hydrogen gas and he would be making his own hydrogen gas a litre of distilled water makes 18,000 litres of gas and he was also going to convert his home heating to Hydrogen gas. He was saying biggest problem was finding space within engine bay for the conversion equipment as he wanted to keep piping as shot as possible for the Hydrogen gas.

I will try and get some better details from him when l go back to site next week and post.

Anyone else heard of the conversion process and is it only suitable for Diesel powered vehicles

I thought I'd add my 2 bob into this. I studied chemistry when I was younger and the idea of running a vehicle on browns gas always intrigued me as it would be a perfect combustion senorio ie H2 + H2 + O2 + ignition source = 2 H2O. Plenty of people (nutty optimists) reckoned you could run a car on browns gas generated from water, in the car, so I thought I'd actually do the math.

I used a small car at the time, that being a 1L smart fortwo as the basis for my calcs. If I remember correctly, I took the average fuel economy per hour, took that down to an average fuel use per revolution of the engine, then looked at the molar energy comparison of an Octane combustion and a Hydrogen combustion. From this I could calculate how much Hydrogen and oxygen I would need to create the same power per revolution, then how much hydrogen and oxygen needed per hour.

I was hopeful in the beginning, but the smallest HHO generator that was on the market at the time that could supply enough browns gas to run the Smart car, ie running it on water, ran on 20A 415V 3 phase electricity and was roughly double the size of the smart car. So, it ain't really possible when you do the mathdibatics, although I haven't been looking into this stuff for years.

As for using HHO for a diesel additive, I think your better off doing water injection.

Just my 2 bob. Plenty of weird and wacky things have turned out to be possible in the past so I say, nothing is impossible, it just needs more tinkering time.

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Hi all

Quite a few users have rightly pointed out where the H2 will come from or the electricity come from to create the H2. Will it really be better environmentally? Especially for a car in the city.

In the case of New Holland's Hydrogen tractor - yes. This was developed quite a few years ago and it a nearly perfect use case for a H2 powered vehicle. Farms have lots of area for solar panels which generate electricity to get the H2 from water. The energy density is not as much as diesel or petrol but that isn't so much as a problem as the tractor does not travel off the farm. Long range is not required. What it achieves is that the farmer does not have large ongoing diesel costs, its clean, quiet, and reduces the environmental foot print of the farm.
I have no idea how much the infrastructure to produce the H2 costs - I suspect it's subsidised as a demo project.

I'd certainly like a H2 tractor myself. I have a small 60 HP Kioti tractor that runs on diesel.

Mike