[Diy_efi] Hydrogen Powered Vehicle

Mon Jul 19 05:19:33 GMT 2004

This thread certainly got some attention. Here is some information to
clarify things.

Our company, working with funding from the Department of Energy, designed
and built a hydrogen production and storage facility  here in Phoenix using
electrolysis and Proton Exchange Membrane (a fuel cell running backward)
technologies. We have also designed and built dedicated H2 dispensing
equipment. We currently have two vehicles running on pure H2 with a third in
the works. This production facility also purifies and stores Natural Gas
from the municipal distribution system so that we can dispense either fuel
or a blend of either. We have a Ford CNG vehicle that has successfully run a
50% blend of both gasses with no changes to the original fuel system. The
blended fuel yields a significant drop in pollutants (primarily CO and C02)
with the downside being a slight reduction in power.

Yes--fuel cells ("fool" cells) are more efficient than IC engines, but we
haven't seen any documentation showing 60% efficiency. 40% is more typical.
IC engines are a way to demonstrate Hydrogen technology today--and to
develop the infrastructure required for a so-called hydrogen
economy--without the enormous expenditures currently required for fuel cell
vehicles.

NO--hydrogen production does NOT result in more pollution, particularly when
using electrolysis as the production method. Even with coal-fired
electricity generating plants, they run at much higher efficiency across
time than do vehicles and it is much easier to monitor pollution from one
stationary source than from thousands of mobile sources. If you look at
renewable sources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.), then pollution is very
low. Nuclear is another low-pollution source but is a political hot button.

Hydrogen embrittlement is an issue but not as drastic as has been made out
in this thread. The 6000 psi tanks we use are made of steel. After two years
of operation, they're still in good shape. All tanks used in the industrial
gas market (Air Products and Air Liquide) for storage and transport are all
steel. The tanks are dated and tested in a regular basis--two years is
typical testing schedule. All tubing used for production and distribution is
stainless steel which is less succeptible to embrittlement and is less
permeable than other materials.

Vehicle conversion is not particularly difficult, but is expensive. We use
readily available 5000 psi aluminum tanks over-wrapped with carbon fiber
from Dynetek (www.dynetek.com). While hydrogen has more energy per pound (or
kilogram) than gasoline or CNG, from a volumetric standpoint, it is much
less energy dense than either of those fuels. Therefore, you need a lot of
tank to get a lot of range. Valves, regulators and safety releifs are from
Dynetek and GFI Tescom. Our engines are supercharged to solve the oxygen
displacement problems of using a gasseous fuel (the gas required for a given
power level takes up much more room in a cylinder than atomized liquid
gasoline) so positive manifold pressure allows more oxygen to be crammed
into the cylinders. Injectors are available from Quantum Technologies
(www.qtww.com). We run dedicated ECU to control the engine as the OEM ECU
(or PCM) won't deal with the vastly different air/fuel ratios. We typically
run very lean burn (lambda values around 3) as stoic ratios require so much
EGR to keep the combustion temps down that water ingestion into the
cylinders from the recirculated exhaust becomes a real problem. At the lean
air/fuel ratios, you need a serious ignition box to light off the mixture.
Detonation is a problem because the mixture burns so fast which causes a
very fast pressure wave to travel through the cylinder which then tends to
shred parts.

While we've spent big bucks doing this, we have a private citizen using our
station to fuel his S-10 truck that he converted to H2.

It can be done. I'm not sure that Hydrogen is the fuel of the
future--certainly not of the near future--but the research is being done to
see what is required to make it happen.

Garrett

-----Original Message-----
From: diy_efi-bounces at diy-efi.org [mailto:diy_efi-bounces at diy-efi.org]On
Behalf Of Robert.H.Warren-1
Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2004 4:06 PM
To: diy_efi at diy-efi.org
Subject: [Diy_efi] Hydrogen Powered Vehicle

Hi all,
I'm new to the list, but have been trying to figure
out what it would take to convert a car to run on
hydrogen.  I thought it might be similiar to
Natural Gas, but I wanted to ask some experts, if
they thought maybe a fuel injection system would
work with a modified EPROM. Or something like that.

Just a thought,
-Rob
>=)

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