A new Challenge

[Assassin]

For many years now I have played with hydrogen and forgotten the hypothesis and concentrated on the real world applications as a fuel, having converted several petrol engines to run solely on water, its time for a marine engine.

Two of my own vehicles have been converted to run solely on water and one is a large 4X4 which sinks fuel it is a pleasant change to throw water into it instead of petrol, other projects have included the usual small petrol engines on anything from quad bikes to generators, and recently a couple of outboards on friends tenders. Both went to Portugal recently and got strange looks when one was out of fuel and he was seen filling the tank with sea water using a cheap plastic jug and a few seconds later he started his engine, many of the locals thought something had overheated until he told them he was filling his fuel tank.

It makes sense to fit a hydrogen generator to a boat, after all its surrounded by its own fuel, salt water, the saving on marina prices would more than cover the cost of a high capacity submersible pump, pipe, and a few more batteries.

 

[longjohnsilver]

Hmm......

 

[Firefly625]

I thought hydrogen fuel cells required hydrogen and oxygen produced water.

 

[Trundlebug]

Hmm indeed.
I seem to remember a BMW that was ostensibly water powered in this way being shown on Tomorrow's World in the 1970's.
It later emerged that it was a petrol car underneath with a hidden tank somewhere.

Still, if the OP has invented perpetual motion and free energy, defying all the laws of physics, good luck to him.

 

[prv]

I thought hydrogen fuel cells required hydrogen and oxygen produced water.

You can also do the opposite - split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The downside is that you need an awful lot of electricity to do it.

If you had that much electricity magically available on your boat, you'd be better off just running a motor with it. The point of hydrogen is that you can do the splitting somewhere that you have lots of power (right next door to a nice big nuclear power station, for example) and then easily carry it to somewhere that you don't.

Pete

 

[Trundlebug]

You can also do the opposite - split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The downside is that you need an awful lot of electricity to do it.

If you had that much electricity magically available on your boat, you'd be better off just running a motor with it. The point of hydrogen is that you can do the splitting somewhere that you have lots of power (right next door to a nice big nuclear power station, for example) and then easily carry it to somewhere that you don't.

Pete

Yes, but if you've invented a magical source of unlimited energy, you don't need to worry about details like that.

 

[Assassin]

Never claimed to have invented anything, never will unless I invent something.

Just a natural progression of amalgamating recent advances already proven to work by myself to a larger scale.

 

[Assassin]

Never mentioned fuel cells either.

 

[henryf]

Sounds like a great idea to me. I surprised it hasn't caught on.

I know all about the conspiracy theories of oil companies trying to silence the truth but the great thing about the internet is by next week the little man can show his technology off to the world.

Let's start with the car and do boats a bit later. I think there will be more take up. Pop round tomorrow and we'll get it sorted. I wouldn't mind a small piece of the action by way of a brokerage fee if you could see your way to it.

Henry

 

[longjohnsilver]

J

Never claimed to have invented anything, never will unless I invent something.

Just a natural progression of amalgamating recent advances already proven to work by myself to a larger scale.

Hmmm yet again!

Btw how's your 4000AH battery bank getting on? I guess now you can run your genny on water you won't be needing many batteries?

 

[rbcoomer]

You can do this as you can use solar to provide the electricity to split the water and then store just the Hydrogen - as Oxygen is freely available in the air. The downside is that you'll need a lot of PV energy as you not only need to split the water molecules, but also compress the Hydrogen for storage. Compressors aren't very energy efficient! You'd also need a long time period to refuel and I'm not sure I'd want to drop the hook in the middle of nowhere for a couple of days whilst I refill my Hydrogen tanks! You could of course add more solar panels and capture more energy, but that would mean a bigger boat and thus more energy needed to move etc etc. Then of course there's the issue of venting the excess Oxygen safely - unless of course you want to compress and store that too... (even more energy).

I think there is potential for 'free' energy for a boat engine, but it perhaps lies in the ample supply of salt water that surrounds? Rather than 'burning' the water via a complex splitting and recombining of the molecules, why not look to utilize the 'charge' of the salt water? Every schoolboy knows you can make a battery with a couple of terminals and a saline solution! You just need a cell that can draw in and concentrate the salt water in enough volume and extract the charge! Easy!

Failing all that, you could of course just use the wind - but there's a separate forum for that!

 

[henryf]

Wind power sounds an interesting idea. Would you have turbines on the boat, a big battery bank and then electric motors or is there another technology ?

H

 

[rbcoomer]

Sounds like a great idea to me. I surprised it hasn't caught on.

I know all about the conspiracy theories of oil companies trying to silence the truth but the great thing about the internet is by next week the little man can show his technology off to the world.

Let's start with the car and do boats a bit later. I think there will be more take up. Pop round tomorrow and we'll get it sorted. I wouldn't mind a small piece of the action by way of a brokerage fee if you could see your way to it.

Henry

Car would be much easier. You could build a solar powered home electrolysis station to split out the Hydrogen and Oxygen, compress the Hydrogen into portable tanks that you can fit to to car. Not sure how many days you'd need to produce enough Hydrogen to fill a tank, but suspect that local authorities would be quite quick shutting down all the explosive gas factories as they spring up! I have done it on a small scale (<1L water), but not sure I'd be too comfortable with a Hydrogen generation plant in the back yard - and that's without attempting to compress it...

I dwelt on this topic at length 15+ years ago when looking at PV and concluded the best solution is to create a synthetic petrol equivalent. One that is volatile enough to replace petrol, but cleaner to burn and cheaper. The liquid format of petrol/diesel is handy to transport and infrastructure already in place, it doesn't need compressing and existing engines/vehicles wouldn't require extensive modification/redesign. Sadly I also concluded that I had neither the time, skills, nor funds to pursue and I'm sure many big companies are already looking at similar.

 

[rbcoomer]

Wind power sounds an interesting idea. Would you have turbines on the boat, a big battery bank and then electric motors or is there another technology ?

H

I have seen a few other more stealthy solutions, but you'd have to join the dark side to find out about those!

 

[Assassin]

At last a sensible comment.

Things have moved on in the last 15 years and more so in the last 3 years to the point where you don't need the massive amounts of power to start a reaction, you only need enough to produce enough gas to start and run the engine and once running the alternator provides plenty of power to keep the reaction going to provide enough gas, the key is two fold, producing enough gas to run an industrially/marine rated engine, then to keep it providing sufficient gas "on demand" to keep the engine running.
With HHO you don't actually separate the oxygen out and disperse it as this is burned in the engine.

 

[jimmy_the_builder]

You might get more 'sensible' comments if you provided some detail and evidence to back up your claims...

 

[rubberduck]

Sounds like a great idea to me. I surprised it hasn't caught on.

I know all about the conspiracy theories of oil companies trying to silence the truth but the great thing about the internet is by next week the little man can show his technology off to the world.

Let's start with the car and do boats a bit later. I think there will be more take up. Pop round tomorrow and we'll get it sorted. I wouldn't mind a small piece of the action by way of a brokerage fee if you could see your way to it.

Henry

I'll join that, instead of a boat, make the next step a truck engine, I will pay handsomely for the prototype & rights.

 

[MapisM]

Wind power sounds an interesting idea.

Not only it sounds, it is interesting. As long as you can live with the aesthetic implications, that is... :nonchalance:

 

[rbcoomer]

At last a sensible comment.

Things have moved on in the last 15 years and more so in the last 3 years to the point where you don't need the massive amounts of power to start a reaction, you only need enough to produce enough gas to start and run the engine and once running the alternator provides plenty of power to keep the reaction going to provide enough gas, the key is two fold, producing enough gas to run an industrially/marine rated engine, then to keep it providing sufficient gas "on demand" to keep the engine running.
With HHO you don't actually separate the oxygen out and disperse it as this is burned in the engine.

Whilst I accept that, the alternator can only harvest a % of the energy created by the 'burn' of the fuel. If hypothetically, 1kW of energy is held in 1L of water then the most you can ever release when recombining the elements is 1kW. If you use say 800W of that for propulsion, then there's at best 200W to be harvested by the alternator for the electrolysis of the next cycle of water (assuming 100% efficient engine). It will take at least 1 hypothetical kW to electrolyse the next 1L... Whilst I accept that using HHO on a petrol engine can improve combustion of fossil fuels (faster/better and thus more efficient burn), I cannot in anyway reconcile how you could dispense with said fossil fuel altogether as there would be a large energy deficit? The only way to fill the deficit is via an external source to 'fuel' the electrolysis of the water - and that I believe is quite energy hungry to do on any meaningful scale...

 

[longjohnsilver]

At last a sensible comment.

Unlike most of what you've been posting :sleeping:

You constantly allude to something that is the holy grail of combustion engines but provide nothing to back it up. Unless you have now perfected what many of the worlds leading scientists have been striving to archieve for decades. Have you?

Just pour seawater into your outboard tank to propel your tender...............hmm yet again. And you haven't told us how your 4000ah battery bank has performed!