Liquid hydrogen injection?

[thoughtcriminal]

No, not that HHO bullshit.
I'm talking pure bottled hydrogen as a fuel.
Anyone tried it?
I've been screwing around with the idea for a while, actually keeping my eyes open for any junk motors (mostly lawn mower) to try it out on.

post your thoughts

 

[Simple_serf]

Not liquid (honestly...more trouble than it is worth), but many old engines at the Coolspring Power Museum are run on compressed hydrogen. it's kinda similar to producer gas, except much purer. It's just another fuel that can be used.... and no, it isn't cost or environmentally effective.

Really though, why bother with hydrogen...it takes too much energy to make.
Even if you are using solar or wind, it is more efficent to charge batteries and drive around in your electric car.

For me, wood gas is worth looking at, because i can get free wood/woodchips in very large quantities. It is a low power, dirty, exceedingly crappy fuel. however....you do get more power out of it than is used to make it (in my case). The same can not be said for hydrogen.

 

[MAKG]

Anyone who considers powering a vehicle with a cryogenically refrigerated liquid needs their keys taken away. Seriously.

This is EXTREMELY dangerous.

 

[reno]

Dang Makg, you beat me to it. Dude, do you know what will happen even if you get a flashback?

The bottle falls and cracks a seam or the neck of the valve?

One day, someone will find a efficient way to produce hydrogen, probably by stumbling over it while intending to do something else, maybe in our lifetime, maybe not.

There are a lot of good ideas at work out there, give it time. Makg tried pounding this in my head and I was stubborn and did not listen, if it takes a half gallon of gas to make 12oz of hydrogen, or as Makg put it a 1/2H.P. to make that 12oz, there is not enough there to be efficient.

Please don't be hard headed like I was, Makg knows what he is saying (I would almost say he is a rocket scientist,)

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Please don't be hard headed like I was, Makg knows what he is saying (I could almost say he is a rocket scientist,)

Fixed it for you.

 

[thoughtcriminal]

yeah, you all do make some good points.
Actually, I am pretty wary of the idea of driving around a huge H bomb.
Thats why I asked, figured someone would make some points I haven't thought of.

And MAKG... N2O

 

[reno]

Fixed it for you.

So he IS a rocket scientist? I never knew.

 

[Simple_serf]

oh, come on now...

...you gotta admit that the explosion WOULD be pretty damn good!

As I said, compressed hydrogen is nothing new, and yes, you can get an engine to run on it.

Liquid hydrogen, while sounding good, isn't.

 

[MAKG]

So he IS a rocket scientist? I never knew.

NASA contractor. Airborne planning and data acquisition engineer. Not rocket scientist (though I know several). I've done some fluids work, but not in that context.

 

[thoughtcriminal]

perhaps I should elaborate a little more. I was thinking along the lines of a modified direct port NOS system to run the hydrogen into the engine. I said liquid hydrogen referring to the bottles of liquid hydrogen, as a means to differentiate from say a fuel cell, or otherwise.

Sorry for any confusion

also, at this point, its more or less to satisfy my own curiosity. I know hydrogen is currently not the most efficient fuel, but hey, going through college to become a chemical engineer and its something I am very interested in.

 

[MAKG]

The difference is that nitrous is not a fuel; it is an oxidizer. And most of its effect is just ridiculously low temperatures due to decompression,

If you blow a bunch of nitrous into the air, it will not create an explosion hazard. Other hazards, sure, but not that one.

And it is NOT cryogenic. Nitrous is room temperature, high pressure. If you throw a nitrous tank into a lake, it sinks to the bottom in a very boring manner.

Efficiency has little to do with it. What you are proposing is making a bomb, armed and primed, and driving it down the street.

 

[reno]

So what other liquids or gases are there that just MIGHT be efficient enough to be considered? and is it possible that another liquid could be mixed with gasoline to possibly where it would be we use less fuel because of, say a 25% or even 75% (I just pulling numbers here out thin air) of the liquid to gasoline? I doubt it, but this would work for a while.

I know bottom line is, if we do not find something else than gasoline, our dependancy will continue. I.E.-we have a mixture of gasoline with X, gas prices drastically drop to say $2.12 (I know, bare with me), we will stop looking for alternative fuels until the next fuel crisis and be back at square one. This is why I like asking, because there are many of you, what do you think the next source might be? Just a hypothesis on it, don't need proven facts, just what you think, some think Butanol, some hydrogen, others Algae...and the list goes on.

There is a lot of ideas going on for this, and is actually exciting. I can't wait to the next source is talked about and released for use.

 

[AllanD]

The problem is that when you want hydrogen for fuel the ammount
you can carry as pressureized gas is literally trivial for automotive
purposes.

As I recently stated elsewhere a cryogenic Liquid Hydrogen weighs
only 71grams... and has one quarter as much energy as an equivelent
volume of gasoline, yet gasoline can be carried around in a bucket,
liquid hydrogen only in a carefully insulated container and high pressure
hydrogen in extreemly thick walled heavy cylinders (through which it leaks
directly through the walls of anyway)

So ANY ammount of hydrogen you could carry as GAS (even at extreem pressure)
is extreemly limited, you can carry more energy as gasoline in a 1quart canteen.

a friend showed me a video tape of some guy with a Cessna Skymaster
who had replaced the REAR engine with a rocket motor running on Alcohol
and Compressed Oxygen, the engine had only limited duration, but that
was because fuel was carried for the rocket motor only in proportion
to the oxygen carried, and THAT was limited by the WEIGHT of the SIX
"K" sized oxygen cylinders that weigh in at 110# each.

I suggested that by carrying a small tank of cryogenic oxygen
AND a SINGLE high pressure Nitrogen tank (you can get nitrogen
compressed to 6000psi in a special 125lb K-cylinder) to push it
(via small turbo pump) into the engine AND substituting common
Kerosene as fuel (14% lighter and 75% more energetic than alcohol)
that the duration of the engine could easily be increased by
a factor of 20-25 with the same weight by just about anyone
who had ever run a torch off of a cryogenic oxygen tank

Given a real engineer that could probably be stretched to
35times the duration for the same 700odd lb package weight.

this is because that particular installation the engine weighed
something like 45lbs and the oxygen tanks 660lbs (a wasteful
ammount of fight mass)

My idea was to substitute cryogenic oxidizer and
fuel in many times the ammounts for those 300kilos
of useless Steel.

You run into identical engineering problems trying to use hydrogen.
you either need it in an unstable form (LH2) or wastefully heavy
tanks to carry any useful ammount of the stuff.