Hydrogen fuel cell car! HAHA!

Agreed...there is no free lunch out there which is why garage junkies like myself are out here playing with ideas. I do understand what I am dealing with. I have seen the results. I realize hydrogen cannot be stored efficiently (yet) and my system has a ton of nay sayers. I never thought I would make believers out of anybody. I encourage people to build one and try it for themselves. Now one question before I am off to bed. Why then sir, if this system does not work, do I increase mpg by up to 20 MPG (on good days) with this system if it is pooey? AS I have said before...the results speak for themselves. Before anybody asks yes I have drained the fuel tank and yes I have tested the mpg this way and another way. I will never compare myself to an engineer or even great scientists of our current or previous times but I have to ask....how many people said POOEY to Einstein, Eddison, and the Wright brothers? Not comparing myself to these geniouses of their time only pointing out the nay saying happened then too. And I am sorry I dont have hard science to back my claims. But at the same time hundreds even thousands of people are building these things as we speak and not all but a lot rave about them. Why is this?

 

BTW....Nissan recently came out with the Leaf that gets roughly 100 miles on a full charge. This is with highly advanced batteries of course. What if I told you....a friend...an engineer holds the patent for a battery powered car that can be driven nearly 400 miles on a single charge? Want pictures of this too? Will be calling him tomorrow for the pics. BTW this is not on state of the art batteries. Why can he do this but big auto cannot? Lots of questions out there people with no answer. IMHO this is what drives garage junkies to push the limits.

 

You have not increased power so you have not produced better mileage. Producing more energy is producing more power... producing more power with less fuel is an increase in efficiency. When you demonstrate you have produced more power with less fuel, then you can say something.

Why do you have better mileage.... no telling. You have not proved you have. You have not done a controlled experiment with repeatable results under specific circumstances. Does not matter how many times you say the sky is green, those that have done the spectral analysis can show evidence it is blue. Your habits may have changes, you changed your fuel curves, you have changed your air flow.... any number of reasons.

 

A source is a place you get the energy from. Hydrogen isn't a source; you can't go "Hey! Let's take this hydrogen that's just laying around in the natural world and use it!". You can do that with sunlight, wind, nuclear power, and oil. That's the difference.

We need to put energy in to make hydrogen. Energy was already put into uranium and oil, and we just help it release it. Sunlight and wind are pure energy. See the difference between the three?

 

I think a solar powered car would be kick-***!
hmm.. I'll just cut my night time commuting down and I would be in business!

 

It isn't that I didn't see the difference... it's that it's semantics.

Oil has chemical energy. When you oxidize it it produces heat. Hydrogen has chemical energy. You do not "add" energy to "make" it. It exists. It is bound to other elements. If you chose to break those chemical bonds then it will take added energy. When you oxidize it it produces heat. They are the same thing.

And yes, it is an easy way to make energy portable and utilize it with a combustion engine when needed. Everything is stored energy. None of it can be utilized until we can convert it to an energy we can easily manipulate.

You can't use hydrogen until it is combined with oxygen. You can't use oil until it is combined with oxygen. You can't use that heat until it is expanded in a cylinder. You can't use a uranium atom until you hit it with a certain neutron at a certain speed. You can't use that thermal energy until you expand it in a turbine and convert it to mechanical energy. You can't use a photon till you capture it with a chemical compound. You can't use wind until you turn a blade and convert it to mechanical energy...... There is no such thing as "pure" energy... there is only energy is all it's various forms.

 

We have oil sitting in the ground, which has already held the energy. Hydrogen is sitting in deposits nowhere, so we need to create it. There's no semantics there, that's a serious difference.

 

That is simply not true. Crude oil, a natural resource, is refined. It is heated, catalysts are added, it is broken down... energy is added the entire time... till we end up with a product easy to use in a specific application. Oil is nothing more than hydrogen and carbons atoms with various other elements thrown in.

Hydrogen is not "created", it exists. We can take a raw material such as natural gas or water.. then we refine it, add energy and come up with a useful product that we can use in a specific application.

How in the world is that not the same thing?

 

With hydrogen, we put in all the energy we're going to get out, plus a bit that accounts for inefficiencies. With oil, it already contains all the energy we get out; we just put a very small amount in to make it easier to use.

 

No we don't.... to process the raw material to a useful product takes more energy than you will get out of it as hydrogen. But that is completely irrelevant as to why it is different that oil. That just makes hydrocarbons a more energy dense material... has nothing to do with it being a "source" what ever that is.

A hydro carbon is useless until we heat it and add in oxygen for combustion. When it does combust it makes more heat... but again... don't see any definition saying a "source" equals a energy density of "x" amount.

It is an excellent demonstration though as to why hydrocarbons are such a useful form of energy and why pure hydrogen can't make the same claim.... but it is all just chemical properties of elements.