And how does one get hydrogen out of water again oh thats right electrolysis. Plant matter is the same as making ethanol or biomass fuels but its still not efficient (yet anyway) not to mention growing enough crops to make enough fuel would mean we don't have enough farming land to make food off.Dirgle said:
RHD Prius
- Thread starter turbotrev
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The article is all based on "research" and is not a reality, a its not going to create Hydrogen at the rate which the car is burning it, thus there statement that storage is eliminated would be false for starters. The whole idea of getting water to flow over the catalyst aluminium rod also suggest we have a water pump in there that'd be drawing current and energy as it'd have to be separate from the engine so its not free energy as they claim. More efficient then traditional electrolysis yes but not free.Dirgle said:
They claim it can produce it on demand but the amount of fuel needed in say something like a 5-6L V12(like the BMW test mule 7 series) can't be made by the time someone goes from part throttle to mashing the floor to overtake another car.
Simply put to have a water tank big enough and space to fit the rod in to generate hydrogen to then burn yeah kinda not gonna fit in a car. The system would still have to be highly pressurised to get the hydrogen dense enough to provide enough fuel for the engine, once again this eliminates their safety features of not having a high pressure storage tank.
And this still doesn't address the fact that whilst clean burning ie the only by product being water hydrogen still isn't an efficient fuel to burn for an internal combustion engine. The prototypes around have 150km ranges and suffer from signicantly less power then the petrol fueled variants.
Not to mention aluminium is a dwindling resource and the rod technically isn't a true catalyst as it react with the water and is used up. Now if our cars are made from aluminium and burning it too its not going to take long to use it all up not to mention the cost and prohibitive nature of replacing rods etc.
The biggest issue here is that aluminium just isn't a reactive enough element to create enough hydrogen fats enough. Back in chemistry at school, even after cleaning the surface of aluminium to remove the oxide coating and then putting it in boiled water the reaction process is so slow and the amount of hydrogen generated is so small compared to say wacking a stick of magnesium in hydrochloric acid.
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Umm, yeah it's not like we are going to driving these tomorrow, but that doesn't mean we should stop researching does it?
Aluminium, is the third most abundant element in the earths crust. we are going to run out of a lot of things before we run out of aluminium.
according to this artical, yes I know what the title says, they know that internal combustion engines are too inefficient, but they say that fuel cells are still too expensive and unreliable. But when fuel cell technology breaks into the mainstream at 75% greater efficiencies it will be a viable alternative.
Also it says that the most pressure that is needed to run an internal combustion engine is roughly 50 PSI, not hard to produce. And enough of the water and aluminum/gallium to be the equivalent of gasoline could be carried on cars. But you would have to get a resupply of fresh aluminum/gallium and then drop off the spent aluminum/gallium for recycling. The infrastructure just isn't there for this. Another reason it currently won't work is because, it requires twice as much energy to produce aluminum/gallium than it is able to put out using todays technologys.
So while it won't work today at least they are trying something. We are moving in a direction and that is a good thing. So if you want to be pessimistic about it fine, but I think the tech shows promise, far more than trying to burn the nations food supplies in your gas tank.
Aluminium, is the third most abundant element in the earths crust. we are going to run out of a lot of things before we run out of aluminium.
according to this artical, yes I know what the title says, they know that internal combustion engines are too inefficient, but they say that fuel cells are still too expensive and unreliable. But when fuel cell technology breaks into the mainstream at 75% greater efficiencies it will be a viable alternative.
Also it says that the most pressure that is needed to run an internal combustion engine is roughly 50 PSI, not hard to produce. And enough of the water and aluminum/gallium to be the equivalent of gasoline could be carried on cars. But you would have to get a resupply of fresh aluminum/gallium and then drop off the spent aluminum/gallium for recycling. The infrastructure just isn't there for this. Another reason it currently won't work is because, it requires twice as much energy to produce aluminum/gallium than it is able to put out using todays technologys.
So while it won't work today at least they are trying something. We are moving in a direction and that is a good thing. So if you want to be pessimistic about it fine, but I think the tech shows promise, far more than trying to burn the nations food supplies in your gas tank.