Heresy - Interceptors and HHO

[BennVenn]

I'm interested to hear more about the zero emission fuel. e100? or something more exotic?

There was a NASA paper released that these HHO sites quote about the efficiency increasing beyond petrol alone. Might be worth a read

What was really unusual during the runs with the HHO on, the exhaust smell... Hard to describe it, a strong chemical smell. Kind of like burning wiring and linseed oil. I pulled the dyno covers off between runs to make sure the wiring in there hadn't melted and nothing went wrong in the engine bay. Might be worth doing another test just to confirm that was the source of the smell.

[BennVenn]

NASA link here from 1977. https://www.hhoplus.com/documents/hho.pdf

So after a bit of reading, they used 0.67KG/hr of hydrogen. A quick google says that 670gms is 8 cubic meters of hydrogen, per hour. That is 8000 L / Hr or 133 litres per minute. This resulted in a 3% gain in power, in a 10.5:1 compression ratio, 7.5litre engine at a steady 2100rpm.

It's probably safe to assume 2.8L/min of HHO - of which is 1.8L/min of hydrogen was never going to have an influence on the old pulsar. And if I were to bump compression up and feed it hundreds of litres per minute of hydrogen, I'd probably get that 3% gain.

Not sure why they'd cite a NASA paper debunking these HHO claims.

[In-Tech]

I'm interested to hear more about the zero emission fuel. e100? or something more exotic?

There was a NASA paper released that these HHO sites quote about the efficiency increasing beyond petrol alone. Might be worth a read

What was really unusual during the runs with the HHO on, the exhaust smell... Hard to describe it, a strong chemical smell. Kind of like burning wiring and linseed oil. I pulled the dyno covers off between runs to make sure the wiring in there hadn't melted and nothing went wrong in the engine bay. Might be worth doing another test just to confirm that was the source of the smell.

Ben, It has been many many years ago and from memory, no ethanol. It was pure chemistry from some kiddo's at MIT. It COST about $25us a quart to produce and we used it straight to the schrader and pinched the return on efi stuff. I do remember a unique odd smell that quite quickly went away as basically any hydrocarbon(I assume) left. I'll look into it again, one of the coolest things I had ever seen and I thought propylene oxide was cool CH3CHCH2O. Everyone has their own sense of smell, at the seemingly correct ratio of prop to gasoline, it smelled like a fresh banana and would rock like Nitro

[In-Tech]

Also agree with others, most ICE's never exceed 50% thermal or any other kind of efficiency.

[In-Tech]

antus,
Thank you so much for having a forum where we can discuss so many things.

I could go on for a bit about chemicals. I actually feel bad about how many ants and mice/rats because they were a pest

Anyhoosit, I wish you all the best Thank you again, antus.

[vlad01]

H2's only advantage is it's very high octane number, not sure which metric they use but it's about 130. The 2 biggest issues with hydrogen is it's super low density and even in liquid form is only a few % more dense than the gas form. And to keep liquid it needs cryogenic tech typically used in space craft and particle accelerators. And compress it needs ludicrous pressures that make it a bomb on wheels, nothing to do with it's flammability but just the sheer pressure it needs to be contained to get any inclining of usability/range when used for a vehicle. Hydrogen also permeates virtually all materials and causes structural issues at the molecular level with time on materials that suffer this, as surface reactions can displace the electron and the H+ is basically a proton that loves to work it's way through materials and recapture electrons to to form atomic H gas that then accumulates as H2, leading to structural problems at grain boundaries from the tiny super high pressure pockets. This in a nutshell is how hydrogen embrittlement occurs.

Hydrogen make one of if not the best rocket fuel because it's low atomic mass and high exhaust velocities, which give it unrivaled specific impulse and other considerations in rockets are workable/less of an issue, but it's a very poor choice for ICEs.

It's hard to beat good old petroleum based fuel for the ICE.

I do like ethanol fuels, but it's lower caloric density is not great in Australia where a normal work trip is the same as driving across a few countries in some places, quite literally.

Also E85 smells freaking amazing! Unburned and burned.

[Gareth]

Whilst I agree that Hydrogen has issues in being the "planet saving answer", I still believe that there still must be some merit in its use, Toyota wouldn't waste millions on developing it...

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawvzH0MQ4[/youtube]

[Charlescrown]

Boy this post brings back memories. Some time back I was involved with a group and we made a HHO generator which added HHO to a std VN Commodore. The outcome was a fuel saving. We did nothing else but plumbed it into the intake. We put the fuel saving down to increaded burn rate but all said and done it was not worth all the hastles.

[antus]

Whilst I agree that Hydrogen has issues in being the "planet saving answer", I still believe that there still must be some merit in its use, Toyota wouldn't waste millions on developing it...

If its stored hydrogen then you can make sh*tloads of it with huge solar and wind farms and store it in tanks and pump it like LPG. Yes you need all the right gear (very high pressure specialist compressors), but here in SA we have a lot of sunny desert and wind and could have / are building huge hydrogen farms that run when the sun is out or wind blowing and stop when it isn't. We can also ship it as ammonia to other markets efficiently or as a liquid though that's the more expensive way. So as a full time 100% fuel you buy at the pump, yes it makes a lot of sense. As an additive for petrol, or powering a car from water with the car doing the splitting, not so much. For the hydrogen cars both ICE and using it to generate electricity then running electric engines both seem to work. If running it as ICE then you don't need the lithium batteries, and if you stored the hydrogen from green solar or wind you have a 100% green energy source with easy tank storage without lithium and it doesn't matter if supply is intermittent with the weather. And if you pump it in liquid form at a station you don't have the long charge times you do with electric or stress on the grid.

https://www.hydrogen.sa.gov.au/
https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/indu ... -australia

[immortality]

Green hydrogen is something the NZ government is looking at when the alloy smelter closes down in the next few years and we have a heap of spare renewable electricity.