Fuel from Water
What if you had a boat that was fueled by the water that it floated in? I have had a few people suggest that we look into hydrogen as a fuel source. Until recently I have focused mostly on BioDiesel and other alternative fuel. I had never thought about hydrogen due to the volatility of hydrogen during storage.
But what about creating hydrogen just before use? That is interesting isn’t it. In theory like a jet boat, your boat could suck in water. But instead of sending it through an impeller powered by gas, you would convert the water via electricity to 2H (two hydrogen) and one O (oxygen) and burn the hydrogen as fuel and spit out the oxygen as exhaust. MMM Very interesting.
In theory it is very possible. My next post will show a very easy way to produce hydrogen (in a very small quantity, completely safe in your house and a good experiment for kids). A small electrical charge separates the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Trap the hydrogen and inject it into your engine. Your engine has no problems burning this as a fuel and has to have very little changes, if any. Let the oxygen escape into the exhaust system and the unused hydrogen will recombine with the oxygen and reform into water. You will need a stainless steel exhaust system to prevent rust. Your exhaust is literally oxygen and water. Oxygen is good, and so is water. As a matter of fact this water is more pure than any water you will find in a bottle. Pure H2O.
Great in theory. The problem; it is nearly impossible to make enough hydrogen on demand to fuel a car. The tank needs to be very large as the surface area of the reactant has to be big enough to make enough hydrogen to fill the combustion chamber at a ratio of about 34:1.
Also you will need to have a power source or another reactant. There are two ways to separate it that is usable for an automobile or boat (nuclear power is very heavy and very big and can only be limited to the largest vessels right now).
- Adding a reactant such as Aluminum Oxide
- Inducing electricity on charged plates
Adding a reactant results in waste in the form of unused reactant that needs to be disposed. It is possible to recycle this and use it again, but I don’t think that we really need to mine something to be able to create energy. Although it is certainly a better solution than coal, it still does not completely solve the fact that we have to use a natural resource.
Needing to use electricity on charged plates brings up the problem of needing to have electricity to start the whole thing. Certainly a car battery is enough to induce the reaction, and all gas engines have a generator to recharge the battery and create the spark needed to ignite the fuel. So once an engine is underway it is possible to keep the reaction going.
The biggest problem in the whole electrical charge system is that it takes a lot of hydrogen to run the engine. When I say a lot I am not talking about amount. It is more efficient than gasoline, but it takes more space. Gasoline is delivered in liquid form and turned into a gas via the fuel injectors just before ignition (usually we talk about it as a vapor, physically it is different but for this discussion it is basically the same). This means that gasoline takes up much less space. Hydrogen on the other hand is delivered in gas form. Since hydrogen is much lighter than gas the same amount of fuel in quantity takes up much more space. So when I say a lot I mean space wise. (I hope that this is not getting to technical or confusing).
That probably means that there needs to be an external power source to create and store hydrogen before it is needed. In other words there needs to be a little stockpile to get things going. Solar is an obvious solution to this but we still need to store a dangerous material.
OK we are going in circles now. In all perpetual engine systems this seems to be the problem. One benefit gets outweighed by a negative (keep in mind that the Universe requires balance) and it never works.
Although this is not a perpetual device the energy source can be nearly perpetual. Solar combined with water can produce a tremendous amount of energy. But then again now we are back to needing a very large area to produce enough energy to make it usable. Is this area too large to be overcome?
