19p replacement petrol??

[jezzaaa]

Wow!

http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/31012011/36/19p-litre-pet...

But hang on...I thought hydrogen was massively difficult and expensive to make??

[ShiggyBiggs]

Even if it is dirt cheap, once it is widely used the government will just start to tax it more and more as we go along, surely?

[Leicesterdave]

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[jlaurren]

Germany pioneered very similar technology nearly 100 years ago.

[Dangerous2]

hydrogen is a piece of piss to make, you could do it at home. it just requires electricity which kind od defeats the point of using it as a fuel until we have electricity sources that don't rely on fossil fuels.... oh...

[Dangerous2]

and that article is very misleading

"hydrogen is the perfect fuel, it has 3 times more energy than petrol per unit weight"

ok, fair enough.

what's the density of petrol vs the density of hydrogen again?

[Pannywagon]

Dangerous2 said:

and that article is very misleading

"hydrogen is the perfect fuel, it has 3 times more energy than petrol per unit weight"

ok, fair enough.

what's the density of petrol vs the density of hydrogen again?

I guess the hydrogen will be in solution (liquid) mixed with all the other detergents needed for the engine. It wouldn't make sense to have it in gaseous form.

[Dangerous2]

but petrol is burnt as a vapour in engines.

[Dangerous2]

and also the boiling point of H2 is something like-250...

[Dangerous2]

using the technology they describe the hydrogen is part of a chemical compound that, when heated, decomposes and releases H2 gas.

what I was getting at is that the comparison is unfair - it's not so much weight of the fuel that is the problem here, more the energy density of the fuel, which basically determines how much you have to carry around. petrol has a much higher energy density than hydrogen... and therefore than ammonia-borane too.

[morgrp]

Dangerous2 said:

hydrogen is a piece of piss to make, you could do it at home. it just requires electricity which kind od defeats the point of using it as a fuel until we have electricity sources that don't rely on fossil fuels.... oh...

We do - it's called nuclear power

[vrooom]

govt will tax it to point we couldnt afford it.

[PintOfKittens]

vrooom said:

govt will tax it to point we couldnt afford it.

And then tax it some more.

[Engineer1]

No you have missed the scam opportunity, the government will initially subsidies the switch over then wait till it becomes popular then tax it to the point that petrol would be considered cheap.

[CraigyMc]

Pannywagon said:

I guess the hydrogen will be in solution (liquid) mixed with all the other detergents needed for the engine. It wouldn't make sense to have it in gaseous form.

To have H2 in liquid form, at rediculously low temperature, in a pressure vessel which isn't going to be light, and will use loads of insulation, as well as using up far more volume than the equivalent petrol tank.

By volume you would need something along the lines of 2.5x the storage capacity to make a tank of H2 last the way an equivalent tank of petrol would last - and that's an internal volume, ignoring the fact that the H2 tank walls and insulation will take up a lot of space themselves.

C

[littleredrooster]

It's not H2, it's H......it only becomes H2 when combined with something of a higher valency.

And it's snake oil, IMO

[Dangerous2]

littleredrooster said:

It's not H2, it's H......it only becomes H2 when combined with something of a higher valency.

And it's snake oil, IMO

what?

if you take NH3NH3 (ammonia borane) and heat it, you get various polymers of NH2BH2 and H2. H2 (dihydrogen) is the elemental form of hydrogen. The process described in the report (very badly) is definitely not snake oil but it does seem that it need massive boosts in efficiency to be viable as a form of H2 storage for internal combustion engines. But if you go to the company's website, they admit that.

[P700DEE]

Pure snake IMO.
Lots of it looks sensible but it falls down when it says that it can be used just like petrol. Microspheres that adsorb/bond with Hydrogen so that yiu can fill your standard tank just like petrol ! So these micro spheres store it and are happy at "room temperatures" to store Hydrogen but not under any pressure ! So once in your tank it can be burnt like petrol and there are no emmissions other than water. So what happens to the micospheres ? Do they burn and create on ash or emmissions ? If they are saved , how are they re-cycled after all 80% of thw weight is the microspheres ! Article from the Daily Mail says it all

[littleredrooster]

Dangerous2 said:

what?

if you take NH3NH3 (ammonia borane) and heat it, you get various polymers of NH2BH2 and H2. H2 (dihydrogen) is the elemental form of hydrogen. The process described in the report (very badly) is definitely not snake oil but it does seem that it need massive boosts in efficiency to be viable as a form of H2 storage for internal combustion engines. But if you go to the company's website, they admit that.

I retract my post - it appears that commercial hydrogen gas is now represented by H2. My bad.
BTW - NH3NH3 isn't ammonia borane.....

[dpbird90]

littleredrooster said:

I retract my post - it appears that commercial hydrogen gas is now represented by H2. My bad.
BTW - NH3NH3 isn't ammonia borane.....

From what A level Chemistry taught me (was a few years ago now!), it is possible to get H on its own, however its extremely volatile/unstable, something about electron shells means that it only really "works" as H2