HHO-only Diesel car

[oil pan 4]

There was a guy that blew him self to bits compressing HHO a few years with an air compressor I will assume he was compressing it to no more than 150psi.
A diesel runs adabadic compression of 700psi minimum.
How's that going to work?

[niky]

I don't get how this is still a discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

One kilogram of diesel has 13 KWh of energy.

One kilogram of hydrogen contains approximately 39 KWh of energy.

Buuuut... even with perfect electrolysis, you are consuming that *same*39 KWh to produce that one kilogram of hydrogen. More practically, at least double that, due to inefficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

Remember, oxygen doesn't count. It doesn't provide power. And most of the weight of water is oxygen. Only a little over 1/10th of your water is hydrogen, by weight. Which means you would have to carry four times as much water as diesel for this, and an expensive EV battery pack, as on the Leaf, would not be enough to electrolyze more than a few liters of water.

In other words, just stick to an electric motor. Cheaper, safer, more efficient.

[samwichse]

I like how his last calculation equated 1L of diesel fuel to 1L of uncompressed gaseous HHO.

ROFL!

Thread over.

[niky]

Originally Posted by samwichse

I like how his last calculation equated 1L of diesel fuel to 1L of uncompressed gaseous HHO.

ROFL!

Thread over.

He did say the calculations seemed wrong.

Didn't seem to realize why.

This is the problem with mixing volume units for liquids and gases.

And why we shold buy, sell and measure our liquid fuels in kilograms (or pounds).

Makes things so much easier to figure out.

[RedDevil]

One kilogram of uncompressed Brown's gas does not fit in the car, even if you'd utilize the entire passenger space. And that's a good thing. Any volume that's over a gram worth is dangerous.

[smallscaleH2]

Originally Posted by samwichse

I like how his last calculation equated 1L of diesel fuel to 1L of uncompressed gaseous HHO.
ROFL!
Thread over.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

One kilogram of uncompressed Brown's gas does not fit in the car, even if you'd utilize the entire passenger space. And that's a good thing. Any volume that's over a gram worth is dangerous.

I'm not sure where samwichse got the idea from that I compared diesel fuel to 1L of uncompressed gaseous HHO.
I only said that "I assumed you'd get about half the range of an electric car", given that you have high efficiency losses when generating HHo gas from a battery.
Also, I don't get why some of you seem to think that I need to store this amount of (uncompressed) gas in a single go onboard the vehicle. I wouldn't be using tanks remember, I would be generating it via an on-demand system (electrolyser). So I don't need to store much HHO gas at all.

Originally Posted by teoman

I am no expert but you may have to use a spark.

Yes. I came to the same conclusion.
See https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_...42-27/27BB.PDF

I think the best option here is just to mix plain hydrogen (not HHO) with a regular fuel in the combustion chamber. That doesn't clean up the exhaust emissions completely, but at least partially. So it would be an improvement, and I don't need to install a spark plug.
See here, here and here

Oh right, one more thing:

Originally Posted by RedDevil

If we just look at the differences:
EV conversion: + motor, motor controller;
HHO-Diesel: + Diesel engine, cooling system, tranny, exhaust system, electrolyser, power regulator...

With a conversion, I mean you would have an existing (working) Diesel vehicle you'd convert. So you don't need to buy a new Diesel engine, exhaust system, ... then.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by smallscaleH2

With a conversion, I mean you would have an existing (working) Diesel vehicle you'd convert. So you don't need to buy a new Diesel engine, exhaust system, ... then.

You'd still need the battery, that was my point there. And a big one too.
In effect you need a very big battery and still have way less range than the cheapest Leaf you could buy.
And you'd weigh down the car considerably. Ordinary cars would already be beyond their load capacity from that battery alone. There would not be much space left to load anyting either.
You'd have a chance if you replace the heavy engine and adjacent systems with a motor and controller, and of course you'd get a better range.

You choose diesel as a way of cutting cost, but the rest of the setup will annihilate any gain you could get there. With safety and practicality already gone, cost is no longer relevant either.
This goes nowhere.

[smallscaleH2]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

You'd still need the battery, that was my point there. And a big one too.
In effect you need a very big battery and still have way less range than the cheapest Leaf you could buy.
And you'd weigh down the car considerably. Ordinary cars would already be beyond their load capacity from that battery alone. There would not be much space left to load anyting either.

Agreed. The only benefit I initially saw regarding the battery was the voltage being lower with this (say 12 to 24 volt rather than 600 V for the Leaf electric motor -and mass-produced 12V batteries tend to be cheaper than high-voltage speciality batteries-). But given that I need so much batteries anyway, cost wouldn't be lower since if I wire the batteries in series, I can increase voltage considerably anyway.

Doesn't matter any more though. I shifted the approach to using hydrogen injection instead.

[teoman]

Build your HHO system and have it powered by an external battery.

Inject it with the fuel, see how much of a benefit you get.

Maybe you can slowly train your car to accept only hho.

[smallscaleH2]

Originally Posted by teoman

Build your HHO system and have it powered by an external battery.
Inject it with the fuel, see how much of a benefit you get.

Yes, HHO injection (and not HHO-only use) could also reduce the air pollution caused by the vehicle, and commercial HHO injection kits exist already. It's a possible alternative to the hydrogen injection I first proposed (and should be a bit cheaper), although it's somewhat less safe.

Do any other methods exist to reduce the air pollution (I'm not talking about reducing emissions, I really mean reducing the air pollution) ? What I've been thinking about is a sprayer that creates a water mist over the tailpipe outlet so that (a fair portion of) the exhaust gases are washed out. This idea is similar to this. The reason I mention to spray it over the outlet (rather than have it injected in the outlet is that this way, the outlet flow isn't reduced that much, so doesn't reduce performance of the engine. It won't work perfectly (there will still be some air pollution, even when hydrogen injection is also done) and it won't be able to reduce emissions either, but it should improve things compared to not doing it at all.

Plain rainwater could be used (rather than tap water). The only thing I'm not sure of is how much water is needed (per 1h of running) to achieve this, and what sprayer I best use ?