Diesel + LPG or Hydrogen?

[gldgti]

wow mate, please try to paragraph your posts... its lots easier to read that way

practical testing of an "on the fly" hydrogen booster really isnt needed, since if you sit down and have the time you can calc it all out that it wont work

(when i say wont work, i mean, you will have trouble measuring its effect)

using hydrogen as a supplementary fuel just like LPG or CNG or LNG works great, but as always, it all comes back to how you make the hydrogen...

maybe you could use an enormous electric dynamo and compressor connected to the driveline of a truck to do downhill braking for it, and make hydrogen, compress it all at once, and hten burn it going up the hill on the other side

[oracle1]

sorry mate

I get involved in verbal blurb i tend to get a bit passionate. As you may have guessed my maths is lacking and I am just an aircraft mechanic so I have lots of practical experience but I basically had to re teach myself calculus when I went to design my own aircraft. I have heaps of stress loadings here for my wing structure that I'm not coping with if your interested? In the end I just put the sandbags on and see if breaks, even the engineers insist on failure testing. Just Kidding Thanks for your input mate I like your style.

In the end hydrogen will work fine the problem is the cost of compressing it and storing it under enormous pressure within the vehicle.

Ive noticed a few posts there where you have advocated practical engineering vs whats theoretically possible. Just wait till i get my teeth into my golf unfortunately the freight company has lost my gearbox but the flywheel is back and machined so I might get some fun in this weekend!

On the big dynamo a guy has already done it he recovers inertia to pressurise a hydraulic diaphram system and then feeds the pressure back to the drivetrain when accelerating.

[gldgti]

On the big dynamo a guy has already done it he recovers inertia to pressurise a hydraulic diaphram system and then feeds the pressure back to the drivetrain when accelerating.

mega cool mate, i didnt know about that one - only have i seen a couple of small Hino hybrid trucks.

I do advocate practical engineering, but i find that forums are largely consisted of theorising without numbers to back up claims, so i occasionally try to throw some numbers into the mix to clear up some understanding for people... then i get enthused about really getting into it (like i still want to calc out the H2 production/unit power) but then i realise i could be better spending my time calcing out things in my uni assignments.... hahaha.

if your in need of stress calc help, i am happy to try to point you in the right direction or point you to some good reading atleast

cheers!

[oracle1]

very complex calc

Id be very interested to know the basic principle of the math involved, the nitty gritty would go over my head. The energy required to split the H2O molecule to make HHO Browns Gas is always going to be more counting losses than what would be recovered by the drivetrain. NAOH is also present as a catalyst, would that effect the energy input? Also we are not trying to simply burn the hydrogen, we are trying to harness the energy of unburnt diesel exiting the chamber.

The consensus seems to be that a diesel can have up to 15% unburnt fuel leaving via exhaust. (a filthy engine) A friend of mine fits LPG diesel and he acheived a 40% increase in fuel economy on a TD common rail twin cam toyota inline 6. I called him a liar till he showed me all the figures. The bottle he uses for the LPG would be lucky to be 25 litres and he reckoned it was a refill every four tanks of fuel.

In effect the Brown's gas is not a fuel per se it is a catalyst (just like LPG) to improve combustion so we recover energy from the calorific of the diesel that we have already inputed, rather than it being a simple energy in energy out calculation. My mind fogs over even trying to think about the math and i find it easier to build small scale examples. I have a great interest in peltic devices, mintos wheel etc to recover heat energy for electricity so fire away

[gldgti]

holy smokes... i'm not sure i believe it either... all the more reason for me to get my brain into gear i guess - WOW.

even if i could get 10-20% fuel economy improvement on my mk3, it'd be well worth it in my eyes.

when we say 15% unburned fuel - are we talking about at the smoke limit? i'm thinking it must be since when you check out the exhaust stack of a well tuned diesel running plenty of excess air and enough advance, it seems pretty darned clean.... but still

[oracle1]

thats why i doubted it

seen plenty of filthy semis spewing fuel everywhere, wouldn't be hard to recover fuel there, smoke = waste but a turbo diesel common rail twin cam inline toyota six with multi injection per cycle is a different beast.

In the early days he sold simple systems which simply fumigated the inlet but with the computerized system they have an injector of some sort which is governed by all the info egt coolant temp, the works. I have seen him put 5 different conversions on the sniffer at racq emissions testing, no dyno but emissions readouts dropped DRAMATICALLY especially NOX

I don't believe hydro will be very effective with gassers but I am interested if it can reproduce LPG results with the diesel. LPG system = 4000 bucks At the end of the day if you can get the same effect from a $400 home made hydro generator, no buying LPG and the engineering ain't that hard your home and hosed.

I am just so caught up with stuff ATM (four kids etc and all my other daydreams) its just one other project along with my solar and wind systems biodiesel, to much talk not enough action, oh and fitting the five speed to the golf

/www.teamgreenautogas.com.au/

[oracle1]

here is someone who has done a practical test

I tried several HHO conversions on a generator. The advantage of testing on a generator was I was able to control and measure the load on the engine very precisely. I also used the same setup to test propane and other gas injection.

Initially, I got a small decrease fuel economy so I changed running the HHO generator from the genset's alternator to an independant power supply. That allowed for a very slight increase in fuel economy, the best being about 5% when including the BTU content of the hydrogen. Next I tried the HHO at different injector timings and the first thing that I found was I could get almost a 5% improvement WITHOUT THE HHO by adjusting the timing. At that timing setting, I got a slight decrease in fuel economy with HHO.

After many more tests at different timings, different amounts of HHO, and wet or drt HHO, my conclusion is HHO CHANGES combustion but doesn't necessasarily improve combustion. For that repeatable test setup, HHO either improved or made the fuel economy worse of a diesel that was initially miss-tuned, depending on the direction of miss-tune. Compairing Diesel of VO only to Diesel of VO with HHO with both having the injection timing at their respective best, I got about a 2% improvement when the HHO generator was powered by an externall source. Powering the HHO generator from the alternator REDUCED the fuel economy by 3% to 10%. Under ideal conditions, it does not improve combustion enough to make up for the added load on the alternator and engine by the HHO generator itself.

So if someone is getting an improvement in fuel economy on the road with HHO, it is most likely that either they are making up for an engine miss-tune or they have changed their driving style to a more efficient style.
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Ron Schroeder