by Jehu » Wed Aug 04, 2010 9:51 am
Ahh, ok, so kinda like a nos style booster but delivering a constant delivery of H. Ok, it's doable, I had the same idea a few years back actually, but there is a few problems with it.
A big part of it is in storage of the hydrogen. The fact is there is more hydrogen in 1 Liter of Gasoline than there is in 1L of liquid hydrogen. Even the big tanks that can hold alot that are designed for use in converted cars tend to run out quickly. Though you don't have to worry about keeping it up right lie a booster
Contrast that with having a booster. Booster can provide a few psi which should be all you need, it's stable, not having to worry what is going to happen in an accident as it's pretty much just water and an electrolyte, most likely a smaller form factor and they are pretty reliable.
Oh and in regards to what burns hotter, I did some research and apparently the only way to get H to burn hotter than the other gasses I mentioned is to pass the stream of H2 through an electric arc. This splits the H2 into 2 H and that is where the real heat some from. However...I don't know if it is worth doing this in terms of total power used to split it vs the extra power from the added heat you will get.
Now, about the dyno. I don't know that much about them but this is what I do know. The basic idea is to get the rollers to spin as fast as you can. That's why you might see someone swap off their wide tires and put thin ones on, less friction and not as sticky compound slowing the parting of the rear tread from the rollers.
Now I'm not sure if they have a load on the rollers for some resistance. But knowing that the idea is to get it going as fast as it can one could theoretically find the power output by using a tacometer and a stop watch and a lot of maths. This is called an inertia dyno. The idea is to spin up a flywheel of a know weight to an rpm in a certain amount of time. once you have the data, weight and inertia of flywheel, rpm, time, accelleration, ect, you can then work out the power and torque.
I'm actually looking at a few sites now to find the calcs you need as I've forgotten them all and my notes from tafe are all packed away somewhere.
Ok, found a good one here hopefully this should have all the info you need on the dyno.
As to the other things, yeah, give them a go. Methane is great as a low pressure fuel for a stove, lamp or generator suppliment. It doesn't like to be compressed though but at least it's not getting vented to the atmosphere as it's a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
Ethanol is also good since you can buy everything commercially. Just go down to your local homebrew store as they have everything you need. If you know how to make moonshine, you can make your own ethanol fuel. I've been meaning to buy myself a still for a long while now and many of them can pull a 96% ethanol from the first run which is all you are gonna need if you plan on burning it and not drinking it.
As for the 5w electrolyser, a few of us have made them but for some strange reason we haven't actually run them to see if it works, lol. I've pretty much finished mine about a year ago but never bothered to fire it up yet. Btw it is an induction based one. Basically it's a 555 timer switching a MOSFET at a high frequency which is then pulsed through a coil of about 3000 turns. The coil is wrapped around a piece of 2in pvc tubing, capped at one end and filled with a saturated solution of NaOH. That's it basically.
Umm, that's all I can think of for now.