Petroleum/Hydrogen engine

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I've found a lot of work my dad did about 9-10 year ago on engines powered by a combination of petroleum and hydrogen, including designs for an entire infrastructure to harvest hydrogen, provide power supply etc. They are serously detailed and he want so far as to begin patent applications, unfortunately he passed away before completing the app and I don't think any one else understood what he was doing at the time or if he wasn't copying something he saw somehwere. From what little i can find BMW started a research initiative into it in 2004ish but i'm not sure what has developed since.

Does anybody have any particular knowledge in this area? Any idea when this sort of idea was first put forward and how foar it has developed?

I'm wondering if it's worth looking into what rights i have regarding intellectual property. considering it was just my dad working from a bedsit on the dole with only a public library for research i obviously have serous doubts but the plans etc are very detailed. Might have been sitting on a nest egg for the past decade! (then again maybe not)

Sorry, it won't go anywhere.

From memory, this sort of thing has been underway for a lot longer than this.

With regard to Intellectual Property, don't even go there. Before anyone else unveiled theirs, you would have to:-

1. Go through an arduous, time-consuming, draining and costly patenting exercise whereby you would have to prove that there was an innovation, something unique, worthy of legal protection. We are talking mega-bucks and you can throw in lawyers, patenting agents, engineers etc etc etc etc.....
2. While all of this was going on, you would have to maintain total secrecy (once your technology becomes part of the 'status quo' you effectively lose the right to profit from it or control its application.
3. You would have the joy of partnering with a large automobile producer, presumably, in order to get your car marketed.

But, the bottomline is, it's all a bit too late. Sorry. Hold on to the work that he left though, because it shows what a great man he was.

BMW did some research into hydrogen burning internal combustion engines. I have no idea what materialised from it.

Have you read Fuel From Water by Michael Peavey?

Free hydrogen is hard to come by. Most of the hydrogen on this planet is locked up in water molecules. To get free hydrogen from water, the H20 molecule must be dissociated which involves an input of energy. Unfortunately the energy gained from "burning" the hydrogen (in a fuel cell or in combination with oxygen) is less than the energy expended in dissociating the hydrogen from the water. So it is a losing proposition from the git-go. At best hydrogen is an energy storage medium and an inefficient mode of energy storage at that. It is not a primary source of energy except in the case of thermonuclear fusion reactions.

ruveyn

Have you ever wondered how much energy it takes to produce a gallon of hydrocarbon fuel? The energy required to extract the oil from the well to delivering the fuel to the tank and everything in between.

Can't say I have, is it any good?




the plans I have hold of go into some detail concerning how to extract the hydrogen, but yeah i read that was the priamry concern with hydrogen, takes too much to get out of water.

Thermonuclear fusion - however - looks too me as a layperson like an awesome possibility. I've read some articles suggesting a combination of deuterium (or tritium is it? tritium sounds like product of deuterium fusion off top of head) and helium-3 (i think, might be hydrogen-3) being more efficient than deuterium-deuterium. Excellent source of helium-3 being....the moon! apparently. which means economiclally viable colonies as well as scientific outposts (so long as getting it back to earth isn't a stumbling block for too long). Given that the big 3 (Russia, US, China) are all considering reusable, landable rockets and shuttles it seems the two developing together might, just might be a damn good place to start. Next. Warp Drive.

It's worth reading.



Arrhenius proposed using wind power to electrolyse water into hydrogen and the French had plans for a nuclear hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is also very difficult to store in quantity. Perhaps carbon nanotubes can solve this problem.

nanotubes? these could be used to provide increased surface area for extraction process (hydrolosis?) as well. I've seen some of the plans of how to make them, not sure how you could do it with carbon (short polymer chains locked into a gold matrix with a current sent through it perhaps? current provided by wind/wave/solar energy?), aren't there also ways of changing the properties of the nanotube to be selectively porous/change their bonding properties etc.? perhaps there is a way of using this to make the nanotubes recycleable?

Controlled nuclear fusion has been 30 years in the future for the last 60 years. A hundred years from now it will be 30 years in the future. The only sure source of fusion power is sunlight.

ruveyn

not to be particularly dense (haven't done chemistry in school since '72.. but wouldn't binding hydrogen to carbon create...hydrocarbons?... unless that's not what's going on...

i'm not sure but i think the oxygen in water will bond with carbon before/better than the hydrogen would, i think you could use something akin to rods of coke to 'capture' the oxygen by seperating it from the hydrogen, which is then heavily compressed to make liquid hydrogen for storage. I think.

should be some chemists wandering around in here. I've been told that it's a pretty strong bond, and takes a lot of energy to break down. There are other ways of getting hydrogen, maybe more easily collected. however, I don't know off the top of my head what they are... I think zinc and hydrocloric acid release hydrogen; it was used in the 19th century for that.

Since the early 1800's there is a kind of self-lighting lighter around - Döbereiner's Lamp:



I learned about this device in school as an early example of a cybernetic model.

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I am strong doubt that this economic on large scale: You need energy to produce zinc and the acid. So I strongly assume that the all-over energy balance is highly negative. That's fine a small flame for lighting cigars, but on an industrial scale even more idiotic than burning petrol.

I think that hydrogen as a fuel which you buy from the petrol station and store in your car is a non starter, it has a lower energy density than petrol or diesel fuel. Also it is harder to store than petrol.

The only ways that I think H2 could be used as a fuel is if it was made by steam cracking, and then using a water gas shift reaction carbon monoxide could be made. The CO is a great feedstock for chemicals, if you choose the right heterogenous cat you can convert H2 and CO into either methane or motor fuel.

At the other end of the energy chain, if you reform hydrocarbon into H2 it is possible to use it as a fuel for a fuel cell. But reforming is not easy.

I think that the idea of the zero emissions car which runs on H2 is not right, it is just an emission elsewhere car.