Thread: Liquid Oxygen

Tweet

I am a newbie to this Forum but evidently there was a thread entitled something like "No Free Lunch" or something like that pointing out that the energy to electrolyze the water to Hydrogen and Oxygen has to come from somewhere. There is a company in Florida which I used to consult for/to which has a patent on making a mixture of Methane and Hydrogen already premixed with some Oxygen and CO and has used this gas fuel in a Ferrari. Others on this Forum including Streets has pointed out that bottled propane is available and acts like 110 octane fuel. My problem with the use of fuels containing Hydrogen (especially premixed with some oxygen) is that the metering valve to the engine has to be capable of shutting off completely when the engine is not running because Hydrogen is the lightest gas and most easily diffuses through the slightest leak to make chance explosions a real problem. Apparently fork lift trucks and other vehicles using propane have good regulators, but it is not clear to me that regulators for heavier gases would be adequate for Hydrogen. Maybe braking could be coupled to electrolysis to generate Hydrogen and Oxygen from braking energy, but as far as using that fuel to run an engine which runs a generator which makes more gas fuel, that would be a perpetual motion machine which will not work in actual practice. Maybe braking energy could be used or bottled fuel gas could be made available at "gas stations", but I think the hazzard from gas fuels instead of liquid fuels could be a real challenge to saftey, but that is just my opinion. My adolescent dream in fitting with Streets' call for more humor above was to build an electric car covered with solar cells and park it under a street lamp at night to let the public utilities charge the battery for me. I believe that there are races every summer where college students build solar cars and race them across the U.S., I think that is called the "Sun Race"???? Unfortunately these cars have a problem on a cloudy day when the intensity of sunlight is reduced.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder