By David Ponce
$7,000 to $10,000 will soon be able to buy you a kit that transforms your car from a dirty gas guzzler into an eco-friendly hydrogen burner. In other words, you’ll be able to run your car on either gasoline, or hydrogen.
That’s right. With some special kits being developed by company United Nuclear, you won’t be using hydrogen as energy source for a fuel cell, like most of today’s hydrogen-as-energy source solutions. You’ll instead simply use the hydrogen as the fuel. And you won’t have to go around looking for places to purchase this hydrogen either. You’ll manufacture it yourself.
The system comes in two parts. First, you have the Hydrogen fuel system in your vehicle, and then a Hydrogen generating system that remains in your garage. The Hydrogen generator is either powered by solar electric panels or a wind turbine set-up, either of which makes Hydrogen fuel at virtually no cost. This hydrogen is then stored in hydride tanks.
The tanks are filled with granulated Hydrides, and Hydrogen is pressurized into the material. Hydrides have many advantages over liquid & gas. One is that the density of the Hydrogen stored in the Hydride can be GREATER than that of liquid Hydrogen. This translates directly into smaller and fewer storage tanks.
Once the Hydride is “charged” with Hydrogen, the Hydrogen becomes chemically bonded to the chemical. Even opening the tank, or cutting it in half will not release the Hydrogen gas. In addition, you could even fire incendiary bullets through the tank and the Hydride would only smolder like a cigarette. It is in fact, a safer storage system than your Gasoline tank is.
Then how do you get the Hydrogen back out? To release the Hydrogen gas from the Hydride, it simply needs to be heated. This is either done electrically, using the waste exhaust heat, or using the waste radiator coolant heat.
Our kits heat the Hydride tanks electrically, and as soon at the Hydride is sufficiently warm, Hydrogen is released from the tanks and the on-board computer detects the presence of Hydrogen pressure. The fuel system remains in “Hydrogen” mode until the tank pressure begins to drop. If the tanks run out of Hydrogen, the engine will seamlessly switch over to Gasoline, which enables the car to run conventionally until the Hydrogen tanks are refilled.
I say this is brilliant. I also say I’m a little worried about all the spelling mistakes on these people’s site. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this actually ever sees the light of commercial day. Check out the website. Story VIA Digg.