- 3396 - HYDROGEN - Cars Can Run on Water? Chrysler already has a car running on water. Daimler Chrysler built a concept car in 2003. It was called “Natrium” which is the Latin word for sodium. Na is the chemistry symbol for sodium.
--------------------- 3396 - HYDROGEN - Cars Can Run on Water?
- “Natrium” could travel at a top speed of 81 miles per hour and had a range of 311 miles. Instead of pure water they used sodium boron hydride. This went through a ruthenium, precious metal, catalytic converter that then reacted with water to liberate hydrogen which fed a fuel cell that runs electric motors.
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- Daimler Chrysler made their engineering far too complicated. The infrastructure that would have to exist to support these cars would be far too difficult. They stopped the project in 2003.
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- University of Minnesota working with Israel has devised a scheme that gets around all these problems. They simply react boron with water to produce hydrogen gas for an internal combustion engine, or for a fuel cell that could generate electricity for electric motors. The hydrogen is produced on-board, in the car.
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- The boron in the car is safe for transportation and storing. The by-product is boron oxide which can be removed from the car and reprocessed back into metallic boron using solar energy. In the reprocessing plant solar is used to heat the boron oxide with a magnesium powder.
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- Boron is released and magnesium oxide is formed. It in turn is reacted with chlorine to produce magnesium chloride. Electrolysis from the solar energy is used to produce magnesium metal and chlorine gas. The cycle is complete and pollution free.
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- The car would carry 40 pounds of boron and 12 gallons of water. The boron reacts with steam heated to 800 C to produce hydrogen and Boron oxide. The hydrogen is burned in the engine to produce water as the “exhaust”.
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- The car would run on 11 pounds of hydrogen stored in the gas tank. The 11 pounds of hydrogen is equivalent in energy to 11 gallons of gasoline. Everything is produced on board the car. There is no pollution. And, the byproducts are recyclable and pollution free as well. 40 pounds of boron at 0.65 a pound would cost $25.00 to fill up the tank.
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- Most high school chemistry classes demonstrate the violent reaction of sodium or potassium with water. The explosion tears away hydrogen from the oxygen. Boron does the same thing but at a much more manageable rate.
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- An Israeli company and a Japanese company, Samsung, have prototype engines that run on this boron/water fuel.
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- Another Israeli company called “Engineuity” uses a burning aluminum wire in the water to create the hydrogen gas. They hope to have a commercial version of the engine in just a few years.
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- “Powerball Technologies’ is a US company that uses sodium hydride powder in plastic balls to drop into the water and produce hydrogen.
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- The start-up power for these engines requires a battery only. Once the engines are running the heat generated by the boron/water reaction is used to heat the water into steam. So, the battery is only needed during start-up.
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- Another option to avoid the battery is to divert a small amount of hydrogen into a start-up tank. The whole system is self contained and truly zero emission.
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- The boron-hydrogen, on-board, engine solves two big problems with transporting and storing highly flammable hydrogen gas. Today Hydrogen is transported and stored in liquefied or compressed form. This liquefaction process alone uses up 40% of the energy content in the hydrogen.
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- Cars that produce hydrogen on demand would avoid the whole infrastructure problem caused with hydrogen gas pipelines or storage tanks. The only infrastructure that would be needed would be to transport and process boron oxide which is safe and easy.
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- As explained above this reprocessing plant can be solar powered and completely pollution free and easy to build. The engineering is stone simple.
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- The efficiency of the boron oxide reprocessing plant could run at 35%. The entire cycle including burning the hydrogen in the cars engine would be 11%. This is about the same efficiency as with gasoline engines today, which is 10%.
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- There are other ways to produce hydrogen that are competing with boron-hydrogen on-board alternatives. UC Berkeley is experimenting with hydrogen farms of clear tubes filled with water and teeming with algae stretching across California’s deserts and salt flats.
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- The Sun’s rays and the algae produce hydrogen gas in the tubes. Their calculations are that if we converted about 10% of the land that is now used for soy beans in the US into algae-hydrogen farms we could displace all the use of gasoline in the US. We need about 9,650 square miles of tubing.
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- Algae ( chlamydomonas reinardtii) in the sunlight produces hydrogen gas as a by-product of photosynthesis. Farmed hydrogen is as cheap as $1.40 / kilogram ($5.00/gallon) by 2015 using this process.
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- Ethanol and solar are also in the race. Which horse are you betting on?
- Cars that run on hydrogen are called “fuel-cell vehicles“. They are electric vehicles that get their energy from a fuel-cell stack rather than a battery pack. In current automotive uses, a fuel-cell stack is a suitcase-sized box that’s fed a mixture of hydrogen held in an onboard tank and oxygen from the air to create electricity through a chemical reaction.
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- A fuel cell is, in a way, a battery that can be refueled (as opposed to recharged). In today’s cars, that refueling can be accomplished in only about five minutes through a process similar to refueling a gas-only vehicle, whereas recharging a battery would take far longer.
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- Another beauty of the fuel-cell technology is that its only emissions are water and heat. Furthermore, the hydrogen that fuels it is the most abundant element on earth. The downside, however, is that hydrogen doesn’t occur naturally; it has to be separated from something else.
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- That “something else” can be water which is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, H2O. Unfortunately, the common way to separate that marriage is by shooting electricity through the water, and that requires generating electricity first though with wind, solar and hydro power, it can be a very clean process.
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- Although fuel-cell vehicles have been commercially available for a while, the EPA lists only three for the 2021 model year: the Honda Clarity, Hyundai Nexo, and Toyota Mirai.
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- That number will shrink, as Honda announced it’s canceling the Clarity after model-year 2021. All have ranges of about 350-400 miles per fill-up, roughly the same as gas-powered cars.
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- Although fuel-cell vehicles are rather new, the fuel-cell stack that powers them isn’t. History dates the invention back to 1839, with credit going to Welsh scientist William Robert Grove. However, fuel cells essentially took a long break until the 1960s, when they were used by NASA to generate power for satellites and space capsules.
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- Currently, there aren’t many hydrogen fueling stations, and most are in California centered around Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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- Since hydrogen is often considered the fuel of the future, more will undoubtedly pop up across the country over time. And, as a fuel cell can be scaled down to be quite small or scaled up to be quite powerful, it’s likely that more than just cars will be powered by them in the future.
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- Other reviews available on this subject:
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- 665 Is Ethanol in your Future.
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- 664 Nanotechnology and Solar Cells
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January 6, 2022 HYDROGEN - Cars Can Run on Water ? 669 3396
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