Solar > Battery > HHO ??

[unclewolf]

hey i'm new to this forum and fairly new to HHO, but I have been reading a lot over the last few days and trying to decide what direction to head with my interest. my original intent was to try and run a boat (has a standard GM 350 5.7L engine it it) purely off of hydrogen. this would mostly be a science/art project...so i'm less concerned about if it is completely logical..just would like it to work.

since i have yet to come upon designs that show safe ways to store excess hydrogen (that are within my budget/ability) i was wondering if it would be possible to get an old prius battery, and then use that to create enough hydrogen via eloctrolysis while underway so as to fuel the engine completely? is that a nonsense idea? my thought was that storing electricity in a battery is safer than storing hydrogen.

i'm a solar contractor by trade so setting up something where i could charge the hybrid car battery via solar during the week and then cruise a little bit on the weekends powered by hydrogen. obviously going from solar to a battery to hydrogen would create lots of losses along the way...but wondering if the idea is even worth pursuing. if it is i'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of similar system designs?

thanks for any thoughts.

[Jay2TheRescue]

There is a loss with every form change the energy makes. To convert from solar, to battery, to HHO, and then burn... You won't be able to synthesize enough HHO on demand to power the engine. You are better off trying to power electric boat motors with the Prius battery, and recharging it with solar energy.

[unclewolf]

That is sort of what I was assuming...but the package to put an electric motor in there is waaay out of my budget. I guess I am still interested (strictly as an exercise) to see how everything (batteries, HHO system, etc) would need to be sized in order to make something like that work.

In order to do that I would need to figure out how much hydrogen (in liters?) it takes to run an 8 cylinder ICE, and also how many watts of electrical energy it would take to make a liter of hydrogen. After that I can factor in the losses (which obviously will add up).

Lets assume I currently burn a gallon of gas an hour.

It seems like a gallon of gas is equivalent to 357.37 cu ft or 10,119 liters of Hydrogen (based off info from the wikipedia link posted below). If I burn a gallon of gas an hour then that means I would need to produce 166 liters of Hydrogen a minute (obviously this is pretty rough but I'm just trying to get an idea).

Somewhere else I grabbed an equation (the Faraday Law?) that states that it takes 2.4 watt hours to produce a liter of hydrogen at 100% efficiency. If that were the case it would meant that it would take 24,285 watt hours (24.28 kWh) to run the engine assuming everything was 100% efficient.

Does that rough math seem appropriate?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoli...lon_equivalent

[Jay2TheRescue]

I'm not sure about how much is required. I know that HHO production by electrolysis is not a fast process. I remember when I was in high school a kid rigged a lawnmower engine to run on hydrogen for the science fair. He had to run the electrolysis for hours to make enough hydrogen to run the lawnmower for about 30 seconds.