Yeah, what always pissed me off were the ignorant fools who thought you could simply power a car off water... and have nothing but water come out the exhaust pipe.

Their idea was that you'd use electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn the hydrogen to make the car run.... Chemistry tells you that if you break water apart, it takes a certain amount of energy... recombining it releases the *same amount* of energy. To do any different would create an infinite power source, or an infinite power sink... neither of which exist.

So you have to either:
1. Pump Hydrogen in the way you pump gasoline in, and just burn it straight
or
2. Use a stored power source such as battery power or another energy-producing process such as the 'reforming' mentioned above.

I'm not an expert, but I know one thing:
Energy In = Energy Out

Jon

 

Has any one ever thought about 80-90% hydrogen peroxide? It reacts violently with nickel producing super hot steam around 1600 degrees, if I remember correctly. The right placement of nickel on the rotor and a placement of a vent to remove the water and steam produced. Sounds cool. Just something I thought about after organic chemistry one day.

 

The problem with that long is its a chemical reaction and would prolly use nickel adams on the face of the rotor and the nickel on the rotor would be reduced to nothing...

 

Hey if you know the people I would be MORE then happy to do so... and while I am makeing my last reply on this thread I would like to add that the bigger rotary motors that were developed made ALOT more low end power... its not so much the rotary motor by nature that stops it from makeing large amounts of torque... its the size of the motor... the larger displacement motors made by chevy made MUCH MUCH MUCH more power down low...

 

Manntis, this sounds like an exellent idea. Keep me posted on it.

 

I'll throw in a few things here for fun (I'm at work bored).

On the water in the car thing, vipernicus is basically right, except those processes themselves will also entail a good bit of losses, so you gotta factor that in to the energy equation. You'd have to store a ton of power to pull that off.

On the hybrids themselves:
One of my senior projects back in college was actually to convert a Suburban to a hybrid. Due to some time constraints, a lot of the stock parts remained, including engine and transmission/transfer case. The electric motor actually tied into the driveshaft after the transmission. With this, you could use any transmission you wanted really. And because of costs, we did end up running regular 12v lead acid cells, if I recall correctly in a combination of series and parallel. We modified other stuff too, but that's not important for this discussion.

It was a real easy system to implement. You could easily do it in a 7. The down side with the lead acid set up was weight. The truck ended up weighing 6500lbs. Still ran a quarter mile around 16.5 to 16.7 and had absolutely no problems pulling around 5500lbs. Averaged in the ballpark of like 18mpg I think too. It ended up being improved a bunch later though after the 1st deadline.

The biggest drawback on this though is the cost. I think the electric motor and controller came in around $45000 for the set up, since it was custom. Add batteries, a bunch of other crap (special cats, exhaust, a bunch of custom stuff) and the cost of the project was somewhere in the neighborhood of like $120000 not including the truck (which was a donation anyway).

Was fun to do though .

 

why did you put the circular induction motor after the tranny, instead of where the flywheel would go?

 

Time mostly. We only had a few months to do the project, maybe had the motor 2 weeks before it had to be finished.

 

HuH?? Whathe???