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I hate to think we-USA -will have to give up roadtrips across our spectacular country because of very understandable CO2 concerns, and understandable foreign energy dependence concerns. With 40 mpg+ vehicles we shouldn't have to. With plug in vehicles maybe someday they will have 400 mile ranges with quick change battery packs, or even 2-3 hour charge times.
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Charlie, I drove up to northern Iowa with the Shandong Pioneer trike in tow and visited Ted Hollinger at his Hydrogen Engine Center (HYEG.PK). Ted's in Iowa because it's the only state that lets him mess around with hydrogen gas without overly-restrictive regulations. Ted takes conventional 6-cylinder blocks and sections them, lowering the crank and making the cylinders deeper, and welds them back together in 2,3,4 and 6 cylinder configuration. Then he reengineers the assembly to get the most power out of hydrogen. He fabricates intake manifold hydrogen injectors and discards the distributor cap, rotor and plug wires, using instead a computerized sensor off the crankshaft that fires a super-high voltage spark with timing and duration that varies according to load and mixture ratio.
Unlike gasoline, hydrogen delivers a push from TDC to BDC - all the way down - in one incredibly efficient power stroke. In fact, the efficiency of Ted's internal combustion hydrogen engines is so close to PEM fuel cells that there seems to be little practical difference. The compression ratios can go beyond that of diesel engines, limited only by materials technology, I think, using two-stage turbochargers to pack enough oxygen into the cylinders for an ideal stochiometric mix.
Ted showed me a shipping container with five V10 turbocharged gensets pumping out 250 kW. These are a modular design that can be ganged together to produce any level of required power from hydrogen. One of the five gensets is a standby unit, ready to fire up in an instant, so the container does not drop from maximum deliverable power if an engine goes down. This standby unit rotates automatically with the other units so that all five engines age equally. Most amazing, as demand drops off, the engines shut down in sequence until the final engine is all that remanis running - then that engine begins shutting down its unneeded cylinders until only a maintenance level of amperage is delivered at the specified AC voltage.
Ted was the chief electronics engineer for the Ford hybrid. He designed the chips for the controller. He went on to head the ICE division of Ballard Fuel Cells, then started the Hydrogen Engine Center in Algona a few years ago.
The big problem with hydrogen - the show stopper - is that although you can make it from windpower and water, ethanol or natural gas, it has a terribly thin energy density. You have to compress it to five or ten thousand psi to get an acceptable range out of a vehicle. That compression is an energy-intensive process that makes hydrogen less attractive financially. The refrigeration of hydrogen into a liquid has the same problem, although BMW has shown it can be done.
So Ted has become one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the internal combustion of ammonia, NH3. Just like hydrogen burning in air, ammonia burns without carbon. The only pollutant is NOX which can be minimized almost to a trace, and certainly much lower than any other internal combustion engine. Ted calls ammonia "the other hydrogen." He is working with the University of Iowa to perfect ammonia as a transportation fuel.
He walked me to a special 6 cylinder engine on his huge assembly floor. There were two injector rails on the intake manifold - one for propane and one for ammonia. This prototype engine had proven that ammonia could be ignited and used as a liquid fuel. This is important because ammonia holds one and a half times more hydrogen than liquid hydrogen in volume. Ted believes the challenge of dealing with the toxicity of ammonia is far easier than the problems associated with the liquifaction or compression of hydrogen.
The Iowa Energy Center has a good selection of published papers on the potential of ammonia as a transportation fuel here
http://www.energy.iastate.edu/Renewa...a/cs/index.htm
The Sixth Annual Ammonia Conference will be held this October 12-13 at the Kansas City Expo Center.
http://www.energy.iastate.edu/Renewa...moniaMtg09.htm
When I first heard about the idea of using ammonia as a substitute for gasoline, I thought, "No way. It's too stinky!" But Ted got me thinking. Knowing what I know about fueling vehicles with hydrogen, which can ignite with as little as four percent hydrogen mixed with air, it really doesn't seem to be such a big deal to just keep ammonia fumes isolated to the fill line and inside of the tank. It might even be safer overall than, say, gasoline - which is itself really dangerous stuff, even though we've all grown used to it.
So I asked Ted, "If you guys get this to work, is it going to meet a niche market or be a 'game-changing' technology?"
"A game changer," he said, without the slightest doubt.
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