9 ms·

New system retrofits diesel engines to run on 90% hydrogen

41 points by bubblehack3r 4y ago

the_third_wave 4y ago
New system... well, not really. This is how diesel engines have been run on wood gas for decades. The engine is fitted with a throttle valve and aspires wood gas which is then ignited by a small ignition charge of diesel. The regulator - which normally controls the injection charge - is disconnected and set to a fixed charge more or less equivalent to what is needed to idle the engine. Engine speed is regulated using the throttle valve which controls the amount of aspired wood gas/air mixture. The combustible components of wood gas are mostly carbon monoxide with some hydrogen depending on the water content of the wood. Most of it is nitrogen due to wood gas being produced using air.
- nanomonkey 4y ago
  I came here to say pretty much the same thing. When I was working at All Power Labs we did exactly this, ran a 150kW Cummins turbo diesel generator off of wood gas. I had the woodgas control unit tell the generator to inject the minimum amount of diesel to idle, then adjusted the power output by adjusting a butterfly valve throttle of stoichiometric mixture of woodgas and air (well, likely lean so that there was added oxygen for the diesel). I wish more folks were interested in woody biomass gasification. There is a tremendous amount of biomass in the world that could be utilized for power production that will already be burned or composted (releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere).
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Having worked at APL you might have an idea whether that project/company is still ongoing, their website seems to have stalled somewhere around 2019? I've toyed with building a GEK or some sort of derivative but this has not gotten pas the drawing stage yet. My interest lies mainly in combined heat-power generation from wood chips as that is a fuel often used by farmers around here, it would be beneficial is they got electrical power 'for free' in the process. From what I've seen at APL their products and prices are mostly tailored to NGOs and research institutes, I'm aiming for something which can be afforded by the average farmer. Especially with the looming 'energy crisis' there should be a market for such, it also combines well with a solar PV installation in that the latter can provide power and hot water in late spring and summer while the former provides more heat and electricity in winter.
    - nanomonkey 4y ago
      They are still going, but mostly in research on biochar generation. Creating electricity was deemed a race to the bottom as solarpanels have become so ubiquitous. They recently had an open house where they suggested that this would be their new focus. When I worked there, I tried to shoot for something closer to what you are interested in. I assumed that farmers and forest management groups would want a small gasification unit that could be trailered to a location and used to run chippers, pelletizers and produce heat and hot water for workers, etc. The 10 and 20 kW power pallets do all this...but were never really as reliable as they need to be for the price point ($35k). Getting them grid tied was a huge expense even though easily doable. I've been contemplating a smaller ~2kW version that would put out a households amount of electricity and hot water for domestic usage, but I really don't like internal combustion engines, and believe that this is the ideal use case for a Sterling engine generator. Sadly those are impossible to find, and as WhisperGen went out of business I don't believe there are businesses interested in making them available.
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        Well, I'm in Sweden which seems to be somewhat of a Stirling engine knowledge centre with Kockums (a shipyard) using them for "undetectable" submarines and Swedish Stirling [1] (a company based around Kockums' Stirling technology) using them for CHP installations running off flare gas and other waste gases for heat and power. That's all fine but their products are aimed at small-scale utilities and industry, not individual farm or single-household domestic applications. There are plenty of toy Stirling engines around and clearly also plenty of large-scale ones but I have not found one in the 15-30 kW range I'm aiming for. It would be possible to build one but it would be much easier to get one off the shelf somewhere. Another option I've been toying with is a small gas turbine [2] which should increase reliability and lower maintenance over a piston ICE - which I assume is the reason you don't like ICEs in these applications?. Has APL considered that route? [1] https://swedishstirling.com/ https://swedishstirling.com/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/micro-gas-turbine https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/micro-gas-t...
        4y ago
jacknews 4y ago
Many of the big mining trucks are diesel-electric. In that case, it would be better to aim for hydrogen fuel-cell-electric power plants.
greenthrow 4y ago
This is not a good idea. You have to expend a lot of energy to create the hydrogen. Then a lot more energy to compress, transport and re-compress at every stage of delivery. To then burn the hydrogen and get yet another terribly inefficient conversion... ugh.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Umm batteries all have that problem
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Batteries don't burn anything
    - Maursault 4y ago
      except for planes
      - jimmygrapes 4y ago
        And people: https://timesofindia.com/gadgets-news/apple-watch-series-7-overheats-blows-up-in-owners-hand-report/articleshow/94683175.cms https://timesofindia.com/gadgets-news/apple-watch-series-7-o...
    - elil17 4y ago
      No, but they do require a lot of nasty metals to make, whereas hydrogen combustion can be done with more commonplace materials.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Yeah but batteries spin motors which are 90+% efficient. ICE is < 50%. And we have electrical distribution pretty much figured out already.
    - elil17 4y ago
thebetatester 4y ago
It doesn't mention whether this changes the power/torque output of the engine which is a big consideration for diesel engines
- coding123 4y ago
  it sounds like they're using it for generating electricity, so power/torque problems go away (I would think)
  - skhameneh 4y ago
    Yes, with mention of needing a storage system for trucks. > "At mining sites, where hydrogen is piped in, we can convert the existing diesel engines that are used to generate power," says Prof. Kook. > "In terms of applications where the hydrogen fuel would need to be stored and moved around, for example in a truck engine that currently runs purely on diesel, then we would also need to implement a hydrogen storage system to be integrated into our injection system.
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Hydrogen gas turbines have you covered with torque.
moltar 4y ago
> The researchers say that any diesel engine used in trucks and power equipment in the transportation, agriculture and mining industries could ultimately be retrofitted to the new hybrid system in just a couple of months. Not sure what they mean here. Is it the tech is a couple of month away from being production ready? Or does it take two months of work effort to retrofit the engine? If so, how many people are working?
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  > Or does it take two months of work effort to retrofit the engine? If so, how many people are working? The research team hope to be able to commercialize the new system in the next 12 to 24 months and are keen to consult with prospective investors. Also I'm assuming they're talking about the big mining and farming machines: [...] it could play a big part in making our carbon footprint much smaller, especially in Australia with all our mining, agriculture and other heavy industries where diesel engines are widely used. Still, would surely need some gov't incentives one way or another to make a couple of months of work look like a good deal.
nigrioid 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
- smitty1e 4y ago
  So, if the engine isn't designed to deal with embrittlement, one suspects a shorter lifespan? I love my two TDI diesel cars, and I hope that capitalism finds the diversity to satisfy the market for the electric-nonplussed among us.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    All hail capitalism?
    - smitty1e 4y ago
      Capitalism, yes; materialism, no. Do great work for its own sake, but leave greed to the godless.
  - basicplus2 4y ago
    Biodiesel
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      And E-diesel.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Capitalism seems to have no trouble selling you those diesel cars. It's dealing with the consequences of their emissions or ensuring that they have a long term fuel supply that is the problem.
- frxx 4y ago
  I am not a physicist but I was thinking this was mostly a topic for hydrogen storage. And it seems the article agrees here: "[...] most metals are relatively immune to hydrogen embrittlement at temperatures above 150 °C."
ck2 4y ago
Awesome. There needs to be a federal program in the USA to help (force) every city to convert every single one of their public transport and school buses to hydrogen. Garbage trucks would be a nice bonus. They all go back to a central depot every day/night and the amount of pollution their engines put out right next to people every day is staggering. Every time one of them goes by me as a pedestrian makes me gag. Can't imagine what that does to someone's health over a lifetime.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  We have a great way of distributing energy with no local pollution over a fixed route. It's called a wire. Light rail also doesn't create pm2.5 pollution from tyres.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect you could math it out and the result wouldn’t be that much. Also they could have already converted those to CNG or propane if they’d wanted to.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Air pollution is estimated to contribute to 7 million premature deaths each year (https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2). That's about one in ten deaths where air pollution was a factor (obviously it's somewhat complicated because things like lung problems don't have a single clean cause).
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I haven’t run the math but the percentage of air pollution caused by garbage trucks is probably relatively small.
      - elil17 4y ago
        As I understand it this technology would work for many diesel vehicles.
ratsmack 4y ago
>Hydrogen production is the family of industrial methods for generating hydrogen gas. As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification. Unless there is a something I'm missing, it seems that large scale hydrogen production isn't very 'green'.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  We're rapidly approaching a time where creating electrolysed hydrogen is cheap compared to mining fossil fuels (let alone cracking it and losing a bunch of heat). Storage may still be a deal breaker for some applications, but if a handful of the many emerging electrolyser technologies commercialise you'll be looking at green hydrogen from the cheap 10am-2pm solar energy for <$1/kg pretty soon. 50c is an optimistic but somewhat realistic estimate by the 2030s Being able to mix and match that with fossil fuels on existing infrastructure will cut emissions from those activities by >80% during the warmer months (or year round in the tropics)
- jokoon 4y ago
  Maybe it would be if nuclear plants would be dedicated to electrolysis. But since electrolysis is inefficient, it would require a lot of nuclear energy.
  - jmpman 4y ago
    In vehicles, high pressure tanks are required to store hydrogen. However, if you’re looking to store hydrogen cheaply, and volume is not a consideration, what’s the cheapest method? Trying to understand if large solar farms could economically load shift using hydrogen storage tanks
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    You can produce hydrogen at home using blue algaea, but something tells me politicians aren't interested in voluntary individual solutions.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Compare the IR-absorption spectra of water vapor, and CO2. This retrofit will not have the expected effect on man-made atmospheric warming.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Doesn't water vapor come down as rain whereas CO2 stays up in the atmosphere?
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Vapor stays in the air until it condenses and falls as liquid rain. CO2 is denser than air, and though it billows with the wind, it tends to stay low; That's why spelunking is so dangerous.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      Ok, so my point is that water vapor is only there temporarily but CO2 is there permanently (unless a plant turns it into oxygen or some carbon capture program grabs it). Since water vapor is only there temporarily, I don't think it'll have nearly as big of a global warming effect.
      - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
        Individual molecules ov vapor may be there temporarily, but atmospheric water vapor is constantly replenished .
        Thorrez 4y ago
        My point is that driving an engine that emits just water vapor for 1 day won't have a permanent effect on the atmosphere, because the water vapor it emits will eventually rain down, and the level of water vapor in the atmosphere will go back to what it was before driving the water-vapor-emitting engine. On the other hand, driving an engine that emits just CO2 for 1 day will have a permanent effect on the atmosphere because the CO2 will stay there.
Hnrobert42 4y ago
Does hydrogen have safety problems? I’m thinking about “Oh the humanity!”

41 points by bubblehack3r 4y ago

New system... well, not really. This is how diesel engines have been run on wood gas for decades. The engine is fitted with a throttle valve and aspires wood gas which is then ignited by a small ignition charge of diesel. The regulator - which normally controls the injection charge - is disconnected and set to a fixed charge more or less equivalent to what is needed to idle the engine. Engine speed is regulated using the throttle valve which controls the amount of aspired wood gas/air mixture. The combustible components of wood gas are mostly carbon monoxide with some hydrogen depending on the water content of the wood. Most of it is nitrogen due to wood gas being produced using air.

nanomonkey 4y ago
I came here to say pretty much the same thing. When I was working at All Power Labs we did exactly this, ran a 150kW Cummins turbo diesel generator off of wood gas. I had the woodgas control unit tell the generator to inject the minimum amount of diesel to idle, then adjusted the power output by adjusting a butterfly valve throttle of stoichiometric mixture of woodgas and air (well, likely lean so that there was added oxygen for the diesel). I wish more folks were interested in woody biomass gasification. There is a tremendous amount of biomass in the world that could be utilized for power production that will already be burned or composted (releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere).
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Having worked at APL you might have an idea whether that project/company is still ongoing, their website seems to have stalled somewhere around 2019? I've toyed with building a GEK or some sort of derivative but this has not gotten pas the drawing stage yet. My interest lies mainly in combined heat-power generation from wood chips as that is a fuel often used by farmers around here, it would be beneficial is they got electrical power 'for free' in the process. From what I've seen at APL their products and prices are mostly tailored to NGOs and research institutes, I'm aiming for something which can be afforded by the average farmer. Especially with the looming 'energy crisis' there should be a market for such, it also combines well with a solar PV installation in that the latter can provide power and hot water in late spring and summer while the former provides more heat and electricity in winter.
  - nanomonkey 4y ago
    They are still going, but mostly in research on biochar generation. Creating electricity was deemed a race to the bottom as solarpanels have become so ubiquitous. They recently had an open house where they suggested that this would be their new focus. When I worked there, I tried to shoot for something closer to what you are interested in. I assumed that farmers and forest management groups would want a small gasification unit that could be trailered to a location and used to run chippers, pelletizers and produce heat and hot water for workers, etc. The 10 and 20 kW power pallets do all this...but were never really as reliable as they need to be for the price point ($35k). Getting them grid tied was a huge expense even though easily doable. I've been contemplating a smaller ~2kW version that would put out a households amount of electricity and hot water for domestic usage, but I really don't like internal combustion engines, and believe that this is the ideal use case for a Sterling engine generator. Sadly those are impossible to find, and as WhisperGen went out of business I don't believe there are businesses interested in making them available.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      Well, I'm in Sweden which seems to be somewhat of a Stirling engine knowledge centre with Kockums (a shipyard) using them for "undetectable" submarines and Swedish Stirling [1] (a company based around Kockums' Stirling technology) using them for CHP installations running off flare gas and other waste gases for heat and power. That's all fine but their products are aimed at small-scale utilities and industry, not individual farm or single-household domestic applications. There are plenty of toy Stirling engines around and clearly also plenty of large-scale ones but I have not found one in the 15-30 kW range I'm aiming for. It would be possible to build one but it would be much easier to get one off the shelf somewhere. Another option I've been toying with is a small gas turbine [2] which should increase reliability and lower maintenance over a piston ICE - which I assume is the reason you don't like ICEs in these applications?. Has APL considered that route? [1] https://swedishstirling.com/ https://swedishstirling.com/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/micro-gas-turbine https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/micro-gas-t...
      - 4y ago

jacknews 4y ago

Many of the big mining trucks are diesel-electric. In that case, it would be better to aim for hydrogen fuel-cell-electric power plants.

greenthrow 4y ago

This is not a good idea. You have to expend a lot of energy to create the hydrogen. Then a lot more energy to compress, transport and re-compress at every stage of delivery. To then burn the hydrogen and get yet another terribly inefficient conversion... ugh.

rdtwo 4y ago
Umm batteries all have that problem
- CyanBird 4y ago
  Batteries don't burn anything
  - Maursault 4y ago
    except for planes
    - jimmygrapes 4y ago
      And people: https://timesofindia.com/gadgets-news/apple-watch-series-7-overheats-blows-up-in-owners-hand-report/articleshow/94683175.cms https://timesofindia.com/gadgets-news/apple-watch-series-7-o...
  - elil17 4y ago
    No, but they do require a lot of nasty metals to make, whereas hydrogen combustion can be done with more commonplace materials.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Yeah but batteries spin motors which are 90+% efficient. ICE is < 50%. And we have electrical distribution pretty much figured out already.
  - elil17 4y ago

thebetatester 4y ago

It doesn't mention whether this changes the power/torque output of the engine which is a big consideration for diesel engines

coding123 4y ago
it sounds like they're using it for generating electricity, so power/torque problems go away (I would think)
- skhameneh 4y ago
  Yes, with mention of needing a storage system for trucks. > "At mining sites, where hydrogen is piped in, we can convert the existing diesel engines that are used to generate power," says Prof. Kook. > "In terms of applications where the hydrogen fuel would need to be stored and moved around, for example in a truck engine that currently runs purely on diesel, then we would also need to implement a hydrogen storage system to be integrated into our injection system.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Hydrogen gas turbines have you covered with torque.

moltar 4y ago

> The researchers say that any diesel engine used in trucks and power equipment in the transportation, agriculture and mining industries could ultimately be retrofitted to the new hybrid system in just a couple of months. Not sure what they mean here. Is it the tech is a couple of month away from being production ready? Or does it take two months of work effort to retrofit the engine? If so, how many people are working?

magicalhippo 4y ago
> Or does it take two months of work effort to retrofit the engine? If so, how many people are working? The research team hope to be able to commercialize the new system in the next 12 to 24 months and are keen to consult with prospective investors. Also I'm assuming they're talking about the big mining and farming machines: [...] it could play a big part in making our carbon footprint much smaller, especially in Australia with all our mining, agriculture and other heavy industries where diesel engines are widely used. Still, would surely need some gov't incentives one way or another to make a couple of months of work look like a good deal.

nigrioid 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

smitty1e 4y ago
So, if the engine isn't designed to deal with embrittlement, one suspects a shorter lifespan? I love my two TDI diesel cars, and I hope that capitalism finds the diversity to satisfy the market for the electric-nonplussed among us.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  All hail capitalism?
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    Capitalism, yes; materialism, no. Do great work for its own sake, but leave greed to the godless.
- basicplus2 4y ago
  Biodiesel
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    And E-diesel.
- elil17 4y ago
  Capitalism seems to have no trouble selling you those diesel cars. It's dealing with the consequences of their emissions or ensuring that they have a long term fuel supply that is the problem.
frxx 4y ago
I am not a physicist but I was thinking this was mostly a topic for hydrogen storage. And it seems the article agrees here: "[...] most metals are relatively immune to hydrogen embrittlement at temperatures above 150 °C."

ck2 4y ago

Awesome. There needs to be a federal program in the USA to help (force) every city to convert every single one of their public transport and school buses to hydrogen. Garbage trucks would be a nice bonus. They all go back to a central depot every day/night and the amount of pollution their engines put out right next to people every day is staggering. Every time one of them goes by me as a pedestrian makes me gag. Can't imagine what that does to someone's health over a lifetime.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
We have a great way of distributing energy with no local pollution over a fixed route. It's called a wire. Light rail also doesn't create pm2.5 pollution from tyres.
bombcar 4y ago
I suspect you could math it out and the result wouldn’t be that much. Also they could have already converted those to CNG or propane if they’d wanted to.
- elil17 4y ago
  Air pollution is estimated to contribute to 7 million premature deaths each year (https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2). That's about one in ten deaths where air pollution was a factor (obviously it's somewhat complicated because things like lung problems don't have a single clean cause).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I haven’t run the math but the percentage of air pollution caused by garbage trucks is probably relatively small.
    - elil17 4y ago
      As I understand it this technology would work for many diesel vehicles.

ratsmack 4y ago

>Hydrogen production is the family of industrial methods for generating hydrogen gas. As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification. Unless there is a something I'm missing, it seems that large scale hydrogen production isn't very 'green'.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
We're rapidly approaching a time where creating electrolysed hydrogen is cheap compared to mining fossil fuels (let alone cracking it and losing a bunch of heat). Storage may still be a deal breaker for some applications, but if a handful of the many emerging electrolyser technologies commercialise you'll be looking at green hydrogen from the cheap 10am-2pm solar energy for <$1/kg pretty soon. 50c is an optimistic but somewhat realistic estimate by the 2030s Being able to mix and match that with fossil fuels on existing infrastructure will cut emissions from those activities by >80% during the warmer months (or year round in the tropics)
jokoon 4y ago
Maybe it would be if nuclear plants would be dedicated to electrolysis. But since electrolysis is inefficient, it would require a lot of nuclear energy.
- jmpman 4y ago
  In vehicles, high pressure tanks are required to store hydrogen. However, if you’re looking to store hydrogen cheaply, and volume is not a consideration, what’s the cheapest method? Trying to understand if large solar farms could economically load shift using hydrogen storage tanks
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  You can produce hydrogen at home using blue algaea, but something tells me politicians aren't interested in voluntary individual solutions.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Compare the IR-absorption spectra of water vapor, and CO2. This retrofit will not have the expected effect on man-made atmospheric warming.

Thorrez 4y ago
Doesn't water vapor come down as rain whereas CO2 stays up in the atmosphere?
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Vapor stays in the air until it condenses and falls as liquid rain. CO2 is denser than air, and though it billows with the wind, it tends to stay low; That's why spelunking is so dangerous.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Ok, so my point is that water vapor is only there temporarily but CO2 is there permanently (unless a plant turns it into oxygen or some carbon capture program grabs it). Since water vapor is only there temporarily, I don't think it'll have nearly as big of a global warming effect.
    - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
      Individual molecules ov vapor may be there temporarily, but atmospheric water vapor is constantly replenished .
      - Thorrez 4y ago
        My point is that driving an engine that emits just water vapor for 1 day won't have a permanent effect on the atmosphere, because the water vapor it emits will eventually rain down, and the level of water vapor in the atmosphere will go back to what it was before driving the water-vapor-emitting engine. On the other hand, driving an engine that emits just CO2 for 1 day will have a permanent effect on the atmosphere because the CO2 will stay there.

Hnrobert42 4y ago

Does hydrogen have safety problems? I’m thinking about “Oh the humanity!”