Home Distiller

im actually a motorcycle mechanic and have taken an intrest in hydrogen fuel cell technology lately. i read that there is a company researching useing methonol as fuel for fuel cells. aparently they want to make it so you can put methonol in your tank. and have a devise that converts the methonol to hydrogen just before its pumped through the fuel cell.
that way your only dealing with small amounts of pure hydrogen at a time. and there is less risk of blowing your self into itty bitty pieces.
does anyone know how to make pure methanol. and how to convert it to hydrogen?

There are some chemistry and science oriented people around here and I'll stay back and let them give you a real answer but my take on it is that ethanol has one third more hydrogen by volume than methanol does... so why not use that? and my second thing is the fuss people make about the explosive properties of hydrogen...

the hindenburg really gave hydrogen a bad rap... did you know it was designed to use helium?
did you know that no dirigible designed to use hydrogen ever blew up without someone deliberately torching it? In WWI pilots would fly over the german dirigibles and drop magnesium flares on them... often failing to ignite them.
Gasoline is also flamible to the point of being explosive and it has the added disadvantage of sitting in a big puddle burning for a long time (something hydrogen doesn't do) but you never hear people talking about how cars are too dangerous to use cause they carry gasoline around.

As much as I would like to say that hydrogen is the fuel of the future, it ain't. Hydrogen has a great power to weight ratio, but a piss poor power to volume ratio. The big orange tank on the space shuttle has hydrogen in it. Would you want to strap one of those tanks to your car? There are many proposals of ways to store hydrogen, but those usually involve using energy to unlock the hydrogen.
For instance, you could store hydrogen in water, and use a battary to hydrolize the water into O2 and H2. The H2 could then be used to run an engine. That plan sounds great until you realize it would be more efficient to just use the battary to power an electric motor.

Just like every other part of life, there are fads in science. In the 90s, bucky balls were big. Then came nanotechnology. These days homeland defense and hydrogen fuel cells are the flavors of the month.

What the heck are bucky balls?

Bucky balls is the slang term for buckminster fullerene, which is a molecule of 60 carbons formed into a sphere. The thinking was that if you could coat a bucky ball with fluorine atoms you would in essence be creating the worlds smallest ballberring, which would create the worlds best lubricant.

did they ever do it, coat the bucky ball i mean ???

Are very new and named for R. Buckminster Fuller who came up with the idea. The uses are vast and are just being explored at the moment. Anyone wanting to join the cutting edge would have fun with Bucky Balls.

I hear they could be strong enough to allow us to make a tether into inner space to attach a platform from which we could launch space vehicles without so much need for immense thrust...just one theoretical application of the incredibly strong Bucky Balls.

Hydrogen is not a 'fuel' but an energy carrier.

http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow lots of Hydrogen info.

You can make methonal via compressing air to get N2, O2 as liquid. Split water into H2 and O2 and use the N2 and H2 to make Ammonia, then expose that to more O2 and H2 and catalyst to get Methonal. The The Sealand process I believe.

Buckyballs
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4825" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow
Fish brain damage not compelling?
http://time.blogs.com/technofile/2004/week15/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow
1) Gunter Oberdorster, the Rochester toxicologist who performed the experiment on rats, has come across long-forgotten studies on the effects of nano-scale things on animals. The best one occurred in 1971, when researchers forced squirrel monkeys (yes, "squirrel monkeys") to snort nanoscale gold molecules. What they learned is that nanoscale gold molecules travel 2.5 millimeters per hour through the olfactory nerves of squirrel monkeys

Enjoy the non-distill info.

Aren't all fuels "energy carriers"????

Gasoline is just an energy carrier of the sun's radiation from a few hundred million years ago.

One more thing, everything is toxic in a high enough dose while nothing is harmful in a small enough dose. The buckey balls are somewhat toxic according to the link:

""That makes this(buckey balls) moderately toxic. It's not extremely toxic, but it's not innocuous, either""

its extremly easy to make. first you have to find 2 carbon rods. you can take a pencil and shave off all the wood and you will have a carbon rod. 2nd you take a water bottle and drill 2 holes(for carbon rods) about an inch apart from each other in the cap then slide the carbon rods through the cap til you have an inch sticking out and then seal it off with any kind of water proof glue. when the glue is dryed you fill the bottle to the very top so thats there almost no air in it and put the cap on. next you take any kind of battery i sugest a battery from a power tool because they give of a good(9-20) volt and will last long and then you take 2 wires and connect one of the carbon rods with the negative side and the other wire with the postive side. the electric will break down the water molecule and turn it into 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom. this method is called electrocise.

opps left some details out. after all the water is broken down you will have 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen in the bottle and you MUST have something to block the 2 carbon rods from touching while the electric is running because if they do touch they will give off a spark and will blow the bottle the hell up from the hydrogen and oxygen.

Try it, Army--let me know how it goes!

Fun-Gi:

I don't think those scientists had to "make" those monkeys snort anything. It was the seventies...the monkeys were just being hip.

The hindenburg actually went boom because of the treatment used on the canvas igniting and that igniting the hydrogen (make aspark in your gas tank and u have the same thing, a design flaw)

Iv done lots in fact years of research into hydrogen production and running cars on it, unfortunatly i dont know so much on the ethanol methanol side as all my research has been on H2O (water its free and theres lots of it). i believe an on demand supply to run your car is not possible yet. however it is possible to run the car on hydrogen my design involves windmills for power, water for hydrogen and a storage technique using metal hydroxide canisters, these store a large amount inside a metal making them non flamable (even if u bust it open) until they are heated either with exhaust heat, cooling system heat or electric blankets to release the hydrogen from the metal.

And these windmills supply the energy to store the hydrogen and the energy required to release it again at a later date?

nope the windmills provide the power to spilt the water producing hydrogen and oxygen, storage is taken care of via the home elctricity supply (which is all solar and wind produced anyway) interstingly a by product of the storage is heat from the canister so air can be fed over the canister to supply a form of heating. to realease the hydrogen the canister needs to be re-heated (not to a high temp) an elctric blanket can be used to get it started switching to the heat from the exhaust or the cooling system once it gets up to temp or the car can be run on normal petrol or lpg until it gets up to temp n then switched over to the hydrogen.

(the windmills can also be homemade for a fraction of the price they cost to buy a comkercial product from a shop)

brett