Public Lab Research note


Spectroscopy of oxyhydrogen flames

by tungs10 | November 08, 2013 21:25 08 Nov 21:25 | #9749 | #9749

To see research so far: click here

Hydrogen flames are generally colorless. Very little emission is within range of visible light. Oxyhydrogen flames of gas produced by a common duct reactor are brightly luminous. Conventional rationale says that there should be no difference, yet people who have seen this flame say it looks very different. So lets get a spectroscopic plot of the light from the flame. As far as I know nobody has ever done this.

In the above monograph, eight tests of the effect of oxyhydrogen gas were conducted on Diesel engine efficiency in dynamometer labs. Results varied widely. There is no clear reason why this should be. Perhaps flame spectroscopic data could be used as a variable to normalize these results.

This technology could increase efficiency of Diesels on ships, trucks and locomotives reducing green house gas emissions by millions of metric tons but it needs to be better validated. For proposals on further research click here


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I am familiar with Mike Allen's evaluations. He admits that they are not "scientific". About the closest thing to a "scientific" evaluation of vehicle fuel efficiency of heavy diesel vehicles (Class 3-8) is the SAE J1321 standard. One J1321 evaluation of an oxyhydrogen system is found here. This was done on very heavy trucks (over 100,000 lbs.) designed to perform wear tests on pavement. Performance of these systems varies widely with speed and load. On these tests, improvement was rather marginal. Better results were obtained with this evaluation done under simulated highway and city driving conditions with two cabs minus their trailers. Although it did not follow the J1321 protocol, I have the raw data and I found that improvement was statistically significant by a wide margin. Also, meteorological data was recorded and the pattern of the data taken over a period of about 1 month indicates that the difference is not likely to be weather related. The original version of J1321 left a lot to be desired. It actually was not very rigorous and made no recommendation regarding statistical analysis of data. It was not until Feb. 2012 that a revised version was released that corrected this shortcoming. As of this date, I do not know of any evaluations done following the revised J1321 standard. As I said, the technology needs to be better validated.

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