Roy's Class of 2001
One of our best classes that we had was when the President of AHA came out to the northwest to put on an Introduction/Alternative Fuel Class. We helde it at our shop, that we converted into a classroom. This shop is usually a gasoline small engine repair shop, so it took about 2 weeks to clean and 3 days with a ozonator to get rid of the smell. This was held on a beautiful day on September 9, 2001.
Here is a good shot of the classroom once we got it all decked out. Everything you see is homemade except the tables closest to us. I believe at this point Roy is describing about how to convert an engine in principle.
This is showing an very small electrolyser experiment and how easy hydrogen production can be.
During this class we were demonstrating our hydrogen system kit, we let it sit in the sun while Roy and us described how the solar hydrogen system works, we noticed it wasn’t doing anything. What a great time to troubleshoot and configuration! So we looked at it trying to figure out why it wasn’t making any electricity. So we had the students go though and try to decide why it was happening. We came up with some valid answers 1) shaded sun 2) bad wires 3) a leak in the system 4) contaminated cells. As we took a look we found the o-ring around the “storage” device was faulty, replacing that resolved the issue. Hooray!
Shortly after showing how the electrolyser works someone asked, so what can you use hydrogen in? The answer to that was everything that needs fuel or electricity. We took the class over to a hydrogen barbecue that had been converted and talked about the safety and storage applications of hydrogen. As you can see here one storage method is compressed hydrogen in our red tank here.
Back the class, here we talked about how the fuel cell and combustion engines running on hydrogen work and how they can be maintained. The students were very happy with their new supreme knowledge of electrochemistry and mechanical mechanism they had the know-how of how to exactly everything works. So what next?
We then spent a good deal talking about the future of hydrogen technologies such as Roy’s “Spark Injector” which is a fuel injection spark plug, High pressure electrolysers, carbon products and the hydrogen storage “carbon activated hydride storage”, and a ton more. Below are some pictures of some various examples of carbon
products.
The end of the class was an introverted to us students, to say “Now that you know what to do, what are you going to do?” This was awesome, because everyone in class was set to make their own plan for the next hour of what they want to see happen. So we made some quick sketches and some quick business plans on how we will make this cost effective and a valuable option to the hydrogen economy. What could be better?
