Cooking with Hydrogen, Indian Style

[nationalize the fed]

Fire from Water; Hyd Gas a Cheaper Alternative to LPG

Alex Mathew | 23rd March 2015 | The New Indian Express

KOCHI: What if you could replace LPG with a cooking fuel as clean and cheap as water. That’s just what the techies at Reinwo Labs Pvt Ltd have set their sights on: Fire from water. Hyd Gas is the brainchild of Reinwo Labs Pvt Ltd, a start-up company incubated at Startup Village, Kalamassery.


Team Reinwo Labs Pvt Ltd: Nithin Mohan, Riswin M H, Vijeesh T V and Vimal Gopal beside the Hyd Gas table cooktop

According to its co-founder Vimal Gopal, Hyd Gas is a gas cooktop that produces gas from water. When current is passed through the water stored inside the device, it gets converted into hydrogen and oxygen by the process of electrolysis. The hydrogen and oxygen thus released are passed to the burner through pipes. As there is no storage of gas, the product will be 100 pc hazard-free unlike LPG gas cylinders.

A prototype of the product has been installed at the canteen of the Cusat School of Engineering two weeks ago. “During our engineering days at Cusat itself, we were quite active in tech fests. After a brief stint with robotics, we turned to product-based activities,” says Vimal. “Though a non-IT startup, the company got funding from Startup Village. Now, we are in final talks with angel investors to bring in more funds to make the product a reality,” he adds...snip... The work on the project began in June 2014 and the company was registered in August...snip

Solar Power

As electrolysis uses DC power, the product can be connected directly to solar panels without the need of inverters and batteries, reducing the installation costs by 50 per cent. The current product at Cusat is 20 per cent solar-powered too... If the R&D of the company goes to the plan, Hyd Gas could be the next big thing...

More: http://www.newindianexpress.com/business/news/Fire-from-Water-Hyd-Gas-a-Cheaper-Alternative-to-LPG/2015/03/23/article2726088.ece

Hydrogen trivia: Hydrogen can be burned inside - no venting required. No toxic fumes.

[PoliticAverse]

1. Why would you use this instead of cooking with the electric source this needs directly? n/t

[procon]

2. maybe electrity isn't available?

Fuel is scarse and expensive for third worlders, but something like this would offer a cheap, renewable and reliable source of fuel for cooking. If hydrogen can also power some lighting or even small appliances that would go along way to improving the lives of millions ofpoor people.

Even in thr rural US where expensive bottled LP gas is our primary fuel source dor heating and cooking, hydrogenwould offer an environmentally and economically attractive alternative.

[mackdaddy]

3. But you need electricity to make the Hydrogen.

The problem with all of the Hydrogen ideas is that it takes a significant amount of energy to isolate the hydrogen, usually electrical energy. Hydrogen is never just by itself and ready to use. Hydrogen is almost always just a temporary storage form for other energy sources.

In this case, they are keeping it simple. DC electricity is passed through water breaking down the bond in the water from H2O to H H O. They seem to not be trying to separate the hydrogen and oxygen which is a flammable (and possibly explosive mixture called Brown's gas) that they immediately re-burn which yields heat and H2O vapor.

Again you must have a source of electrical energy to make the HHO gas which is burned to yield the heat for cooking. And the energy in to make the gas will be greater than the energy delivered as heat for cooking.

It is usually more efficient to just turn the electrical energy into heat directly. I am having a hard time seeing the advantage of this one.

[hunter]

5. Yep. Cooking with gas is nice, but electric rice cookers, electric kettles and microwave ovens...

... are much more efficient and much less expensive.

And how does this compare to a rocket stove built mostly of mud, or a Kelley Kettle?



Smoke from cooking fires, even in efficient stoves, is a major public health hazard in much of the world.

Fires caused by unsafe fuel stoves (gas, gasoline, kerosene, alcohol...) are a very serious danger too. A stove or oven powered by hydrogen derived from electrolysis doesn't address any of these problems.

If you've got the electricity, but not a lot of money, an electric rice cooker and a well insulated thermally massive crock pot are your best bet.

My parents have lived away from any gas company for decades and they cook with bottled gas.

Worldwide, and in the future, bottled gas might be anything from propane to dimethyl ether. You can make that stuff from biomass or even from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if you happen to have some surplus of non-fossil fuel energy.

[Nihil]

4. I love the way that you can't even be consistent within a single post ...

Text:
> As there is no storage of gas, the product will be 100 pc hazard-free ...

Diagram:
> Electrolyzer -> Hydrogen -> Hydrogen Storage -> Hydrogen-> Fuel cell





Not forgetting the (inevitable) catch in this latest version of the Hydrogen Scam:

> The current product at Cusat is 20 per cent solar-powered too.

i.e., "The current product at Cusat is 80 per cent fossil-fuel-powered".

= Scam trying to cash in on gullible & non-scientific believers of the ongoing
H2 Hype project with yet another re-badged Brown's Gas Generator.

[nationalize the fed]

6. I thought most people could understand the fact that the Indians

were only using the first part of the cycle. Do you give anyone the benefit of a doubt or are you convinced you're smarter than everyone else alive...Who cares.

= Scam trying to cash in on gullible & non-scientific believers of the ongoing
H2 Hype project with yet another re-badged Brown's Gas Generator.

Think so? We'll see about that.

Fortunately people like you aren't going to be able to stop the coming hydrogen revolution. You aren't even going to slow it down a little bit.

Thanks for kicking the thread. Please keep the insults coming- you are saying way more about yourself than others (who you think are too stupid to understand a simple diagram). And for every 2 bit insult, you spawn at least 4 more posts.

[Nihil]

7. Admit it: you screwed up (again)

You posted another of your clipboard of hydrogen scam images without even reading what
you'd previously cut & pasted to see if it is was appropriate (*again*).

> And for every 2 bit insult, you spawn at least 4 more posts.

1) It is not an "insult" to point out that you screwed up royally with your hydrogen scam spam.

2) Your maths are as bad as ever: my post spawned a single post ... only an error of +300% this time!



PS: I have no problem with this post being kicked as every time that it is, it enlightens people
to the nature of the people pushing this greenwashing scam that is purely designed to keep
people locked into the destructive world of fossil fuels.

[caraher]

8. Fun bit of math...

Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that the article says the product is 80% not solar powered, and accept the implausible claim that there is no need for hydrogen storage. (Beats me how one reconciles those two claims...) So how big would your solar array need to be?

Figure incoming sunlight at 1 kW/m^2, solar PV panel efficiency at 20%, hydrolysis efficiency at 50%. Let's say we want 1.5 kW of heating at the cooktop (what our kitchen electric kettle delivers; one could scale the number back easily to assume a weaker flame). Cooking with no hydrogen storage would require 15 square meters of solar panels - provided they are sun-tracking and you have clear weather. Adjust the estimate upward for any fixed array. And forget about cooking at night or in bad weather.

This is basically a few engineering students' senior design project being plugged as something far more than it ever could be.