Hydrogen, its effects inside an engine.

[glenn_aircooled]

We may expect some rust corrosion to valves and exhaust pipes
but I have found some other things happening.
-
My poor little motor had some problems, so I dismantled it and found
some interesting things.
-
History (skip if you like.)

The heads are from an old race car. Built 1970, raced 5 years. They had
obviously had a hard life but were an excellent piece of work.
They had Big Valves , Huge Porting, Stainless valves.
So I was enticed by these features ? especially the stainless valves
because of the experimenting I wanted to do.
- - I was a bit apprehensive because I knew they had hard life.
One valve had obviously been repaired from what looked like
a " Dropped valve seat ". They had been so modified that there
was very little alloy left in the head.

Now.

My motor was re-built in April.
I started using " small " amount of Hyd/Oxy in June.
I had only just increased the Hyd/Oxy rate with KOH & 2 days
Later the motor locked up.
Pulled the motor apart, found 1 dropped inlet valve seat. It was apparent
That it had broken up and fell into compression chamber jamming piston.
The next chamber had the inlet valve seat with Cracks in it.
The other two inlet seats were NOT cracked - so I dont think they were
Hydrogen Embrittled - Just past use by date.
It was seen that the heads were not sealing properly against the barrels
- this probably being due to weak head structure.

I am going to use the original Standard heads. I will port them to flow
A little more. I will put stainless valves valves in the heads.

Note;
the bores had an interesting effect. The mechanic looked and said
They were all rusted. I looked very carefully and saw they were in fact
Tarnished. They had a light brown coating all over them. It looked like
The brown coating that you get after conditioning the plates in an
Electrolyser cell. The bores are cast iron.
Hopefully this a hard wearing surface, it certainly looked shiny and
Hard. It will be interesting to see what happens with this surface.

- The chambers were very sooty, I expected the hydrogen to clean out
Any carbon here. It certainly shows that the mixture was too rich.
There may not be as much cleaning as I expected from the Hydrogen.
So far the exhaust looks fine. Its only Mild steel.
Any ideas what the brown may be.?????

[glenn_aircooled]

I got a friend to take a digital Pic of the bore. It may be some time before
he gets it to me - when he does I will post it here.

[waterbard]

Hi Glenn,

I would just like to make an observation. Hydrogen embrittlement does happen, but it happens at which electrode in electrolysis? If you remove rust via electrolysis, you have your rusty part hooked up to the negative lead, aka cathode, and a iron rod hooked up to the positive, aka anode, hydrogen embrittlement will occur on the cathode, and oxidization on the anode.

So if the whole block is 'grounded' to negative, I would suspect that hydrogen contacted parts of the block would be susceptable to hydro embrittlement because hydrogen would be attracted to a negatively charged iron.

Not to create alot of work for you, but would you consider reversing your system to where the 'ground' of the chassis and block is actually positive?

This would eliminate any hydrogen from being attracted to any part of your block, valves, headers, exhaust, etc. The only downside I see is possible increased oxidation, if not all of the oxygen is used to oxidize the hydrogen.

[kevinsatterfield]

hey Glen, were you use'n revearse osmosis water?

[Bob Boyce]

Glenn

Not only is the coating hard, but also exihibits a reduced friction surface for the rings. Sounds to me like your heads have been overworked, and did not have enough material left to keep it from flexing slightly from the stresses of combustion pressure. That alone can cause the valve seats to crack and fall out. The valve seats are a lot harder, and a lot more brittle, then the surrounding metal. Like you mentioned, has nothing to do with hydrogen embrittlement, it's the way they are designed. Otherwise they could not hold up to the pounding they get.

This falicy we keep seeing posted about needing to ceramic coat everything is rediculous, since gasoline combustion creates so much more water vapor than the piddly amount that boosting adds. A properly functioning engine, at temperature, will evaporate water out of itself and the oil fast enough to keep things well under control.

Your combustion chamber carbon is quite normal for a performance engine. You are running it richer than the hydroxy can clean. If you add water fog injection, I think you'll find that will give an additional boost, and help clean the carbon out.

Bob

[mos68x]

Although hydrogen embrittlement does happen, it has never happened inside the engine from what i have read in the major stidues investigating it. it normally happens in the fuel delivery system at high pressures, like 1500psi of PURE H2. that is why we use SS as fuel containment, it does not effect it as much, where as copper and std steel are the most effected.

i'll see if i can find those files again in my pile of info and post a general area for it.

[Pinhead]

Since you have to rebuild the engine anyway, I might suggest something else that will greatly increase combustion efficiency. They're called "Singh Grooves" and can be found at www.somender-singh.com. It's really easy to implement (once you have the heads removed) and will add only an hour or so of extra work. The results will be anywhere from "definately didn't help, can feel a little more power" to "OMG WTF did they give me a big block??"

Their biggest advantage is at low RPM, but has absolutely no high-rpm sacrafice. There have been race engines that are cammed up to the point that they won't idle below 1800rpm before the grooves, but after they're grooved they will idle smooth at 600 rpm. It greatly speeds up the initial flame front and makes the A/F mixture burn much more quickly overall. The result is less pinging, and allows for higher CR. Experiments have been run on NA engines that pinged on 87 octane gas at "stock" settings but with the grooves were upped in compression but refused to ping on the same fuel.

Also, since the mixture is burned so much more quickly, the engine temperature is greatly decreased (and thus thermal efficiency is increased). Thus far, after a lot of experimenting, there have been no drawbacks found whatsoever. You may want to look into it.

I know this is "off topic" from the hydroxy injection, but I think they could be combined to create some extremely efficient engines.

A few websites that may be of some interest:

www.somender-singh.com
www.mpgresearch.com <-- Got hacked recently and is down temporarily
www.fueleconomytips.com <-- Also was hacked and is down temporarily

The last two were hacked due to "breakthroughs" that were being made in engine efficiency. Someone doesn't want that info to get out.

[mos68x]

[glenn_aircooled]

[glenn_aircooled]

[glenn_aircooled]

[scotts]

[Joseph]

I get a slick brown coating on the inside of the outlet tubes for all of the aquatune units. The tubes are that clear hospital grade plastic. They say to replace that tube at every other oil change or so - it is a mystery to me but sounds similar to what you are seeing.

Also, I agree with the comment above about adding a fog or mist to your setup.

[Joseph]

oh and it's store bought distilled water that I'm using - all the time.

[CJMOSS]