I worked for a startup called Millennial Cell in Eatontown, NJ that produced hydrogen for cars. We made it from NaBH4 in alkaline solution that produced hydrogen as you needed it. It was called Hydrogen on Demand. We took an old Ford Bronco and converted it. We rode around our industrial park and just kept increasing the speed to see how fast it would go (it got up to 50 mph). A cop stopped us. Here are 4 people in white lab coats and goggles writing down notes in the car. We told the cop what we were doing and he said, well, I think I heard something about that but just stay at the speed limit and he let us go without a ticket.
I'm curious, what is the advantage of using NaBH4? Whe you said "on demand", it sounds like H2 was being made in the Bronco with on-board battery electrical?
Yes, the hydrogen was produced in the bronco. Here's a summary-
A novel, simple, convenient, and safe, chemical process generates high purity hydrogen gas on demand from stable, aqueous solutions of sodium borohydride, NaBH,, and ruthenium based (Ru), catalyst. When NaBH, solution contacts Ru catalyst, it spontaneously hydrolyzes to form H, gas and sodium borate, a water-soluble, inert salt. When H, is no longer required, Ru is removed from the solution and H, generation stops. Since this H, generator is safer, has quicker response to H, demand, and is more efficient, than commonly used H, generators, it is ideal for portable applications.
Thanks for your response. You mentioned it being a chemical process. I'm interpreting this as using no electrolysis for this conversion. I sodium borohydride and ruthenium catalyst price prohibited? Why isn't this method on the market?
This is interesting. Do you have some reference info I can read. I'd greatly appreciate it.
I can only speculate but we were a small company that went public and the board brought in a CEO who had worked for a large company (Air Liquide). He brought in quite a few people from Air Liquide, pushed the inventor Steve Amendola to the side and the politics went bad.
One of our problems was bringing down the price of sodium borohydride (which is high) and we never achieved that. We would have probably tried other catalysts than Ru but the sodium borohydride cost was our primary concern.
Steve Amendola was a brilliant chemist and a nice guy. Unfortunately he died from cancer a few years ago. He's the kind of guy you could just call and he would talk to you. His jokes were the best!
You can search for Steve Amendola and hydrogen. Here's a patent
https://patents.justia.com/patent/20070217994
This is interesting, I had a diesel that I used a hydrogen generator on to supplement into the intake and heard about how hydrogen destroys metal. I sold that truck so don't know how that engine paired bc I sold it with 397k miles on it and still ran good
No one really thought about that. Most of the people who worked there were chemists and they think only about chemical reactions. Now that hydrogen powered cars are becoming more popular for development, tests on hydrogen embrittlement are being done. It is bad for the HS steels used in car engines,
I worked for a startup called Millennial Cell in Eatontown, NJ that produced hydrogen for cars. We made it from NaBH4 in alkaline solution that produced hydrogen as you needed it. It was called Hydrogen on Demand. We took an old Ford Bronco and converted it. We rode around our industrial park and just kept increasing the speed to see how fast it would go (it got up to 50 mph). A cop stopped us. Here are 4 people in white lab coats and goggles writing down notes in the car. We told the cop what we were doing and he said, well, I think I heard something about that but just stay at the speed limit and he let us go without a ticket.
I'm curious, what is the advantage of using NaBH4? Whe you said "on demand", it sounds like H2 was being made in the Bronco with on-board battery electrical?
Yes, the hydrogen was produced in the bronco. Here's a summary- A novel, simple, convenient, and safe, chemical process generates high purity hydrogen gas on demand from stable, aqueous solutions of sodium borohydride, NaBH,, and ruthenium based (Ru), catalyst. When NaBH, solution contacts Ru catalyst, it spontaneously hydrolyzes to form H, gas and sodium borate, a water-soluble, inert salt. When H, is no longer required, Ru is removed from the solution and H, generation stops. Since this H, generator is safer, has quicker response to H, demand, and is more efficient, than commonly used H, generators, it is ideal for portable applications.
Thanks for your response. You mentioned it being a chemical process. I'm interpreting this as using no electrolysis for this conversion. I sodium borohydride and ruthenium catalyst price prohibited? Why isn't this method on the market?
This is interesting. Do you have some reference info I can read. I'd greatly appreciate it.
I can only speculate but we were a small company that went public and the board brought in a CEO who had worked for a large company (Air Liquide). He brought in quite a few people from Air Liquide, pushed the inventor Steve Amendola to the side and the politics went bad.
One of our problems was bringing down the price of sodium borohydride (which is high) and we never achieved that. We would have probably tried other catalysts than Ru but the sodium borohydride cost was our primary concern. Steve Amendola was a brilliant chemist and a nice guy. Unfortunately he died from cancer a few years ago. He's the kind of guy you could just call and he would talk to you. His jokes were the best!
You can search for Steve Amendola and hydrogen. Here's a patent https://patents.justia.com/patent/20070217994
How did you deal with hydrogen embrittlement?
This is interesting, I had a diesel that I used a hydrogen generator on to supplement into the intake and heard about how hydrogen destroys metal. I sold that truck so don't know how that engine paired bc I sold it with 397k miles on it and still ran good
No one really thought about that. Most of the people who worked there were chemists and they think only about chemical reactions. Now that hydrogen powered cars are becoming more popular for development, tests on hydrogen embrittlement are being done. It is bad for the HS steels used in car engines,
It’ll only be allowed to succeed if Chy-nah controls the world’s ruthenium supply.
The Chinese are already in on it - coming up with different catalyst, e.g. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.1c03067
But it was Steve Amendola who came up with this.