There's a good chance that you haven't given hydrogen a thought since eighth grade chemistry. Heck, there's a good chance you didn't even want to look at it then, much less now in your everyday life. But with gas prices going nowhere but upward, hydrogen has become a fixture in the news and in a lot of people's life. So you may be asking what is the big deal with hydrogen? What it is it and, much more essentially, how can it save me money? If I inhale it, will it make me talk funny? Can I use it to disinfect cuts? Okay, maybe not the last two. No it's not going to make you speak a foreign language, and I wouldn't use it to wipe clean your cat scratches, as liquid hydrogen is cold enough to turn your flesh to solid ice, which, admittedly, probably would. Hydrogen is an element, one of the essential building blocks of the universe. In fact, hydrogen is the most common element of all, containing more than 75 percent of the universe. That's universe, as in, everything. Hydrogen is also one of the components of water, and a heck of fuel. It's highly combustible, and burns incredibly clean. That, equipped with its abundance, is the reason that you're seeing a lot about it in the news. The more futuristic way to use it is by way of hydrogen fuel cells. A fuel cell is more or less a battery that will never run out of power, with the caveat that you need to keep refueling some of its chemicals. It turns hydrogen and oxygen into water, a process that gives out energy that is then used for power. Which is wonderful, but not particularly handy for those of us who are not living in the future. But there is something that can help you use the power of hydrogen right now. That is the Water4Gas system. What this system does is use electrolysis, the same process fuel cells use, to turn common water into a hydrogen gas that car can then burn in place of oxygen. Normally, your car integrates oxygen and gas to power the engine. Obviously, this works, but it's utterly inefficient. By letting your car to combine the hydrogen gas with gasoline, it means that you can go farther with every tank of gas. This means you'll have to fill up less much, which means you get to save money. All this goodie is mainly because you're capitalizing on the most common thing in the universe. |
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