How to build a hydrogen car (The engine)

Summary

Highlights

• Converting a petrol car to hydrogen is surprisingly doable with some technical tweaks.🔧
• ECU upgrades are crucial for controlling ignition timing and preventing engine damage.🛠️
• Using LPG injectors could be a better long-term solution due to their durability.⏱️
• A focus on aesthetics: adapting motorbike parts for a unique engine look.🏍️
• Despite inefficiencies, hydrogen cars remain exciting for sport use due to their zero emissions.🏁

Key Takeaways

• Hydrogen conversion can be cost-effective but requires key component upgrades like a specialized ECU and performance injectors.💸
• Colder spark plugs are essential for efficient hydrogen engine operation, reducing pre-ignition and backfires.✨
• An oil catch can helps prevent water contamination in the engine oil from hydrogen conversion blow-by.💧
• Straight-through, stainless steel exhausts are recommended to handle the high water vapor and heat from hydrogen combustion.🚗
• Hydrogen engines are less efficient, encouraging frequent refueling compared to hydrogen fuel cells.⛽

Overview

How to build a hydrogen car (The engine) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello all and welcome back if you're watching this video it's because you're wanting to convert a car to running hydrogen gas or just curious to know how it's actually surprisingly easy uh if you've been following the channel then you'll know that we've been uh working on a hydrogen powered car that was originally a petrol car and the aim was to do it as cheaply as possible just to see how cheap we can actually convert a petrol car to running hydrogen gas now that does have a few issues in regards
• 00:30 - 01:00 to efficiency and how long the engine will last but it is doable um so that's what this video today is all about is how I have converted the engine to run hydrogen gas and then maybe later when I'll do another video on the fuel tank in the boot so you can replicate this build exactly so uh if you're new to the channel or just stopping by to watch this video and you like what you see Please Subscribe cuz that lets me know that you're enjoying what you're see
• 01:00 - 01:30 so let's jump straight into it so basically we got the car for uh very cheap it's about uh about £500 and then the aim was to convert that to run on hydrogen gas uh so the first thing I did was by a ECU which controls the ignition timing so that I so I used a noce ECU from Motorsport Electronics um and uh that was very very
• 01:30 - 02:00 easy to use the in total that cost about £350 and uh it was very easy to wire in and that controls my ignition time and it replaces the standard ignition coils and you run a separate ignition coil for it or or you remove the old ignition coil and you add a new ignition coil and that controls the um the the spark for your ignition and that's important when you're converting an engine from hydrogen gas um as um you need to
• 02:00 - 02:30 the timing when running hydrogen and if you don't do that you will damage the engine very quickly uh I've made lots of small engines in the past and kept the standard ignition timing which on small engines tends to be something like 30° 32° before top dead center and uh over time you develop a lot of piston slap um and does you just you just do lots of nasty things inside the engine which is just not worth it um so
• 02:30 - 03:00 yeah you want to change the ignition timing so I use a notice ignition ECU to do that um purely because it was the easiest way to do it now it's still not the best um ECU for it because uh notice ECU runs on a wasted spark system that means you get a spark at top dead center or whenever you want the spark to occur um and then you get an Al you also get a spark at bottom dead centor which is which is not great in fact no that's
• 03:00 - 03:30 wrong you get two Sparks at the top dead center on the uh ignition stroke and later on in the exhaust stroke which can cause backfire for hydrogen gas so if you were to build this from scratch or if I was to build this again I would have a [Music] non-wedding if I was to do a build
• 03:30 - 04:00 again um but I'm happy with this setup I've got now and I'll be running this for a while until i' so I've done what I needed to do which um I pretty much have done really I mean my whole aim when starting this channel was to build a hydrogen powered car and I've done that now so I'll probably be moving on to other things but before I do I just want to share my knowledge so you can all recreate what I've done here and hopefully improve on that so so yeah so we use a no dis
• 04:00 - 04:30 ignition ECU to control the ignition and that cost around £350 um I then had to change the spark no I had to change the spark plugs yeah change the spark plugs to colder running spark plugs um the car did run uh normally really on the standard spart plugs but if you're taking it to a race track or you're really going to be putting your foot down accelerating hard you really want to be using colder running SP plugs so you just need to
• 04:30 - 05:00 research your engine and find a spark plug that will fit that operates at colder temperatures uh this is important uh to reduce ignition uh pre-ignition in the engine uh and that stopped backfires as well so change The Spar plugs you've got uh a piggyback ECU system you're then also going to need um injectors bigger bigger injectors to flow more gas so hydrogen gas gas is less dense it's
• 05:00 - 05:30 less fuel dense I mean it's a gas so it would be less dense so you need to put a lot of gas um through the injector into the combustion chamber so you could do two things you could use the standard fuel injectors and have a really high pressure to to get get the flow of gas through it um but that doesn't well for me that didn't work because my regulator in the car maxes out at 10 bar uh gas flow output at temp that's the max it
• 05:30 - 06:00 can do and I would need to go much higher than that if I was to use the standard injectors so instead of going for higher pressure I went for higher flow and to do that I used 440cc fuel injectors from the Rena Cleo sport so this is just a a 1.1 L petrol but the Reno Cleo also do a 2 L version of this this car so I use performance injectors for that car and then they plug straight into this no problem it was plug and pl they cost something like
• 06:00 - 06:30 40 so that was a nice cheap alternative now the fuel injectors will eventually seize up and that's because they're designed to run on petrol not hydrogen gas and hydrogen gas is non lubricating petrol lubricates the tiny solenoid valve the little needle valve inside um the injector as it flows through now over time the high flow injectors I've us have seized up every
• 06:30 - 07:00 now and then uh I've lost two injectors so I've had to replace them um last a while it's just not long compared to how they should last if we would get um on petrol so an alternative to this if I was to do this build again was to potentially use uh LPG fuel injectors um LPG gas is less lubricated than petrol so so in theory they should
• 07:00 - 07:30 also work absolutely fine on hydrogen gas I've not tested it myself so I don't know how it would actually perform I don't know how you gauge flow rates when it comes to LPG injectors I've always been a petrol head so I just know a lot about petrol cars and that that sort of thing not not so much LPG so you'd have to do research in that and testing but if I was to do this build again I would use LPG injectors high flow LPG injectors if that's if
• 07:30 - 08:00 that's even a thing but I'm sure it is so we've got new spot plugs we've got the high flow injectors and the uh noce ignition ECU to control the ignition timing and the ignition timing is the most critical thing because you can still run a car to on hydrogen gas with the standard spark plugs and you can still run it on the um without the fuel injectors but you'll have to be using pressure the main change was the ECU now
• 08:00 - 08:30 um I'm pretty sure that you could run hydrogen car on the standard ECU I've never tried it myself while I might be doing that in a later video and I'm pretty sure you could but it just won't last long because you start developing knock and then you start developing piston slot and then you would have you need to rebuild your engine CU youve started damaging some critical components so that's pretty much it in the engine bay what you see here is an
• 08:30 - 09:00 additional thing that I wanted to do to fully embody um you know keeping the combustion engine alive so the standard manifold would work on hydrogen gas what you have to be wary of is if you do get a backfire when running on hydrogen gas in the air intake you got all this plastic air intake housing and that could shatter explode um I didn't like the idea of that um bit similar to uh the exhaust of the car I've had a back
• 09:00 - 09:30 box blown up on me because hydrogen gas built up inside the very restrictive exhaust and then I had pre-ignition or backfire um which exploded all a mixed hydrogen an option in the exhaust and it couldn't escape so it just blew itself out the rear of the exhaust destroying the standard back box so it's got a an aftermarket back box on there now which is less restrictive so if it was to back fire it just shoots like a cannon um
• 09:30 - 10:00 except there's nothing flying out apart from from Steam I guess water water molecules um so this is the same but on the intake so there's this Runners standard individual foto body setup uh and run is going into the cylinder head now if it was to get a backfire it the gas would just shoot out top nothing's damaged nothing's exploded absolute F but if you had a proper engine set up you wouldn't need these uh or if you had a metal uh intake amount of fold which
• 10:00 - 10:30 some cars do and you wouldn't need them either this was just me wanting the car to look pretty cool and to fully embody a uh the combustion engine all the all the right noises it makes uh producing zero carbon emissions which is what it's all about at the end of the day I mean if you weren't so bothered about the combustion engine and you wanted something more efficient you would 100% want to go down the hydrogen fuel cell route which is basically an electric car except it converts hydrogen gas into
• 10:30 - 11:00 electricity and a way to go and you'll get hundreds of miles out of a fuel tank whereas this n you're going to you're going to want to refuel quite a lot because it drinks a lot of gas because hydrogen gas is not so dense um so this is purely for fun at the end of the day or a RAC track or some sort of racing sport um and you've got combustion engines running on hydrogen so they sound like petrol engines they run like petrol engines but they produce zero carbon emissions so these are actually from a
• 11:00 - 11:30 uh kawsaki uh motorbike I believe it's it's z x I mean I've got it written up there to remind me CU I'm not I'm not Bing into motorbikes but I do like um I do like their engines so it's a ZX6R kawi saki Motors bike uh throttle bod is here which cost about £45 to buy uh and then 3D printed some adapters and attached them onto the standard uh engine manifold um intake manifold Runners I cut the did the top half of the manifold off 3 puted some adapters
• 11:30 - 12:00 mounted these throttle bodies on top of there and then re done some rewiring uh for the frle position sentor the mass a flow sensor and for your frole cable so that's that's all in there and it runs absolutely fine and it obviously it looks awesome um we've also got because I've removed the uh engine intake manifold I've also got an oil catch can this is actually quite important because when you've converted an engine to hydrogen gas you will inevitably get
• 12:00 - 12:30 quite a bit of blow by like you do past the piston rings like you do with petrol engines which will contaminate oil now when it's um when it's petrol and mixed with the oil it's not so bad I mean it's not ideal by any means but it's not so bad and that's why your oil over time gets a bit black it picks up all the carbon deposits um from the combustion chamber that's why your oil goes black over time especially in diesel engines but when I'm running hydrogen you know it's water vapor so in theory your water
• 12:30 - 13:00 won't go black but if that water seeps past the piston rings like it will inevitably do it means you're getting oil contamination um with your water contamination with your oil and in fact I was running this engine just earlier and you can see there we've gone a bit murky not ideal at all this engine's due an oil change for that very reason so by having by having an O catch can which you can see over there
• 13:00 - 13:30 um that becomes the highest point on the engine so all the water vapor the steam the oil Vapors will rise to the top here and get catched in catched in the catch can help preserve the oil but with you're converting an engine to an un hydrogen gas you are going to want to do more oil changes anyway because you're inevitably going to get oil contamination with the water so recap you've got Standalone ECU ignition ECU you want new spark plugs new fuel injectors
• 13:30 - 14:00 ideally LPG but if not high flow um you don't have to have individual fossil bodies what is ideal oil catch can ideal because you're going to get oil contamination and then finally you want to change out your exhaust system now hydrogen gas obviously creates water as it's exhaust so if you're running a standard exhaust system which is usually Steel on production cars they will Rust and they will r very quickly CU not only are you having
• 14:00 - 14:30 lots of water vapor condensing inside the exhaust you are also producing a lot of heat when burning hydrogen gas much more heat than you would do on petrol and because of that your whole exhaust system will Rust a lot quicker so it's so basically you want to upgrade your exhaust system to stainless steel which for Car Guys is a win-win anyway because most of us have stainless steel exhaust on our cars um because it sounds a hell of a lot better and um yeah so you want stainless steel exhaust ideally you want
• 14:30 - 15:00 the exhaust to be straight piped as possible to remove any back pressure uh like I learned the hard way like I was saying earlier I blew off my back box because the exhaust was so restriced and the worst case scenario happened where I had um oxygen and hydrogen mixed in the exhaust unburnt and then it back fired and the whole thing whole that box exploded so you want straight through exhaust ideally um your catalytic converter you probably want to keep anyway um because you're still producing
• 15:00 - 15:30 nox emissions when running hydrogen gas this engine ran very very lean sorry very very rich on hydrogen gas which means there's more fuel than there is oxygen and or air and oxygen you find in air but you also find nitrogen and that's what creates your nox emissions so because I'm running a rich fuel mixture there's less nitrogen in there anyway that's going to get burnt off so um catalytic converter maybe on mar car
• 15:30 - 16:00 is not needed so much but if you wanted to go for the economy and the fuel efficiency and you wanted a very lean air fuel mix ratio R ratio bit of a tongue twisted there yeah if you wanted a very lean mixture then you probably want to have your Catal converter to reduce nox emissions uh you won't have any carbon emissions if you got a healthy engine and you're not getting any oil leakages um so yeah want to keep probably keep your catalytic converter high flow C
• 16:00 - 16:30 again because you don't want any back pressure now if I was to also start an engine again from scratch building a hydrogen powered car I'd also want to have it turbocharged or supercharged ideally uh turbocharged uh when running hydren you have less torque than you would do on petrol so it makes more sense to um use a Turbocharger to recover the waste energy out the exhaust instead of taking it straight from the crank like a supercharger would do which is belt
• 16:30 - 17:00 driven um which is going to rob some more torque so I'd say turbocharged um and that way you'll be able to get to your very lean a fuel mixtures which should improve economy and that's pretty much it Spar plugs fuel injectors e ECU exhaust um and in total I hope spends on this hydrogen car conversion about 500 in parts uh that's not including the exhaust
• 17:00 - 17:30 so I probably want to upgrade an exhaust in the future apart from the back box which is on there but that was accidental and that's pretty much it so if you like this video uh please subscribe I'm going to be doing a another video on the fuel tank and the fuel consumption and what you need to expect and when you're sing up your gas tank um because you need quite a big gas tank or quite a few small gas tanks um so yeah I'll touch on that in a
• 17:30 - 18:00 future video hope this was helpful uh hopefully you can take on what I've done and improve on it make it better and um share the knowledge um so let's get hydrogen cars on the road thanks for watching