I'm talking hypothetically. Hydrogen access would obviously be difficult with the current energy network. Although, honestly, I probably do. Sometimes living in one of the biggest research areas in the country has its perks.

Nonetheless, rotaries are very flexible about fuel, and you could run easily design a rotary to run on either gas, hydrogen, or a combination.

Hydrogen has a autoignition point of 900+ F vs. 480-500 F for gasoline and is much more energy dense. If you don't care about emissions (specifically NO2, otherwise it doesn't really release anything but water vapor), you can easily get 25% more power vs. a comparably sized and designed gasoline engine.
[/quote]


You might want to check your facts. I am unaware of any form of hydrogen storage that provides more energy for volume than gasoline.

And if we didn't care about emissions like NO2, alcohol burns pretty cleanly as well. Alcohol is low on power like hydrogen, but a hell of a lot easier to refine, store, and transport.

There is absolutely no advantage to using hydrogen as a fuel.

 

I'm talking hypothetically. Hydrogen access would obviously be difficult with the current energy network. Although, honestly, I probably do. Sometimes living in one of the biggest research areas in the country has its perks.

Nonetheless, rotaries are very flexible about fuel, and you could run easily design a rotary to run on either gas, hydrogen, or a combination.

Hydrogen has a autoignition point of 900+ F vs. 480-500 F for gasoline and is much more energy dense. If you don't care about emissions (specifically NO2, otherwise it doesn't really release anything but water vapor), you can easily get 25% more power vs. a comparably sized and designed gasoline engine.
[/quote]


You might want to check your facts. I am unaware of any form of hydrogen storage that provides more energy for volume than gasoline.

And if we didn't care about emissions like NO2, alcohol burns pretty cleanly as well. Alcohol is low on power like hydrogen, but a hell of a lot easier to refine, store, and transport.

There is absolutely no advantage to using hydrogen as a fuel.
[/quote]
^Except it sounds so cool. Alcohol is pretty shitty too, considering the amount of fuel/fertilizer (derived from petrol)/ land used to create it. Petroleum is pretty much number one with nothing comparable, barring the fact that its "limited". Only fuel source even remotely useful would be nuclear. Solar/wind/hydro are all pretty cool too but it can't give us a nice baseload so we'll always need petrol/nuke unless we can make some bad-ass batteries to store solar/wind/hydro during the off-peaks and reclaim it when necessary.

Anyway, you guys are probably arguing the same facts - "energy density" with respect to what? Weight? volume? moles?


The rotary being used as a generator actually sounds really smart. You can calculate the amount of hours (at the exact same RPM due to it being a generator) it ran, to know what needs to be maintained. It'll probably end up fairly reliable due to that fact alone.

 

I'm just waiting for someone to discover how to use the rotary design as a supercharger supporting a piston engine, because then we'd have something

Hydrogen loses outright when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. The only justification for hydrogen-oxygen combustion engines is when hydrocarbons just aren't available. They make zero sense in the real world. even if you insisted on doing it, your best source of hydrogen is hydrocarbon fuel, not water, and at that point why aren't you using the carbon to increase the yield of the combustion event?