Hydrogen Reactor

Hydrogen reactor is a reactor used to extract hydrogen from ethanol. This reactor was invented by Lanny Schmidt. The reactor is deceptively simple in design.

The reactor is a relatively tiny 2-foot-high apparatus of tubes and wires that creates hydrogen from corn-based ethanol. A fuel cell, which acts like a battery, then generates power. Hydrogen is expensive to make and uses fossil fuels. Hence, the reactor will produce hydrogen exclusively from ethanol.

Hydrogen does not produce any greenhouse gases or pollution. It has to be produced because there are no natural stores of it that can be pumped or dug out of the ground.

Working of Hydrogen Reactor

• At the top is an automotive fuel injector that vaporizes and mixes the ethanol-water fuel.
  
  
• The vaporized fuel is then injected into a tube that contains a porous plug coated with the catalyst.
  
  
• As the fuel passes through the plug, the carbon in the ethanol is burned, but the hydrogen is not.
  
  
• Carbon dioxide, burnt carbon, and hydrogen gas emerges out.
  
  
• The reactor needs a small amount of heat to get going, but once it does, it sustains the reaction at more than 700 degrees C.