Hydrogen-assisted cars on Waiheke

The existence of Waiheke’s first hydrogen-assisted car was brought to light during a seminar in Oneroa about ethanol alcohol as a cheap fuel that can be made locally.

The hydrogen-boosted car is owned by Waiheke resident Gian Badraun, a computer design engineer and former marine scientist who has succeeded in designing and installing a hydrogen system which reduces petrol consumption by about 40 percent.

In true altruist fashion and disgusted with profit-driven corporations, Gian – who has been inventing waste-reducing technologies since he was 20 – is keen for the information to be out in the public arena to stop big business patenting the idea, and he does not wish to patent it himself.

“Something like this is more important than one person making a profit,” he says.

“If it is in the public domain, no-one can own it alone.”

The ‘hydrogen booster’ works, in layman’s terms, by using electricity made by the car's alternator to split water molecules into hydrogen  and oxygen gas. The process is regulated with pulse width modulation which works in a similar way as volume control and which is either controlled by the driver inside the car or linked to the accelerator pedal.

The gas mixture is instantly produced but it takes up to ten minutes for the cell to reach maximum output and ideal temperature, so the system works best for longer trips.

Ultraviolet light is used to help increase the overall efficiency of the process. The gas mixture then bubbles through a safety chamber, a flashback prevention device, and then gets injected into the carburettor.

One litre of water can produce 1200 litres of hydrogen and 600 litres of oxygen and will assist the car for several hundred kilometres.

Gian’s method relies on harmonising with one or more of the water molecule's oscillating frequencies and he says that more gas is created and less heat is generated than using ‘brute force’ DC electrolysis.

Gian is continuously working to improve the system having made several prototypes and he has just designed a new electrolyzer cell which generates three times more output than his previous version.

To put this into the public domain, he is interested in talking with like-minded people who may also be working on similar concepts.

Wishing to empower people with the knowledge, Gian is willing to run workshops and to assist interested people in building and installing their own systems.

“It makes sense to me to solve the transport problem on a local level, which also slots in with the philosophy of the transition town movement,” he says. It is important to him to continue passing information down from generation to generation.

“What I’d really like to do is to find a philanthropist who would finance a local people’s university where real life skills related to sustainable energy use can be explored, researched, developed and taught by people like myself.

“Somebody whose philosophy is not driven by profit and return on investment but who wishes to assist in reversing the damage done to our environment by capitalist greed.”

“I also agree with (the principle of) ethanol as a fuel, and hydrogen boosting works just as well with ethanol-run cars,” he says. “It is legal to produce alcohol – in a home still – for your own use. You only need two or three cookings per week to make enough fuel for one car.”

At the age of 20, Gian co-invented a process which separated copper from PVC to recycle electrical wiring. He sold the process to a German plastics company that shelved the idea because they wanted to make more money by selling new plastic rather than seeing recycled plastic coming on the market.

He later invented and built a truck that ran on ‘gasified’ wood.

As Gian continues to explore uncharted territory with hydrogen, our conversation takes us into the realm of high temperature plasma electrolysis which has the potential of creating more energy than was expended, a concept called overunity.

“But that is too contentious with the current thinking of most scientists and even considering the possibility is regarded as scientific heresy,” he says.

For more information www.gianbadraun.com/hydroxy 

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Minka Firth