Would it be feasible to make a hydrogen lighter, and/or fill a
butane lighter with hydrogen (or some dilute mixture thereof)?
Yes, and it’s been done before
Hydrogen gas, though, is pretty dangerous stuff, and transporting it around in a plastic lighter meant for butane probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
[sub]removed quoted material - DrMatrix[/sub]
Probably quoted too much of that. Would any mod that sees this please delete the quote and just leave the link?
hydrogen is very easy to ignite, true, but what if you dilute it with
argon?
Hydrogen is very easy to ignite, and it’s also explosive in air in concentrations between about 4% and 95%, so the dilution probably isn’t going to help.
I was thinking more along the lines of using a much stronger container for it. You’d probably need to store it under high pressure anyway, simply to get enough of it into the lighter.
Butane is a liquid at room temperature and relatively low pressure. Hydrogen isn’t.
Butane, IIRC, at the commercial level is only a small fraction of the cost of hydrogen. That, and the other reasons given in this thread, make hydrogen not a viable candidate for lighters.
Some things just turn out to be ideal for their application, and butane is one of those things. So raise your lighter and hail butane! (Oi!)
Why is hydrogen so expensive?
Would a pair of stainless steel electrodes, some water, lye, and
a supply of electricity be so expensive?
Manufacturing hydrogen has been covered before in fuel cell threads. It takes more significantly more energy to make hygrogen by electolysys than you get from the hydrogen. Also hydrogen molecules are what sciencey guys call very small, much smaller than other molecules, so they tend to leak through seals and materials that are otherwise airtight.
QUOTE]Originally posted by Grievar
Hydrogen is very easy to ignite
[/QUOTE]
Can you please define “very easy to ignite” ?
Here’s something to interest you :
a> self-ignition temperature (ºC) Hydrogen 585, Natural Gas 540, Gasoline 228-501. So clearly it is not the self-ignition temperature you are talking about.
b> Flammability limits in air (vol%) Hydrogen 4 – 75, Natural Gas 5.3 – 15, Gasoline 1.0 – 7.6 - Clearly Gas is worse than H2 here.
c> Detonability limits in air (vol%) Hydrogen18 – 59, Natural Gas 6.3 – 13.5, Gasoline- 1.1 – 3.3 - So Gasoline is again more dangerous.
d> Theoretical explosive energy (kg TNT/m3 gas) Hydrogen 2.02, Natural Gas 7.03, Gasoline 44.22 - So clearly hydrogen gives out less heat than Gas.
All the above figures are taken from here. Please read that cite on the car explosion and see the pics with car explosion with H2 and with gasoline.
Incidentally, as part of my highschool science project, I used Caustic Soda (NaOH) solution on waste aluminum can to generate hydrogen which I burnt in a bunsen burner. I added urea to the NaOH solution because urea gives NH3 and gives the flame a color.
The heat was enuf to move a needle on the ammeter which was connected to a thermocouple on the flame.