El Salvador's Hydrogen Technology

Last night Roberto Saravia, one of the students from my renewable energy course, took me to visit a friend of his who is a hydrogen enthusiast. We drove through San Salvador rush hour traffic to Ayutuxtepeque, a neighborhood near the Universidad de El Salvador, where Plácido Lemus has a garage workshop cluttered with tools and half-assembled projects. Another friend of Roberto's who collaborates with Plácido, Manuel Molina, was also on hand.

Plácido operates a small business making and selling drinking water filtration systems that use activated charcoal and colloidal silver. He was experimenting on the side with developing an inexpenisve electrolytic device that could be used to generate chlorine from table salt on-site as an alternative water purification technology. He realized that hydrogen gas was a by-product of this electrolysis and started thinking about what he could do with that. He read about the devices that are sold online that supposedly enrich gasoline in vehicles by injecting hydrogen via an onboard electrolyzer and decided to build his own. He got it to work but has had trouble controlling the combustion, which tends to wander back upstream in the fuel flowpath.

Plácido is obviously brilliant and a very nice guy. He does not have a college education but appears to be pretty familiar with fluid dynamics and combustion engineering. He does unfortunately seem to have the attitude of many self-taught tinkerers, that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are just broad guidelines and don't necessarily apply to their work. This mindset tends to blind otherwise creative people to thinking clearly and critically about the all-important efficiency of their devices. In any case, I admire his accomplishments, especially given the difficulties of doing this work in El Salvador. I offered some ideas about measuring the efficiency of his electrolyzers and shared some thoughts about safety -- I'd hate to see him blow himself and his lab up.

Manuel Molina and Plácido Lemus in their workshop (the devices in the large white enclosures are DC power supplies for their electrolyzers)