H2 to the Max.

I feel like it would be a wise decision after reading Alex p's blog to write down some of my own life experiences. For the last few years I have been working for a company in Redmond designing and building hydrogen reactors. Depending on the design it can take many weeks (sometimes months) to prototype a reactor, then build and finally test. I will never go into very much detail about what our fuel is or what the reactor design is but feel that it is fine to be fairly vague. For the last week I have been working on installing a reactor that we hoped to have fairly decent conversion (conversion being our fuel releases hydrogen, which is monitored with a custom made $7000 hydrogen detector). A couple of our Chemical Engineers did some number crunching and figured we could see possibly 30% conversion, but this would be the best case scenario and seemed a little out of reach. The average reactor gives us around 2-5% conversion, which is respectable for the size of the company and the time we have been working on this project. Earlier this afternoon we decided to fire up the reactor and see what we could get, 5 minutes into the run we were producing 73% hydrogen by volume and were bubbling like crazy in our beaker out the outlet of our reactor. I left work around 3:40pm for a dental appointment and when I was finished I called work to see what the results were of the latest tests... We were running continuous fuel through our reactor and generating 51% hydrogen. I also heard that as the fuel was being depleted of hydrogen that the percentage would start to drop (exactly what it should do, as the fuel re-enters the system it has less fuel and therefore has less reactivity). I spoke with the 2 people that were running it and they also informed me that as they added new fuel the percentage would then increase again.
One of the highlights of today was when we hit 73%. It feels so nice after putting in so many long hours and hard work to see it start to pay off, and that we could possibly reshape how people look at fuels and how people think about how we power this world. After we finished running the reactor we stuck a piece of paper with the number 70% writen on it on the window of our conference room. Our CEO, CTO and other mangement were having a meeting and I heard the CEO yell, 70%!!!! Never knew a percentage could sound so sweet.