It is an incontrovertible fact that the petroleum resources existing on the earth are limited and destined to be exhausted some day. Today the petroleum demand is rapidly increasing. If petroleum continues to be consumed at the present high rate, the demand-supply relation must certainly become unbalanced in the near future. As petroleum is unevenly distributed among the countries of the world, "have-not" nations cannot avoid facing energy crises as long as they depend upon petroleum. In recent years, the tendency to regard petroleum as almighty has come to be reviewed because of its unfavorable effects on the human body. With respect to automobiles in particular, there has been a strong cry for pollution-free gasoline engines. This has led to realization of the necessity of the conversion of engines to a substitute for petroleum as a fuel and of the effective utilization of hydrogen energy in particular. Hydrogen can be obtained easily at any place on the earth from mere decomposition of water. Therefore, hydrogen resources are practically limitless. Hydrogen is also called the ultimate energy because, when it is burnt, it only produces water without emitting exhaust gas. There is no fear of causing air pollution at all.
This invention, presented with the above situation as the background, will serve to the hydrogen engine, as a substitute for the petroleum engine, into full practical use.
The greatest drawback of a hydrogen engine was conventionally said to be the very low calorific value of hydrogen at the time of combustion as compared with that of gasoline. Because of this fact, there is the necessity of transporting a large volume of hydrogen where the engine is on a vehicle, while the means of transporting it is difficult to operate and it is highly dangerous. Also, the low calorific value makes it impossible for a hydrogen engine to operate for a sufficiently long time or distance. In other words, a sufficiently large output of such an engine cannot be obtained from expansion energy at the time of the instantaneous production of water vapor produced by combustion of only hydrogen because the quantity of produced water is very small. Increasing the quantity of hydrogen to cover this defect is uneconomical and involves transportation difficulty as stated above. Since overheating of an internal combustion engine must be prevented, some means is necessary to remove the heat produced at the time of hydrogen combustion and the mechanical frictional heat generated from the engine.