By Mary Spicer

MEADVILLE TRIBUNE

When Seth Graham was a freshman at Meadville Area Senior High School, he was already aiming high when it came to career goals.

“I wanted to go into aeronautics — to work on electronics on airplanes,” he recalled during a recent interview in the electronics lab at Crawford County Career and Technical Center where he now spends the last half of each school day.

Two years into the school’s three-year electronics program, his horizons have expanded. Now a junior, Graham is hoping to continue his formal studies — the legendary Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is among his top choices — before moving into the extremely high-tech world of the U.S. Air Force.

Before turning his attention to heavier-than-air flight, however, Graham is part of a group of electronics students who have teamed up to pursue a project that’s definitely lighter than air. A core group of approximately eight electronics students and their instructor have embarked on an endeavor they believe can dramatically change the world’s relationship to one of the hallmarks of the mechanical age — the internal combustion engine.

Coming up with a special project each year is as much part of the electronics curriculum as physics and math. However, when students came up with this one, they quickly realized it was going to take more time than they had to devote to it in class. As a result, the Keystone North Electronics Club — complete with a boosters’ organization and funding from local and state grants — was formed. Members meet after school two nights each week.



Shifting a paradigm

“The gasoline and oil industry started here, so it would be kind of neat if the next generation started here,” electronics instructor Guy Burchill observed with a smile as three of his students clustered around a slender, yard-high green cylinder with a distinctive silver cap — a structure bearing something of a resemblance to Seattle’s Space Needle to the electronically-challenged and immediately identifiable as a Tesla coil to those in the know.

The goal of the club is simple: free the internal-combustion engine from its dependence on petroleum-based fuel by developing an energy-efficient method to break water, which covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen.

“In an internal-combustion engine, hydrogen works the same way as gasoline,” Cochranton Junior-Senior High School senior Lee Clark, a three-year electronics lab veteran, explained. While it may work the same way, Clark continued, there is one significant difference. Instead of a variety of pollutants, the only output is water vapor.

Unfortunately, hydrogen in the volume required to fuel the world is difficult to come by.

Hydrogen, symbol “H” and atomic number 1 on the periodic table, is the most abundant chemical element in the universe. It’s also the lightest, giving it the ability to escape easily from the Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, hydrogen is the third most abundant element on the Earth’s surface in chemically-combined form, but hydrogen gas is very rare.

Over the years, hydrogen has traditionally been separated from water by applying direct current as opposed to the alternating current that provides electricity to the nation’s households.

“With DC, all they do is crank the current up until they physically tear (the water) molecule apart,” Burchill said. “That’s not energy-efficient, because it takes more BTUs of electricity to pull it apart than you get use out of the hydrogen.

“Our theory is to use very low current, very high voltage, very high frequency,” he continued, noting that they’ll be charting new territory by using alternating current.

Although they’re breaking new theoretical ground, these electronics students are using a time-tested mechanical model to test their theory.

“When we’re done, we’re going to use electronics circuitry to do what we’re now doing the old-fashioned way,” Burchill explained. “There are ways of doing this with electronics, but we want to prove the concept before we begin investing in the circuitry and things we’ll need in order to build this with electronics as opposed to the old mechanical way.”

Part of the project includes restoring an old, abandoned gasoline engine for use as a hydrogen engine.

As for hydrogen’s reputation as a highly-explosive substance, “like any other fuel, hydrogen or gasoline or natural gas or propane, you need three things for ignition. You need the fuel. You need a spark. And you need oxygen,” Burchill said. “We can control the spark and we can control the oxygen, so we’ll have a much safer system.”



Mary Spicer can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at mspicer@meadvilletribune.com.