Stan Meyer's 5,000-degree flame, and the trick every modern engine now uses

Stan Meyer said his hydrogen flame ran over 5,000 degrees, and joked that it would burn holes in his wife's stainless steel pots and pans. That number checks out: hydrogen burning in pure oxygen reaches about 2,800 °C, a little over 5,000 °F, while stainless steel melts at about 1,400–1,450 °C. His fix cost nothing: capture the exhaust coming off the flame and feed it back in. Steam and nitrogen don't burn, so they soak up heat and slow the burn. In the buggy he used the same trick to bring hydrogen's burn rate down to gasoline's, so the engine ran as it would on gasoline: "So you don't change the engine in any way" (1990 interview). Car makers call it exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). US cars have used it since the 1970s to cool combustion and cut NOx, and industrial burners do the same with flue gas recirculation. The tapes are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · evening workshop, probably Denver · 1993
• Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
• Stan Meyer, Figure 2-10, non-combustible gases as a dilutant modulator
• Stan Meyer, evening workshop, probably Denver, 1993, at 69:50 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, 1990 interview at his garage, at 32:52 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Figure 2-10: burning ambient air and mixing in non-combustible gases as a "dilutant modulator" — stanslegacy.com
• Adiabatic flame temperature of stoichiometric hydrogen–oxygen: about 2,800 °C (about 5,100 °F); hydrogen in air: about 2,100 °C
• AISI 304 stainless steel melting range: about 1,400–1,450 °C
• Exhaust gas recirculation: used in US passenger cars from the early 1970s to lower peak combustion temperature and NOx