Posted on 05/09/2008 8:14:37 PM PDT by djf
OK!!!
Lately, there seems to have been a torrent of info, ads, websites, radio shows, etc about "run your car on water".
Including the C2C show last night, that featured Ari Cohen & Fred Gutierrez, promoters of a site called water4gas.
So my question is:
Are they shucksters?
The basic idea is somewhat misstated. You obviously can't "burn water" Well, maybe you could if you lived on a planet with a Flourine atmosphere or something.
But what these devices do is to take water, and using electricity from your battery/alternator, decompose it back into the hydrogen and oxygen it is originally composed of. Then, using a venturi type system, it feeds this back into your air intake system, where it is eventually mixed with gas and burned in the cylinders.
Can this idea work? Well, I imagine it could. The claims are that each quart of water actually contains the energy equivalent of over 1800 gallons of gas.
Does it work?
I watched a bunch of Youtube vids this afternoon. Simple HHO generators are fairly easy to construct. Most seemed , to my untrained eye at least, to not be putting out very much gas. But a couple were positively overflowing with gas.
So even if you could construct such a device (this thread is for tinkering Freepers like me), is there enough "left over" energy in your car system to run it? I mean, say you have a 50 Amp alternator, does your car really run that close to the limit that you can't spare one or two amps to drive the unit? Does the car's negative ground system just throw away the wave cycles that are the wrong phase, or does it rectify them?
What about your valves? Plugs? Oil systems? Catalytic systems? Water, in general, is not the best thing to have in an engine, even though burning gas obviously makes some.
Any Freepers tried this stuff? Thoughts? Ideas?
I thought the title said “Rum your car on water...”
I was gonna say, not the rum!
Separates the hydrogen and oxygen I do believe to provide better oxidation of your gasoline.
If it’s the device that costs about $1200, then I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re talking about.
Of course you can separate the hydrogen and oxygen and run an engine with only (lots) of heat and water (in the form of steam) produced.
Works for the main engines of the space shuttle. :)
If you could buy bread forever on the change you got from your last loaf of bread, then this idea would work great.
Supposedly you can build a device that does it fairly easily and at a pretty minimal cost, say less than $150.00
Which, these days, it equal to three or four fillups at the local station.
So if it works, and can save you, say 20%, then it could pay for itself in pretty short order, especially now with the summer season coming on.
Additional benefits were that the car runs cooler and has more “pep”. The correct mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen is a highly explosive, very fast burning substance, so I could understand why.
Basically, I’ve been thinking about trying it. But I don’t want to trash my battery or burn up my alternator or have a mini-Hiroshima under my hood!
If I were going to experiment with something like this, I would go with a carbureted engine. Probably before ‘74 to avoid emissions equipment.
That’s another thing. Here in Washington, you have to get a smog test every 2 years. A test where they look under the hood.
If they look under the hood and see this contraption, do they even let you make a phone call before they haul your behind down to jail?
Dunno, just figured I’d ask about it. Freepers in general being a bold group and more inventive than the rest, somebody must have tried it.
Most states that I know of don’t have the same requirements for older”pre smog law” cars. I had a 72 Pinto that would have been perfect for testing this. Lots of extra room under the hood and everything was easy to get to.
There is no free lunch.
Whatever energy you get out of reacting hydrogen with oxygen, you have to put into the water in the first place to separate them. In addition, every process has inefficiencies, so you lose energy in every step (separation of the atoms is one step; recovering mechanical energy from the combustion is another step).
What you have described is a perpetual motion machine. Hucksters have been selling these in various forms for centuries.
Draw a big box around this system, including the alternator and the engine. The law of conservation of energy states that energy can not be created nor destroyed. Therefore in simple terms, the energy sources coming into this system are the combustion energy of the gasoline and air mixture, and the energy leaving this system is the heat associated with combustion and frictional losses, and the kinetic energy of the crankshaft. If the system is powering a vehicle there will be additional frictional losses, but for know let's consider this smaller closed system.
Splitting water molecules then reconstituting them via combustion within the closed box of the system doesn't create energy within the system, because the water (again in simple terms) came into the system without energy potential. Energy had to be imparted to the water in order to create the potential.
The splitting and rejoining (combustion) would be happening within the closed system, and there would actually be net losses associated with that process, including the additional heat losses (albeit smaller in scale than total heat losses) from the engine associated with the additional load to generate the electricity to split the water molecules.
These people are snake oil salesmen.
Good way to put it, in the type of system he mentions you cannot create any surplus energy because it will simply go back into splitting more water and will do so back and forth until it does not have any fuel left, so it would be a net zero gain in energy.
The word is “Scam”. Every few years someone ‘discovers’ air/water injection for engines. I remember the simple mason jar and vacuum hose tied into the carb. method. It didn’t do much, if anything, other than make the owner feel better.
Why won’t it work? Because water won’t burn, in fact the water absorbs energy due to its high latent heat content.
Want to save gas? Low restriction air filter, $100-$150, and it works. Engine programmer, $100-$300, allows you to set engine for economy on demand. It works.
We know that. Read the post again. You’re using excess amps from you system. Might as well say your running your car by burning electricity.
But the amps from your car are based on the r’s you are turning. And if there weren’t at least enough, then your car would stall, at idle or at cruise, or at whatever. So obviously there are enough.
My question is two fold: can this thing generate enough gas to make a difference, and is there enough amps “left over” to run it efficiently.
First off, no a perpetual motion machine doesn't work. Secondarily a quart of water has no energy, as in zero usable energy. That is unless your car engine happens to be a fusion reactor, of course the radiation would kill you if you had a car like that, but that is beside the point. And before someone tries to hammer me by saying that fusion is radiation free I am prepared to argue the point : )
Does it work?
As in put money in the promoters pockets? It just might. Other than that you are way ahead just buying a more efficient vehicle.
I watched a bunch of Youtube vids this afternoon. Simple HHO generators are fairly easy to construct. Most seemed , to my untrained eye at least, to not be putting out very much gas. But a couple were positively overflowing with gas.
LOL Here is a quote from somewhere on the internet "Hydrogen does have some more significant drawbacks. One of the most difficult to deal with is that it is such a light gas! A pound of Hydrogen contains around 61,000 Btus of latent energy in it, which seems like a lot! For comparison, a pound of regular gasoline only contains around 20,500 Btus in it! Sounds good!
However, a pound of Hydrogen is HUGE! At standard atmospheric pressure and temperature, it takes up around 190 cubic feet of space. In contrast, that pound of gasoline only takes up about 1/50 of a cubic foot. Hydrogen gas takes up around 10,000 times the space that gasoline does!"
So even if you could construct such a device (this thread is for tinkering Freepers like me), is there enough "left over" energy in your car system to run it? I mean, say you have a 50 Amp alternator, does your car really run that close to the limit that you can't spare one or two amps to drive the unit? Does the car's negative ground system just throw away the wave cycles that are the wrong phase, or does it rectify them?
The alternator produces more or less watts depending on the load or the resistance. You can test this by listening to the motor at idle when you turn on electrical devices in your car. Generally the alternator is producing a fraction of its rated capacity. It is simply the standard V=IR equation.
The big thing is that at automobile engine is only about 20 to 40% efficient. If you can figure out how to double that efficiency or even improve it slightly you might very well be the next richest man in the world : )
May interest you..
You’d do even better using that great battery that would electrolyze the water into hydrogen and oxygen, to instead run the car through an electric motor. The law of conservation of mass/energy has not yet been refuted.
Hi Count-change
Here’s how I see it, and I’m ignorant enough to imagine this: heat generated by combustion and internal friction is energy wasted. If that heat can be channeled to propelling something, why not?
For example, rather than driving the alternator from the drive shaft, why not create a conventional steam turban from this heat?
Maybe this is already being done; I dunno
It would appear that Mr. Gunnermans ideas work. And have been shown to work exactly as he says they will work.
I may not totally agree, but good, reasoned response.
Thanks.
One aspect of this idea might be this:
It’s POSSIBLE that by burning say, 5% of your gas, it yields something else that makes the 95% of your gas left over burn much, much more efficiently.
Just an idea.
So I don’t know, that’s why I said “color me skeptical”. But everyone has to admit there’s been alot of brouhaha about it lately.
No such thing as "excess amps". It's the watts we're interested in, not the amps. If the battery is fully charged then there is a lessor amount of potential (volts) between the alternator and the battery. Therefore the only amps that are flowing are the amps required to maintain the charge of the battery, which is also the amount of energy required to run the engine and accessories.
All this system is going to do is draw more energy from the battery, which means the alternator is going to work harder, which means that it will require more energy from the only energy source coming into the system; namely the combustion energy of the gas and air.
Again, I've got to fall back on the conservation of energy. There are ways of mitigating energy losses (e.g. regenerative braking), but not of creating energy within a system.
The process is called electrolysis. Basically, you are breaking water (H20) into it's component gases (HHO, also called Brown's Gas). Like many things, there are a lot of lies mixed in with the truth.
The talk of running on 100% HHO it not real today. You use too much energy to produce the fuel needed to run the engine, much left supply excess energy for propelling the car. People claiming this I believe are hucksters.
However, there is another mode: using HHO as a supplement to a standard fuel, gas or diesel. For this, you only need to generate enough to enrich the air/fuel mixture. The $49.95 units I believe are so crude they will not produce enough gas to make a difference. I have found a decent looking system for my Ford F250 for $1600 that included an engine parameter monitors and some other stuff. Like other things in life, you get what you pay for.
The act of injecting some HHO into the engine is a low grade, continuous thing, not a shot boost like a NoS setup. It is not the primary fuel, but a gaseous additive. As my understanding goes, the hydrogen burns many times faster than gas or diesel. This extra burn, over the initial spark for gas or compression ignition for diesel, causes the fuel to burn more efficiently. In the case of diesel, also it lowers emissions (also a sign of better fuel burn).
This seems to be real. I have found multiple companies selling these units to truckers. I believe I recognized one of the units as something I have personally seen on a big rig. These guys depend on their rigs for their livelihoods, so they don't put them at risk. Mileage increases reported by the big rig guys are in the 20% - 20% range. I have read claims for gas engines are 20% - 50% improvement.
There are more sophisticated units that can use straight water, but most made today require an electrolyte mixed in the water, typically NaOH, sodium hydroxide (lye).
So, you ask, why don't the car makers do it? My personal opinion, it makes a car/truck need more maintenance. You now are consuming a water/electrolyte mix (or at least water if you have a better unit) as well as fuel. Depending on the capacity of the unit, you could be adding daily, weekly but almost certainly every fuel tank fill up. I am not sure a typical consumer will like that. Mercedes was very concerned about the Bluetec diesel system's acceptance. It requires the urea tank to be refilled every oil change. The big rig units have more room to work with and some have an auxiliary water tank that topped off the unit. The one I read up on required fill ups every 2000 miles. For a trucker, maintaining the rig is just part of the job so it is no big deal in that market.
Maybe Mr. Moller could use it to power his Skycar.
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Stacking 2 air filters to increase airflow effiency - mucho cheapo - A bit of electrical tape will seal the joined filters
Adding a simple water vapor container feeding into a vacuum line allows you to increase engine timing without pre-detonation (and melting your forged pistons!)
I used these simple cheap devices on a turbocharged car in the early 70s commuting to NYC
It does increase gas mileage and allows increased power at the same time
Insulating the exhaust manifolds or tubular headers to retain more heat will increase turbo boost and devising and intercooler to keep the intake colder helps a lot too
Compressed intake air is hotter - keeping that air colder will increase efficiency
You don’t have to buy designer add-ons - NASCAR tricks from years ago were simple and still work
How well does this work?
This particular vehicle had a top speed of over 173mph
Hydrogen and Oxygen are diatomic(two atoms per molecule). So, when you react(burn) the two you get 2H2O.
(2H2+O2=>2(H2O). Both sides must contain equal atoms)
Most of the generators I've looked at are using pulsed DC, which is different than normal electrolysis of water which splits the H and O molecules apart back to H2 and O2 using steady DC. The pulsed DC seems to be splitting the molecule another way giving you HHO or HOH.(AKA Brown's Gas)
I tend to think the folks telling you fantastic claims about using this on cars are blowing smoke at you. However, the 1800x the energy claim may be true - water heated to steam does expand to 1600 times its volume as water, and Hydrogen/gram has more BTUs than gasoline/gram. Compared to gasoline heated air your engine uses, the difference may well be 1800x. (Note that this comparison may be flawed in that the amount of energy required to make water into steam is considerable, and may not have been considered.)
When I was racing(early 80's), lots of guys tried water injection systems, but it wasn't easy to meter the exact amount needed for consistantcy at that time, and I saw lots of damage done by water, both quickly and over time - it just doesn't compress well, it rust iron, and will not mix at all with gasoline. With modern engine mixture controls it might be possible to do so more sucessfully.
SEE, I knew you would like this thread!
I don’t understand a bit about it but knew you were the expert, lol.
Yes, I realize the conservation of energy aspect. No, that law is not being broken here. You are introducing an additive to the combustion chamber that increases the burn efficiency. Less unburnt fuel (containing unreleased energy) is leaving the system via the exhaust.
This more efficient burn of the fuel plus the burn of the additive converts enough additional energy to compensate for energy used to produce the additive.
But everyone has to admit there’s been alot of brouhaha about it lately.Two reasons, I believe:
1. Gas prices are going up painfully quick, we are no longer frogs in a pot... we are feeling it!
2. The patents held by Stan Meyer, the man who came up with the pulsed DC method, went public domain in 2007 (unconfirmed by me, but sited by those who are reproducing his work and trying to continue).
The sad thing is, the conspiracy crowd has taken these ideas hostage. The stories of "Big Oil" buying up all this technology abound. Stan's untimely death added fuel to the fire (they KILLED him!) even though the official cause of death has been reported as a cerebral aneurysm, not uncommon for a person with a history of extreme high blood pressure.
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Adding a little alcohol to the water in a vacuum (vapor) or injection system will allow better atomization
During WWII (enough practical use then folks?) aircraft used injection on turbocharged engines
Obviously it worked pretty well.....
One rig I’ve seen on a racing turbo setup used an aluminum beer keg and a modified windshield washer pump
It worked great - but was not needed for my street vehicle
I’m sure algore has an “alternate source of power” in his 4WD he was caught exceeding 85mph in a few years ago
During WWII in Germany some hog farmers rigged methane fuel devices on the back of their Volkwagens
Al Gore Junior and his fancy sport car or Al Senior?
Well I visited a few websites and cannot say if they were using pulsed DC or regular. But your point about the HHO gas making the whole system run more efficiently is part of what I’m talking about.
Last night, I hooked up a simple system using a six volt lantern battery that didn’t have alot of charge left in it. I used stainless steel scrub pads (like brillo pads but stainless) as the anode and cathode. Tap water, and sodium bicarb as the electrolyte.
The bubbles were pretty feeble. I have yet to try it with a regular, fully charged 12V battery. (But I have a spare on the charger now).
If the results are better, I may try to construct a more mobile unit and hook it up to my car when it’s running, just to get an idea of the amount of output.
I just like to tinker with things. And the reports I’ve seen (things like the exhaust being much, much cleaner) add up that it might actually work. And since the Freeper world has a wide variety of experience, figured I’d ask.
Lotta folks say if you add a small amount of acetone to your gas, you get a much better burn. Reduces the surface tension of the gas so it vaporizes better.
Not to mention it keeps your injectors clean as a whistle!
Not sure if your hoses will like it, though.
That isn't the problem. An engine is just a pump, all it is doing is heating up and expanding air. Most of the energy simply goes out the exhaust as heat. The actual combustion is in the 99% percent range. The gas burns extremely efficiently, it is the conversion of the heat to mechanical motion that is inefficient. A 100% efficient engine wouldn't need any cooling of any kind :)
That 50 amp alternator you mentioned uses up to 10 hp, it is terribly inefficient.
I know this stuff because I am the President of an airplane engine manufacturing company and spend a lot of time playing with a dyno. I periodically get calls from people who claim to be able to boost performance, fuel economy, etc. and invariably when I tell them, 'great, lets see how it works on the dyno" they get really quiet.
There are things that do increase the efficiency, advancing the timing, increasing the compression, getting the stoichiometric ratio perfect, etc. The problem is that I generally blow up the engine if I push them too far. So we put in a safety margin and lose about 10 to 20% off of optimum.
Seriously the answer is to buy a tiny economy car that gets 40 plus miles to the gallon. Or invent a new and fantastic battery : )
When you separate water into its separate gases you create “Brown’s gas”. When you ignite Brown’s gas it recombines into liquid water producing a high VACUUM. Compression ratio will not be affected by using this gas but peak chamber pressure after ignition WILL be reduced. Read that as less hp per cycle.
Google Brown’s gas.
Welders are experimenting with this stuff because of the weird properties it has. As far as automotive use you’ll get better results using ground up ‘shrooms and chicken lips. Snake oil and bad science alert!
YOU ARE THE PRESIDENT OF AN ENGINE MANUFACTURING COMPANY?
Talk to ME!
I have schematics and a plan for an engine design that is basically revolutionary. Showed it to a buddy of mine who knows ALOT about engines, materials, metalworking, and manufacture and he looks at it for about thirty seconds, then says what I thought he would, then says “No, it’s not...”
Then he sorta drools and says “Whoa! Motorcycles...” and I knew I had something!
But I do not have any patent experience or the machining equipment I would need to even set up a prototype...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QdVevvgM3ho
In general I would say that anything that adds weight takes extra fuel.
More machinery, more expense and possibility of failure. The piston gasoline engine will improve in tiny steps not some great break through that doubles its efficiency so its going to be either use a different engine fuel, diesel, or different engine, turbine (not turban-that’s a hat) or similar.
The waste heat of the engine is low in temp but large in calories so it’s rather hard to make use of it. Turbocharged diesels look pretty good right now.
Patent it first and then send me some CAD files. The machine shop can make anything. We are particularly interested in small, lightweight engines that produce around 200 hp at less than 2000 rpm.
To be perfectly frank, the odds of you having made a revolutionary breakthrough are low, and the costs of developing a new engine are in the 10's to hundreds of millions. It has to be a 'very' promising idea, but there are breakthroughs every day : )
so then the price of water is going to skyrocket now.
the price of corn was supposed to go up.
that is it charge the heck out of everything.
bankrupt us all
starve everyone to death.
My friend and I just made one from scratch and followed no plans other than we we dreamed up. It churns out a lot of gas, hydrogen and oxygen, and we feed it via a copper tube into a hole we drilled in the intake manifold of and old tractor (this is our “venturi type system.”) Thus, the engine runs on gasoline enriched with our hydrogen-oxygen gas, and it runs like a champ. It took all of one day to put it together and collect enough gas for a test run.
Water injection systems were used in the leaded-gas engine era to boost performance, also fuel economy. This worked because it scavenged some of what would normally have been waste heat by making steam in the cylinder, which pushed the piston down a little harder. Not too sure this would work for 100s of 1000s of miles in a modern engine without a lot of preventive maintenance.
Breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen using waste heat is probably A) missing the point of what’s really going on, and B) doesn’t work, because the temperature isn’t high enough (water electrolysis is one way to break water into H and O, but the bond breaks down when the temperature rises high enough).
There is hydrogen gas, as well as oxygen gas, in water. They are leftovers from water formation, or somethin’. There’s sufficient oxygen in the air to combust with the wandering hydrogen if one can get it out of the water, a process that superficially resembles water electrolysis but uses very little electricity (by comparison). I doubt that the hydrogen is in sufficient quantity to make any difference.
Oxygenation of fuel using MBTE or ethanol is intended to make gasoline burn more thoroughly. Probably the hydrogen is irrelevant in booster systems of the kind claimed, and it’s the oxygen that is giving the engine the extra pop. I would think that it could yield better fuel economy than, say, a turbocharger or supercharger, and would do something like the same job.
Bump for FReeper thoughts and comments.
I tried yet again with a small electrolysis setup and got only feeble amounts of gas coming out.
If there’s some kinda secret, let me in on it!
There is no secret. Let me clue you in to the truth. Lets say a gallon of gas has 100,000 BTU's and lets be generous and say your car's engine is 40% efficient and the alternator is 60% efficient and the electrolysis is 50% efficient. 100,000 x .4 x .6 x .5 = 12,000 BTU's. Another way of saying it is that for every dollar you invest you get 12 cents back. I was being very generous with the numbers the actual results would probably be a fraction of that. Trust your own findings and your feeble results, they are the truth.
If there is anyone who likes those kind of investment returns, I am more than happy to provide them. I accept Cash, Checks, Credit Cards, etc. : )
If the two filters are in series, this will double the resistance of the new filters. I don't see how it would make any difference as the filters load.
This will work if you find some way to install filters in parallel, but I believe this requires something more than electrical tape.
What these two people are talking about could be a variant on the same water injection boost to get more engine power from a smaller engine. Mind you, I think a better solution is to use a smaller-displacement engine coupled to a two-speed supercharger such as the one the Antonov Transmission company developed two years ago.
You’re simply doubling the exposed filter area of the filter
Often on earlier GMs you could find a stock of aftermarket filter of the same diameter that will fit in a stock air cleaner housing with a longer carb screw swapped in
The top of the air filter will also be raised or it can be installed with just a bottom plate and the stock top plate as on the Shelby Cobra roadsters - the filter will either need to be replace or cleaned (as in some K&N reusable filters)
You may not “see how it works” - but it does
Just put a thinner air filter on your vehicle - say half the height - the engine will produce less horsepower
Reunning with no air filter at all will increase air flow and also lean the mixture somewhat - it will produce better performance if the bottom curved plate is used - to smooth the airflow
Removing the air filter to get thru state inspection tests was a simple way to get it passed if the vehicle was/is marginal
The leaner mixture will show up a good shop testing machine
There are FReepers that created the AC-’Vette (John Schultz’s AC-Bristol) that Carroll Shelby copied when he saw it at Opa Locka when he was racing a Birdcage Maserati
(Bristol aluminum engine block spun the bearings three times - requiring welding and reboring in Fort Lauderdale - the forth time a certain ‘59 Chevy Impala with small block [Duntov SR/’56 Vette dual AFBs] was measured about 3am in the morning with a yardstick in Schultz’s garage and the AC underhood dimensions checked - plenty of room)
The engine conversion was done in Pompano Beach Florida and took 3 days in between other vehicles - a 3-speed transmission was used and never changed to a 4-speed
It was a legend on the Sunshine State Parkway
You never learn until you try something
More grease under the fingernails and less time at a keyboard
(Hey John! Keep it betwwen the ditches!)
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I used it on my TRW turbo in the 70’s - a mix
I reworked the distributor to get a faster advance curve and dialed in more initial advance
The stock exhaust valves were sodium cooled
That engine later was sold to a postman with a VW Karmann-Ghia
A bit of ballast was added to the front - wheelies under light throttle are not smart in the rain at stoplights
Good info on the German fighters
Check out US bombers
bump
Antonov's two-speed supercharger could make it possible to have a really small gasoline engine (as small as 1.2 liters' displacement!) generate as much as 140 bhp, more than enough to accelerate quickly a compact car the size of a Hyundai Elantra or Honda Civic. And it will use about 10-14% less fuel than its larger normally-aspirated counterpart, since in flatland driving you don't need to full boost of the turbo and enjoy the benefits of a small-displacement engine.
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