Drivers Seek Mileage Boost From Hydrogen, Oxygen Bubbles

Newhouse News ^ | 6/10/2008 | Tim Knauss

[Anti-Bubba182]

I agree. The car industry is in worlds of trouble, if this worked they would be all over it.

[McGruff]

We are going to put one on my sons older PU truck before I try it on our newer vehicles.

I would warn anyone against doing this to a vehicle you can not afford to replace. You are working with gasoline near a hot engine. Car fires are nasty ones.

[rednesss]

"I smell a Hindenburg coming on."

Did somebody say "huge manatees"????

[DJ Frisat]

Unless you’re leaving out some pretty important details, I’m thinking you have a very active imagination...

[Conspiracy Guy]

I love Manatee steak with country gravy

[Centurion2000]

So you burn gasoline in the tank to turn the alternator which charges the battery which provides power to the Brown Gas Generator which gives Hydrogen to the combustion chamber and this setup is supposed to give greater mileage?

The question then is, is the chemical energy release of burning the hydrox mix greater than the electrical energy required to crack them? Somehow I doubt this is the case. I expect a lot of dead batteries in these cars' futures.

This also kind of strikes me as similar to the more complicated versions of steam engines like triple or qudruple expansion engines.

Now if you were generating electricity from the waste heat off the exhaust and using THAT to crack the water. Then you'd definitely be getting somewhere but even then you are just increasing the efficiency of the internal combustion engine.

[Jeff Head]

We're pretty adapt at working on vehicles and the conversion will be accomplished, of course, when the engine is off. The hosing to transfer the HHO is straight forward and can be accomplished without any danger.

Just the same, the whole idea of doing it on the old pickup is to check it out on something we can afford to have it not work on and then fix afterward if necessary. A 1992 Ford F-150.

I'll post something on FR after we do so in the next coupe of months and then test it long enough in real world conditions here in IDaho to get a feel for the results.

[Mechanicos]

"A key component of the system is an electronic modulator for the car's oxygen sensor, Kushnir said. The device prevents the car's computer from injecting more fuel into the engine in response to cleaner exhaust produced by burning hydrogen ..."

Ding! Ding! They mechanically lean out the fuel mixture...

[fproy2222]

What I have observed is that people who use these devices alter their driving behavior and tune up their vehicles. It is very easy to get better gas mileage simply by idling less, driving a little bit slower, not accelerating as quikly, etc. My dodge Cummins diesel pickup gets between 15 and 25 mpg depending on how I drive it

++

I drive a Ford Ranger with the small 4 cylinder and manual transmission.

I normally get 29/30 mpg. Since most of my driving is within 50 miles, the few minutes difference between 65 and 75 is worth the difference in gas money.

Here a while back I had to get about 400 miles away in a hurry and was not worried about gas millage. At 75/80 mph, my gas millage dropped to 19 mpg.

[AmericaUnited]

As was pointed out, Brown's Gas has a very, very low energy density so beware of no-load test results.

[Jeff Head]

With a 4X4 pickup operating offroad in the mountains here in Idaho, you will not have to wrroy about that.

[N. Theknow]

My Son-in-law is going to put one in his Chevy SUV.

I now call it Der Hindenburban.

[chopperman]

Congratulations, I find your post to be the most informative and credible in this thread.

[AmericaUnited]

Anyone interested in this should read this first.
Some Energy Fundamentals
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf
...
There was a recent newsgroup flap over an individual who thought he was going to find an old solar panel scunging away at a yard sale somewhere, build up an electrolysizer out of scrap parts he had lying around, and then hydrogen power his Cadillac Escalade SUV by using "free" energy. Thus screwing the oil companies. What’s wrong with this picture? Or, for that matter, "not even wrong"? There seems to be an amazing amount of appallingly bad misinformation on both traditional and alternate energy out there. Driven by everything from wishful thinking to hidden agendas to hero worship to big business hatred to government stupidity to subsidy ripoffs to bad labwork to utter cluelessness to R&D funding grabs to outright scams.

[Doohickey]

When I was in the Navy, we had on board a rather large device known as an electrolytic oxygen generator. It generated oxygen using a process that is really no different from the device described in the article aside from scale.

There was a reason that we referred to it as the “bomb”.

[Right Wing Assault]

It's likely that hydrogen improves combustion

The modern engine running at constant driving speed is giving as close to 100% combustion as you can get. There is hardly any raw gas or CO coming out the tailpipe. There's nothing left to burn. How can you improve on that?

Since it takes energy to make the hydrogen, even if it makes a difference, will it pay back the energy lost?

[count-your-change]

“A key component of the system is an electronic modulator for the car’s oxygen sensor, Kushnir said. The device prevents the car’s computer from injecting more fuel into the engine in response to cleaner exhaust produced by burning hydrogen, which would negate the efficiency gained, he said.”
Simply leaning the engine fuel mix. Plug-in engine modulators can be purchased aftermarket to tune the engine on the fly.
Burning water, burning hydrogen generated from water, nonsense, past and present.

[AmericaUnited]

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf

Electrolysis Fantasies

Water is an ash. By chemical energetics, it is thus about the worst place to look for a bulk hydrogen source. At first glance, it seems easy enough to use electrolysis to split water into its oxygen and hydrogen components. Just apply any low dc current for bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Full details first appeared by Michael Faraday over a century ago. And are easily found today in Britannica’s Great Books #45.

Electrolysis is certainly useful for cooling generators or petrochemical refining or precision low energy torches or lifting research balloons or making fat pretty but deadly. But nearly all of these use unstored hydrogen-on-demand and do value their hydrogen much higher than by its meager energy content.

As we’ve seen, retail electricity is worth about ten cents per kilowatt hour. Lower exergy gasoline is worth three cents per kilowatt hour. Your value of raw unprocessed hydrogen is not well established, but we do know it will certainly be a lot less than gasoline today. Because it has not yet impacted gasoline in any significant way. I feel 0.8 cents per raw hydrogen kilowatt hour can be a reasonable ballpark estimate.

In a typical situation, electrolysis takes two or more kilowatt hours of electricity worth ten cents each and converts them into one or fewer kilowatt hours of hydrogen worth less than a penny each. And that is before any fully burdened cost accounting, amortization, storage or processing. Thus… Electrolysis for bulk hydrogen energy is pretty much the same as 1:1 converting US dollars into Mexican Pesos.

At its very best, electrolysis introduces a staggering loss of exergy that dramatically reduces the quantity and value of transformed kilowatt hours of energy. Electrolysis is thus wildly unsuitable when driven from high value electrical sources such as retail grid electricity or any small scale photovoltaics.

If you have electricity, sell the electricity, buy some methane, and reform the methane. It is a lot cheaper and throws away a lot less exergy.

This is remarkably comparable to our earlier electrical resistance heat example. Where your best solution involves converting a few higher value kilowatt hours into more lower value ones. Rather than fewer.

Even if you have a renewable and sustainable source of ultra low cost electricity, electrolysis can still easily convert it back down into a net energy sink. Individuals making their own "homebrew" hydrogen by electrolysis face other rude surprises. For openers, some to much of the produced "gas" may end up water vapor from dielectric heating. Safety issues are largely unappreciated and easily lead to Darwin Awards.

But the really big gotcha is trying to use stainless steel rather than costly platinized platinum electrodes. Because of the hydrogen overvoltage of iron found in most any electrochem textbook, and because of the dead-wrong low energy passivated surface, stainless slashes your possible efficiency by one-half or greater.

[naturalized]

Umm, pretty sure this was Mythbusted.

[Mr. Dough]

I don't believe this is a good idea on the surface. Electrolysis of water into Hydrogen and Oxygen is an endothermic reaction. It takes more energy to break the H & O apart than they give off when they are recombined by combustion. For this to work there would need to be a violation of the law of conservation of energy, i.e. a perpetual motion machine.

Now, that said, there might be an advantage actually caused by the free oxygen helping to efficiently combust the gasoline. If this is the case, the hydrogen is probably just getting in the way. That aspect may be worth experimenting with.