BlueRidgeMark

You might want to review those 7th grade basic principles. Contra Crazy 8s and a few other people, the energy required to break a chemical bond is exactly the energy that is returned when that bond is reformed. It's 1 to 1. 10 joules in, 10 joules out. 100 joules in, 100 joules out. No more, no less.

System losses make the process a net energy loss in any real-world system, but the chemical energy equations are about as straightforward and debatable as 2+2=4.

That means that hydrogen is an energy storage medium (and a poor one), not an energy source.

If you go back far enough in time, the same is true of petrochemicals. The difference is, the sun stored that energy for us a few years ago and now we have a stockpile of it, so the only cost to use it is the cost of pulling it out of the stockpile, cleaning it up a bit, and transporting it to the point of use. The energy content is free.

That's not true of hydrogen. We have to provide the energy somehow. No process can transfer energy from one form to another with a gain in energy. The BEST you can do in theory is to break even. The BEST you can do in the real world is to lose energy.

IF you have an abundant source of cheap energy (solar, nuclear, whatever) it might be worth the losses to swap forms around for convenience. For example, filling a hydrogen tank and driving to Timbuktu is a lot more convenient than dragging an extension cord.

But that use of hydrogen is not helping our energy situation one bit.

It could help pollution in some specific areas by transferring the production of pollutants to another location. Places like Los Angeles could benefit from this.

OR it could reduce worldwide pollutants by using a source of energy that pollutes less. Hydro-power, for example.

But converting to hydrogen on a mass scale does NOTHING to provide more energy for the world because it is LESS efficient than anything we are currently using.

CoffeeCommando

Those guys blundered the whole thing. I think they were either intent on producing a negative outcome to push people away, or were just too ignorant to be doing it in the first place. Probably both.


The load isn't enough to make any difference on the alternator vs gas mileage. Alternators that weigh 30 lbs in 6.5 HP generators produce 3500+ watts. It's a 6.5 HP motor and it has no issue producing enough power for a house. It's common sense. Everyone always says it'll drag the alternator down so much it will cancel it out. That's just conjecture and sophomoric speculation that seems like it could be right, but when you look at the numbers it's actually very wrong. I have a Mechman 240 amp alternator and I will be putting that to the test with a 150 VDC HHO generator in the future. Financials aren't in my favor at the moment.





Toyota has one on the market already. The key point is that the car is expensive, and you have to go to a hydrogen fill station. They're monetizing water for cars. It's the exact opposite of what the whole concept of water for fuel was about; free energy for the car.

There is more to the equation than just simply slapping an HHO generator on a vehicle and expecting it to work. It will work, however, we have fuel injection. What does that mean? When the O2's see better fuel economy they increase the injector pulse widths. If you really want to get better gas mileage you need electronic manipulation in the form of an EFIE (at minimum) to see the gains.

There is another way, a simpler way, that uses 3-5 amps total. Still using water, but not running electrons through it to break it into HHO. I think misting water into the intake is better. Room temperature water when heated to 212 becomes steam. What is steam? It's water expanded 1700x into a gaseous form. HHO is 1800 x the size of a standard H20 molecule so it's very close to turning into HHO. What little bit of steam makes it into the cylinder will do a lot not just for pushing the piston, but steam cleaning the pistons and valve faces. This method absorbs the energy from the combustion chamber (which is just wasted heat energy anyways) and uses that to push the piston. That would help cool the cylinders a little. I already know what a few are thinking, "But cooling the cylinders will make the ECU see cooler temperatures and adjust the fuel injectors." Nothing is black and white, everything works to a degree. There is a cut off point for everything and that is where scientific testing and validation comes in. You can theorize and conjecture all day. Unless you test it you're just blowing hot air. I don't blow hot air. I test and validate. That's science, not speculation. That's also where that electronic control unit I have comes into play. It checks ALL sensor parameters that are related to fuel injector pulse widths and modifies them to account for the changes.

Carbon build-up also causes a sponge affect on oxygen during the combustion process. The Oxygen is pressed into the carbon layers reducing the oxygen to burn the gas, then during the exhaust stroke when the compression is relieved it exits and offsets your O2 sensors' readings. It took me a while to happen across that information in race engine rebuilding articles.

With proper engineering you could actually make a car that you fill up just one time with water and would never need refilled again, because you can recapture the water from the exhaust and condense it back into room temperature water, and pump it back into the cell.

You better believe people have been killed over this type of free energy technology (Denny Klein was working with the DoD in the early 2000's and mysteriously died, and Stan Meyers is the first well known case).

I left my job in May to pursue this full time and have used it successfully without even using the electronic portion. I had to do a number of things to increase the potency. Mine isn't like anything else you can buy. Everyone is using dry cells and they have drawbacks you just can't do with a wet cell design.

Bugout4x4

Good morning. I want to come pursue this some more but have to run to town today. My 82 yr old father won't leave power tools alone and tried to cut his hand off with the chain saw. Time for the doc to make sure it is healing well.

So I'll be back when I get caught up... Really want to dive into this deeper.

4.3L XJ

This is an interesting subject for me too. I learned in a chem class that water to steam ratio was 1100:1, but still impressive which is why the country ran on steam for awhile. The thing is that I have heard good and bad about water injection. But I am all for gas milage.

CoffeeCommando

Water injection kits are not what I made. I have some pictures of that but I need to transfer the setup over to the square black bucket I got. Right now it's in a Lowe's bucket. Getting the right nozzle with the right pressure matters, and so does making some drain reliefs in the intake for any that isn't sucked into the engine while idling.

Water injection kits usually require reading an injector pulse width which requires more complex electronics and modifying the on-board wiring harnesses, things I am not a fan of. It's too invasive for consumers to want to get involved with. I made a simple setup that can be assembled and installed in just a few hours if you have some power tool know-how. A few more for anyone else.

The "injection" kits can fail open. I've seen a vehicle hydrolock as soon as it was turned on because he was running boost and had it plumbed to his manifold. That's how they're recommended installed and not how I do my setup. Mine is continuously on with a very small mist that can't possibly hydrolock the car, and if you want more you can either adjust the pressure with the turn of a screw or install more nozzles (also fairly easily). It also comes with a cheaper container setup that holds a lot more liquid than your water/methanol injection kits. I actually have a snow performance kit on my XJ.

Edit: Water Misting Setup Enclosured. It looks simple but there is more to the complete setup than what is depicted. I suspect a capacitive ignition setup might actually ignite the H2O to combust into HHO, but that would create more heat. Combusting HHO into H2O is endothermic and has a cooling effect (gasoline is ignited in contrast to break the bonds which expands the liquid into a gas. It's an exothermic reaction that creates heat).

jedijeb

Ugh, the HHO miracle molecule device again.

The miracle is that HHO can not exist without violating the laws of physics.

Hydrogen has a single proton and single electron, but can possibly have two electrons. When Hydrogen looses an electron it has a single positive charge, if it gains the extra electron it has a single negative charge, this is why it exists in nature as H2 which allows two hydrogen atoms to join together into a stable hydrogen molecule where they share the extra electron. Oxygen forms the same type of molecule but with its electron arrangement it can easily gain two electrons which will give it a double negative charge. Oxygen will share its two extra electrons, one each with two hydrogen atoms which forms the stable H2O molecule, which is in the form H-O-H . The mythical molecule described as H-H-O can not exist since hydrogen can not form two chemical bonds. What these devices actually do is simply take H2O and break it down into H2 and O2 gas through electrolysis. H2 is flammable when it reacts again with O2 to generate energy. The laws of physics demand that energy can neither be created or destroyed, the same with mass. It essentially takes as much energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen as is produced by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water. If burning hydrogen and oxygen produced more energy than was used to split water, then long ago we would have build a perpetual energy machine that ran on hydrogen and oxygen generated from electrolysis and it would run forever without every having any more energy or fuel added to it. We don't have that because it isn't possible by the laws of physics.

Now the disappointing mathematics related to using this to power a vehicle.

One gallon of water will produce 165 cubic feet of hydrogen gas. If you use air to burn the hydrogen you will need 2.4 times as much air as hydrogen to reach the stoichiometric ratio needed for use in an internal combustion engine. ( found here in section 3.6 https://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydroge...fs/fcm03r0.pdf ) this means you will use a total of 148 cubic feet of air/fuel pulled through the engine. If this is true, then it would seem one gallon of water would require a total of 561 cubic feet of air/hydrogen to be pulled through an engine to totally burn it all. Since a 2.0L engine running at 4000rpm will use about 140 cubic feet per minute, maybe less depending on the volumetric efficiency of the intake and exhaust systems. This would mean one gallon of water would generate enough hydrogen to operate the engine at this speed for about 4 minutes, if that engine speed will push the vehicle 60 miles per hour then you would only get about 4mpg from water. If you can go 60mph at 2000rpm then maybe you get 8mpg on water. Run with a lean mixture and maybe you get 10-12mpg.

Unless this device magically creates new laws of physics and chemistry then that is about the best efficiency you will ever get. If you are still running gasoline through the engine and adding in the little bit of hydrogen produced you might gain a few mpg above what is normal from just the gasoline.

This is also why most hydrogen you purchase in cylinders comes from natural gas or other hydrocarbons since per unit mass they contain more hydrogen equal amounts of water and it is easier to break it down( water is a very stable molecule compared to most hydrocarbons).

btw, I have been working as a chemist for the last 26 years and use hydrogen in a lot of the equipment at the lab.

Bugout4x4

There is some good home work being done here both pro and con. I have a few questions on both sides, but had such a bad day yesterday I don't want to think today.

4.3L XJ

I am watching with interest too. I haven't gotten over violating the second law of thermodynamics yet. But I will keep an open mind

andrewmp6

When i had a procharger blower on my drag can i ran a water methanol injection as basicly a chemical inter cooler,It does work to a point but the water methanol mix wasn't cheap after running it a while.Later on i sold the blower and ran it all motor on e85,I lost a little power but made up for it in the weight i removed aka the blower.

CoffeeCommando

Rules and laws are only there until we find out we didn't know everything at that time. We're constantly discovering new things that abolish the old ways of thinking. That will never end.

I've read elsewhere about the first engine actually being hydrogen, but here's a tidbit on it. Beware that you don't buy into disinformation. The very nature of of disinforming people comes down to controlling their behavior patterns. If you think about it long enough, it always comes from the top down and there is an agenda. What's the agenda? Who all benefits from selling gas/oil? The guys with enough money to hire hitmen and fund disinformation campaigns with fake news can do the same thing on the Internets. It's your job to use your noodle and figure out whether or not what you're reading is real. No one has anything to gain by you figuring out how to use water as a fuel except yourself. That's where the oil industry's conflict of interest comes in and they have enough money to keep these kinds of devices in the recesses of the markets or off the markets all together.

http://www.automostory.com/first-hydrogen-car.htm

Bugout4x4

Good morning, I think in this perpetual debate about hydrogen a couple cause and effect goals should be established from the start. First what is the true goal? Is the goal to run and engine on hydrogen alone? Or is the goal to supplement and engine with hydrogen to make it more efficient?

The first has pretty much been proven not possible many times over now despite what the greenies would like to hear because of the power to produce outweighing the power derived from the resulting product. But the second is very viable and does work to make an engine more efficient when used as a supplement to petroleum fuels.

If done correctly and efficiently there are several benefits and overall increases in BTU efficiency. But just like everything else, it also requires regular maintenance. It does work but the maintenance costs verses the amount of gas produced is what this debate actually boils down to.

There have been great innovations in design and materials that have reduced these costs over the years. Plate material being the most important because no matter what you use it degrades, especially if you are adding a catalyst/electrolyte to the water for better gas production at lower power draw to higher gas production ratios.

But here is why it does work and what the benefits are when using it as a supplemental fuel rather than a primary fuel. First, Gasoline by it's self can only reach a maximum efficiency because it does not burn thoroughly and completely during the combustion process. Especially low octane fuels like we are now forced to use. Lowering octane was the dumbest thing we could have ever done if better efficiency and cleaner burning engines are truly a goal in this country.

End part one...

Bugout4x4

Part two...

The misconception about octane is that it burns faster with more explosive force when the opposite is true. It actually burns slower with a longer more thorough burn to get more efficiency out of the same amount of fuel introduced. A comparison could be the difference in muzzle velocity of an exact like kind round when discharged from a pistol or a rifle. Because of the barrel length, and the longer it is pushed by the propellant pressure, the rifle will produce faster exit muzzle velocities and energy than the pistol will.

So what does hydrogen do in this process? The introduction of hydrogen as a supplement greatly increases the burn efficiency of the primary fuel it's self whether it be gasoline or diesel. It creates an environment for the primary fuel to burn much more thoroughly and cleaner. So what we are after here is actually helping increase the efficiency of the primary fuel it's self rather than trying to run off of hydrogen alone as a fuel. And if done right, there can be quite a bit of BTU profit in this concept.

(it wouldn't let me put all that into one reply. lol)

Bugout4x4

Everything you stated is absolutely true. But in the end these few miles per gallon and a cleaner burning engine is all we are after. No miracles, just helping the primary fuel burn with more efficiency.

CoffeeCommando

Modern cars are engineered to only be 25% efficient. Lower octane fuels have more energy and that is why you need high octane (less energy compacted into a tighter compressed space on a high compression engine won't detonate).

Fuel used to be 50 octane, and that is what white gas (Coleman lantern fuel is the only one I am aware of available today) is. Pure gasoline with no additives.

People like to chime in about laws of energy. Have you ever considered where the alternator is pulling the electrons from to keep the battery charged? If we can't extract more energy than what is already being used by design in our vehicles, then that means the battery is the most energy dense component in the system. Gasoline provides energy only because the battery is able to split the gasoline apart. How much energy does the ignition system use? How many joules does the gas provide? Why are we even using gas to begin with if the battery has more energy than the gas it is extracting energy from?

Do you know how a battery is made? It's providing all the energy to the electrical systems in your car through a simple process. It's called electrolysis. The same thing me and many others are using to turn water into a gaseous fuel. Simply by association the electrolysis process, even if we're obeying the laws of energy, in and of itself is the most energy dense system in the vehicle, whether you're using an HHO generator or a completely factory setup.

Educational books are always decades behind the actual practical applications. They only get put into the books long after it's been proven to be effective over the course of time, because if something doesn't stand the test of time it isn't worth a hill of beans. Electrolysis happens all around us. How do you think water evaporates into the sky? Why do you think lightning strikes when it's raining outside? I've seen minute sparks inside my cells by having loose connections.

Furthermores, most of the parroting-effect (where someone repeats the same thing that someone else repeated which perpetuates itself with no real backing or source that can be found) about the energy involved in extracting HHO was done with tests using water WITHOUT electrolyte. Electrolyte in the mix is what makes the process very viable and efficient. You can use 12v instead of engineering a giant inefficient transformer setup trying to produce 20,000+ volts so you can break distilled water down without electrolyte. Pure distilled water is an electrical insulator. Water with electrolyte is an electrical conductor. Two completely different things.

There's tons of bad science out there. If you don't know what you're reading and making observations about what they're not saying you'll get spoonfed filtered information and live inside the box of normalcy like everyone else in the gen-pop community. Innovators don't live in that box, and we wouldn't have any of the advancements in technology we have today if it wasn't for people that could see the end result instead of the mountain in the way. Some people are just too lazy to think about how to overcome obstacles and would rather just watch Wheel of Fortune and Dancing with the Stars instead of thinking about something. Social media is destroying people's attention spans so much it's no wonder no one wants to think anymore.

jedijeb

I never said that hydrogen is a bad fuel, I wish every vehicle could be run on pure hydrogen instead of gasoline. It just isn't efficient yet to produce the hydrogen, although it is getting closer. If we only used nuclear plants to generate the electricity for the world, the reactor cooling itself will convert enough water into hydrogen to make it efficient enough to use as an automotive fuel.

Electricity is not the electrons themselves, it is the electromagnetic field generated by the flow of those electrons through a conductor. That is why you won't get an electrical current unless it is a complete loop. The alternator does not pull electrons out of nothing, it generates a moving magnetic field which in turn causes the electrons in the copper wires to move. There are no new electrons made, they simply get exchanged from one molecule of copper to another and move in a single direction. This movement then creates an electromagnetic field. When this field moves through the battery it causes free electrons to transfer between the electrolyte in the battery and the lead plates, when those electrons are forced off of their normal atoms onto other atoms that really don't want the, the "electricity" is stored. Once a circuit is made, such as connecting the two battery terminals with a conductor, the electrons will then be able to return to their normal atoms, which makes an electric current again, which the flow of the electrons through a conductor makes the electromagnetic field again that can work in reverse to produce work. That work is turning an electric motor, lighting a filament in a light bulb or other work. Nothing is created or destroyed, just moved from one place to another.

Also the energy in the battery doesn't go into the fuel to make it burn. If that was necessary then a diesel engine would not work. The electricity only generates enough heat in the spark to initiate the chemical reaction between a fuel and oxygen which releases the energy stored in the fuel. If the fuel is reactive enough it will continue to run only on the heat generated by the compression of the fuel air mixture in the cylinder. This happens with diesels and with gasoline if you have a hot carbon spot in the cylinder and low octane fuel.

Octane rating for fuel does not mean there is octane in the fuel, or added to it. It is a number generated to compare the given fuel burn rate to the burn rate of pure iso-octane. It is really a measure of how resistant the fuel is to preignition in the cylinder. Before they learned how to put additives in gasoline to raise the resistance to preignition (pinging) they could only make engines with very low compression ratios, which meant they were very inefficient.

As for making hydrogen, I have two hydrogen generators running in the lab all the time. They make the hydrogen we use in the instruments so we don't have to purchase high pressure cylinders. The two together can make 1.2L of hydrogen per minute and are the smallest size made. These use ultra pure water, only because we have to have hydrogen that is 99.999% purity. The ones that use electrolyte in them are more efficient, but also have more water and other contaminates in the gas so we can't use them.

The other thing most people don't realize is just how complex combustion is. Fuel plus oxygen is not the only thing involved. In my research for my chemistry degree I studied combustion of coal. There are at least five different chemical processes happening when coal burns, and at one point in the process if you inject water vapor, it will enhance the reaction because the carbon monoxide will pull oxygen from the water which generates heat as it reacts to form carbon dioxide and that leaves the hydrogen to react with any other free oxygen farther up in the stack to generate more heat as it forms water vapor again. The process can easily be observed if you burn a large brush pile and it begins a light misty rain, the fire will actually start to become hotter. Only if the amount of water falling on the fire exceeds what is needed to enhance the combustion will it begin to extinguish the fire, because it is evaporating when in contact with the burning wood, which removes enough heat from the process to kill the combustion.

As I said in the initial post, these systems will increase fuel efficiency by adding hydrogen and oxygen to the combustion process of an internal combustion engine. Just don't think about filling the fuel tank with water and driving away as many of the websites that promote the tech seem to promote.