HHO gas car kits seem to be all the rage on the internet for the best
> increase in gas mileage=85
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I wish the HHO enthusiasts would explain to me why this is not just another perpetual motion idea.
Water doesn't burn. You have to put energy from the battery into it to separate the H from the O. When you burn the H you get back less energy than you put in, because all you are doing is to put the H and the O back together again, and there are losses. And then you have to recharge the battery! If you use the motor power of the car to drive the alternator to recharge the battery, you have perpetual motion.
So you would be better off to use that battery power to run an electric motor to push the car. And buy some gasoline for the extra energy you need to charge the battery.
Well, you know the old adage that a little knowledge is dangerous...
Please realize this is speculation on my part as to how this came about. I have no physical evidence to back this up. I just see this as a possible evolution as to how this idea grew it's own legs and won't die.
Energy in = energy out, right? Well, it turns out that with "Browns Gas" (HHO) there is a set of conditions where the energy out is greater than the electrical energy in. Now before people start going nuts, this is over a VERY small range of conditions, and energy in still equals energy out, it's just that the 'system' to make Browns Gas gets some of it's energy in from the ambient temperature. This is only a SMALL percent, and it only happens during a VERY SMALL window of conditions.
But you can imagine the idiots out there who read the original papers on the subject back 80 or 90 years ago and have been trying to exploit this ever since. To be fair, there probably were a lot of serious scientist trying to expand the window of conditions to see if they could ever make something close to practical, and those people are to be respected. What if someone DID manage to get control over the window of conditions, and could make HHO and suck heat of the air at an efficiency that made it practical? But I'm sure you can imagine what happened when the average person heard of this kind of thing. Free power and run your car on water were right around the corner! Yeah, right!
But then, stranger things have happened. For years, the natural atomic decay of U235 was looked at by MANY respected scientist, and considered impossible to speed up and extract usable energy...
But somehow I doubt that these idiots with nothing more than wire loops and mayonnaise jars have captured some serious secret and are going to turn mankind on it's ear...
There is nothing new about what happens if you get water into the engine. In very small quantities it does not need to be dangerous. Water that turns instantly into vapor expands enormously. If there comes too much at the same time it can easily brake your engine. Everyone who knows a little bit about physics knows how this works. If you want to see how powerful this can be then you can put a little bit of water in a kettle and close the kettle completely. Put the kettle on top of a burning grill or fire. Be sure to stay well away and keep this experiment well away from anything and anyone. You will see an explosion and that is what can easily happen to your engine if you put water into it. So sure you can see enormous power when the water expands and sure if the amount is not very much your engine may survive. It is like you always get a little bit of water into your tank during rain. Often the water remains at the bottom of your tank. You can get rid of the water from the tank by removing it or mix in solutions that help mix the water with the petrol and lets it pass through the engine in small amounts. That is basically what people are selling like something new and powerful.
No. Water is H2O. Browns gas is actually 2H202, or two MOLECULES of hydrogen gas (2 atoms each) mixed with 1 MOLECULE of oxygen, which again is 2 atoms. Total of 6 atoms. When ignited, it produces 2 MOLECULES of water (which is 3 atoms each). Browns gas doesn't 'burn' in the sense that it consumes oxygen. It is hydrogen gas that has the prefect mixture of oxygen gasa already mixed to produce water.
This is NOT the case of liquid water in an engine. It already is steam from it's own ignition. (And there is no danger of hydrolocking here.) The scammers are basing this totally on the ignition, and the subsequent release of energy, of the Browns gas.
You're 'experiment' is, shall we say, quite dangerous. If someone were to fill a can 'just enough' with water to burst as it turns to steam, it could send pieces of metal literally hundreds of feet. If you want to burst something with water, use the property that water doesn't compress. Fill your container FULL, so that when it burst, there's nothing to expand except a very small amount of steam and then it just leaks out, not explosively decompress.
If you want to talk about the release of energy from vaporization, there's some interesting articles about '6-cycle' engines. Basically, engines that rotate THREE times for each ignition cycle. What they do is instead of exhausting the hot burned gas on cycle 4, they recompress it. Then at peak an injector similar to a diesel injector puts in a small amount of water. That water hitting the already hot then recompressed burned gas instantly turns to steam and drives the piston back down for cycle 5. Cycle 5 is a second power stroke but it's not from the gas ignition, it's from the water expansion to steam.
This extracts a lot of the energy from the heat that would both be blowing out the tailpipe or at least radiating from the headers as well as from the cylinder area itself. More energy extracted and the engine runs a LOT cooler.
I don't know that they have the bugs worked out yet (and I'm sure there are a LOT of them) but it shows promise. Maybe not for high performance engines, but possibly for low powered 'commuter' engines or fix load applications.
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