Quantity, my boy, quantity. The amount of water carried along with the reaction material to make hydrogen that is needed to carry a vehicle for more than just a run to the grocery down the block is quite large. Near the end of the tank of water that has been converted to a concentrated solution of something such as NaOH there is a lot of caustic there. Whereas there is only a small amount of H2SO4 in the battery of a automobile.
One winter, the two batteries (under the rear seat) of my MGB ruptured and there was very little damage to the garage floor from the amount of sulfuric acid that was released. They pool of liquid didn't even get to the tires and attack them.
I understand that the hydrogen produced is about 1/1000 the amount of gasoline burned. Stoichiometry would imply that the water used is 9 times that, or around 1/100 of the gasoline burned. So if you fill the converter when you fill the gas tank, you would be adding say 1 1/4 pints. Maybe the converter's volume is twice that?
What is the concentration of caustic in the converter? I thought it was rather far from saturation whereas battery acid is rather near saturation.
If you mean 1% the mass - that is about right. By those numbers a car that gets
29 mpg would use about a quart of water in 1000 miles. That is pretty close to the amounts I've read. At any rate the amounts involved are actually pretty small. Everyone seems to focus on the quantity of energy. The energy involved is also pretty small. The energy to convert the water to gas is less than needed to run the headlights so the energy losses that everyone focuses on are really quite tiny compared to the total energy a car uses.
That quantity sounds about right, but I would think there are a lot of problems with getting this to work effectively. To work efficiently the water would have to be fed into the converter at more or less the same rate as it is used to maintain electrolyte concentration. Also, water itself is problematic because it freezes. There are a lot of other technological problems to be solved to make this work. The gas has to be generated and fed to the engine at a rate that is needed and that alone is not easy. And every laboratory that has studied this has concluded that in order to take advantage of the altered combustion properties of hydrogen enriched fuel there need to be significant changes to engine design. That means things like higher compression ratio and redesign of fuel management and ignition and valve timing. It just doesn't seem likely that the kit that you buy on the internet are going to be up to the technology challenges involved to make this work.
I don't know. But I rather doubt the amount of caustic used is as much as the amount in a can of Drano. And I expect there are whole semi loads of drano out on the highways.
-jim
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Hydrogen is very very light and disapates up-ward very quickly, which probably makes it less dangerous then gasoline liquid or fumes. In a confined area it could collect I suppose, but so could gasoline fumes.
A quart is with a rough approximation a liter. Another rough approximation is that a quart is about two pounds or about 900 grams. And since about 1/16 of the mass of water is hydrogen you have about
900/16 grams of hydrogen or about 56 grams of hydrogen. And you really think you can drive a car on 56 grams of hydrogen for 1000 miles? I won't even bother to convert the available energy for complete combustion of 56 grams of H2 as the super fuel you believe it is. 56 grams of gasoline (a much more energetic fuel than H2 provides as a fuel) will never get you even started on your 1000 mile trip. Better math required for you vehicle. FK
That is what I thought. You don't have a clue. The answer to your question is yes. That is roughly the quantity of hydrogen used.
The vehicle doesn't derive energy from math it runs on gasoline. The function of the hydrogen is to alter the way gasoline burns. The total energy in the hydrogen is quite small (100,000 Newsgroups
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