What is Water For Gas?

"What is water for gas?".. Well it is a scam, Virginia. And you are a part of it.

i think its too expensive to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. or am i wrong?

It is more expensive that pulling cheap oil out of the ground and using fairly inexpensive refining technology to turn it into powerful and easily distributed liquid fuel.

Hydrogen presents some problems in storage and distribution. Those can eventually be solved.

Hydrogen is created from water by electrolysis, so every mol of hydrogen requires a predetermined equivalence of electric current in its production. It is not cheap, like the scalping of petroleum has traditionally been. In the future, if cheap electricity can be acquired, then the price of hydrogen will more or less be directly related. Possible? Yes...with hydroelectric power, wind, solar, and nuclear fusion or fission reactors, it might be. Today, you well know, electricity is not cheap. Most in the USA is from coal or petroleum fired power plants.

You get just as much energy burning the hydrogen as you put in during the separation process. Which is to say, hydrogen isn't a power source at all, it's a power storage and distribution medium.

--scott

Basically, that is the story today. Now, if we ever perfect fusion reactions on a very small scale,we could fuel our car for life with a thimblefull of hydrogen. Or we could make hydrogen from water using fusion energy at a very reasonable price. Not likely to see this in our time, huh?

Depends on whether you believe in the laws of thermodynamics :-) Many people obviously do not.

Only if you have absolutely 100% efficiency. Remember the law of thermo that says "and you can't even break even!"

,

But that is a completely irrelavent answer to the original question that was asked.

It has been shown that you can take natural gas and convert (reform) that gas to hydrogen and then generate electricity from hydrogen and you will get 30% more electricity than you would by just generating from natural gas. This is proven technology with plants in operation. Sure the conversion to hydrogen loses some energy but you have to be blind to focus on that and ignore the gains in efficiency in the rest of the process. However, that still leaves the question which was asked can it be cost effective for powering cars? Hydrogen fuel cell cars are extremely efficient but they are also very expensive. Making Hydrogen with electrolysis has energy losses (duh). However burning gasoline in a IC engine has a lot more energy losses. Hydrogen Fuel cell powered cars are supposed to have efficiencies that are more than double that of gasoline powered car. So it is possible to use the petroleum to produce electricity and use the electricity to produce hydrogen and power a car with the hydrogen and not only "break even' but come out ahead (in terms of total energy used). But that doesn't answer the question - Is it expensive? The answer is yes it is very expensive.

-jim

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Depends on whether you believe in the laws of thermodynamics :-) Many people obviously do not.

Laws of thermodynamics are not in question. Economics issues are.

What is expensive? Many items will have to be taken into the loop before "expensive" can be succintly defined for future fuel needs, I think.

With petroleum, our definition of "expensive" has never really taken on many factors except immediate local price to purchase.

There was almost no expense in generating that petroleum because Mama Nature did it for us.

If we now have to generate fuels because petroleum is too damaging to the environment, too rare, too valuable to burn, etc, then expense takes on other dimensions.

You CAN create fuels, but you cannot avoid the thermodynamics.

I think I know what I am trying to convey, but am not sure I did a very good job in conveying it.

. However burning

But those energy losses in an IC engine are NOT due to poor combustion with gasoline. They are energy losses that will occur WHATEVER fuel is burned. With a properly operating carburetor or FI, virtually ALL the gasoline is burned.

The losses are HEAT losses. When an IC engine in a car is operating near peak efficiency, about 1/3 of the heat energy from combustion is used to generate mechanical horsepower. A further third goes into the cooling jacket as part of the cooling process to keep from melting metal parts and coking the lubricant. The last 1/3 goes out the tailpipe as enthalpy of the exhaust gases. While a turbocharger does use some of this last third, attempts to use too much of the exhaust energy leads to poor breathing and the need to use a slower turning engine with less horsepower per pound.

These losses remain even if we DO burn hydrogen.

These losses remain even if we DO burn hydrogen.

Exactly. Fuel cells using hydrogen could possibly improve this thermal energy loss quite a bit, but for internal combustion engines (which are THE reality right now), heat losses are hard to avoid.

Don Stauffer in Minnesota wrote:

Yes the losses are. due to poor combustion. That is, if you define the difference between poor combustion and good combustion as delivering more pressure onto the piston at the top of stroke - thus requiring less fuel to move the car the same distance. It has little to do with the amount of energy produced. Using the energy efficiently is the issue.

So what? That has nothing to do with whether the fuel is utilized efficiently. Imagine if an engine burned 90% of the fuel in it's exhaust system. In that engine "virtually ALL the gasoline is burned". So what? I would guess that even you can see that would be a very inefficient engine.

There are 2 things that IC design engineers know limit fuel efficiency with spark ignition engines. They are the lean limit and the knock limit. If the fuel and engine design can be modified to overcome those limits significant increases in fuel efficiency are possible. That has been known for close to 100 years. If you can run an engine with a significant increase in air and EGR (i. e. get past the lean limit) pumping losses are reduced drastically. Spark ignition engines as currently designed, running on regular gasoline, are efficient heat pumps. They pump heat into the atmosphere. The air conditioner in your car has a throttle just like your engine does. Remove that throttle (or open it up) and the air conditioner will consume a lot less energy and it will pump a lot less heat into the atmosphere. The throttle on your engine only exists because the fuel properties require it. Changing the fuel properties can mean you can get by with a lot less throttling. Getting past the knock limit means engines can be deigned to apply more pressure at the TDC thus more work is accomplished with the same amount of fuel. MIT studies have shown that with enhanced fuels and engine design it is possible to have spark ignition engines run with internal pressures of as much as 4 times greater than is possible on today's engines running on regular gasoline. Running engines with much higher internal pressures significantly increases the work to heat loss ratio as well as allowing you to build much lighter engines that deliver the same amount of power.

Most vehicles are getting closer to a ratio of 1/4 used to 3/4 lost, but yes, even if your numbers were correct that means 2/3 is wasted.

So what? Some engines have no cooling jacket (air cooled).

All of your statements are true only if you assume no enhancement to the fuel.

No, everything can change when you change the fuel properties. Reputable laboratories such as NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory and MIT's Plasma research center have studied this and have built working models of engines that run on hydrogen enriched gasoline and their conclusion was that there is no doubt modifying the fuel before it enters the engine can lead to increases in fuel efficiency. Do you suppose they never heard of your thermo laws? Also there are vehicles being built and on the road today that run on hydrogen enriched natural gas that are operating at 40% efficiency (60% is still wasted). That is a 30% increase in efficiency over the best they can do without hydrogen.

-jim

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Jim, I have read your post, and I am sure you have been fed this information.

Honestly, I got a little sleepy with the replays of the HHO boys "physics".

There is STILL no free lunch.

I read the information directly from the research institutions that published it. Where are you getting your information?

I don't know who you mean by HHO boys. Did you know that Delphi this summer announced that it is developing hydrogen generating system for hydrogen enrichment of gasoline engines. They say their unit will be about the size of a twelve oz. can and may improve mileage by up to 25%. The press release didn't go into details. Is Delphi who you are calling HHO boys?

I suppose NASA and MIT no nothing about physics?

When you say "sleepy", do you mean you are too lazy to read the research?

-jim

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No, I am not to lazy to read research. When work of this sort leads to something new, realistic and useful technology, I will be glad to hear it.

Where did you get the lousy attitude? Are you a researcher and have you been offended?

Thermal efficiency is defined as the ratio of mechanical work out of the engine to the energy value of the fuel input. So these losses DO affect, by a large degree, the thermal efficiency. In effect, the engine is not using, it is wasting, a high percentage of the enthalpy (which is a function of temperature, among other things) resulting from the combustion. If you raise the temperature of the working fluid, the cooling losses would be even greater.

******************* Don, You probably remember the "adiabatic" engine that ol' Smokey Yunick worked on for a while. I cant remember all the details, but IIRC, he was trying to reduce the heat losses.

I guess that there has been progress made in internal combustion engine efficiency over the decades, buy IMO the steps have been relatively small and predictable ones.

Yes.

The fuel is gasoline. Modifying the combustion properties of that fuel can lead to significant increases in thermal efficiency. If the fuel burned so slowly that most of it was burning in the exhaust and late in the power stroke that would be very inefficient. Adding hydrogen to the fuel causes the combustion to complete earlier in the cycle (without detonation). That leads to better thermal efficiency for the same reason that having the combustion complete late in the cycle produces worse thermal efficiency.

What losses are you referring to? Are you are talking about the losses in the example I gave? You made the claim that how the fuel burns makes no difference as long as it burns completely. I offered a counter-example to illustrate your claim was false.

So who said anything about raising the temperature of some fluid?

The air conditioner in your car is supposed to be a heat pump by design. Your gasoline engine is not supposed to be a heat pump. The only reason it is designed as a heat pump is that the fuel won't burn if it isn't designed like that. Modify the combustion properties of the fuel so that it is able to burn with less pumping losses and the result is improved thermal efficiency.

-jim

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Don, I know you could recommend a book on thermodynamics to him.