Fuel from water. Scam or not?

I think that if you're the same Mike G who's the engineer with the celica and BMW, you've just sorely disappointed me - the answer is so obvious that the only reason you should visit those websites is to point and laugh.

Yes, your instinct is correct. Rather than wondering how it might possibly work, you should be weeping that people actually get taken in by this.

Flanders and Swann covered this in one of their songs - where does the energy come from? Answer that and you've either become insanely rich or understood the problem. Also see perpetual motion machines...

"Mike G" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Yup.

The websites selling fuel system magnets have a shedload of "evidence" that they work, too.

You can produce the hydrogen quite easily but the main problem is you use more energy getting it than you can get back from burning what you produce. If it was possible with current technology wouldn't the power companies be doing the same in power stations rather than spending millions burning oil and coal? Don't let it put you off experimenting, there's lots of free information out there without paying for it. If you work out how to get a significant amount of hydrogen with minimal power consumption you'll become a billionaire.

That's more or less what I was thinking. I don't believe the claims, but freely admit that as far as the technology is concerned, electrolysis etc, I have no idea of the power requirements. In fact electronics in general have me baffled. I can wire things up, but don't ask me how they work. :-)

Anyone got the actual figures as related to a car engine. IOW how much current is required to give enough hydrogen to give the up to 50% fuel savings claimed. Mike.

If anyone doubts this, consider running a power station. We're going to generate electricity by burning a mixture of hydrogen produced by electrolysis (Brown's Gas). So we start out power station going using a fossil fuel and electrolyse ourselves a big batch of Brown's gas and burn that. We use the electricity produced to make more Brown's gas and burn that (and so on).

Anyone spot the flaw with this?

Henry Ford was scammed out of a large amount of money by someone claiming to be able to run a car on water...

It's not how much current that's important, it's how many Watt-Hours. A litre of petrol is 36MJ or 10kWH. A typical car wil use around 6 litres per 100km. That's 60 kWH. Half of that is 30 kWH.

Making the incorrect assumption that electrolysis is 100% efficient, that means we need 30 kWH to replace half the petrol used for a 100km trip. If we take an hour to do the trip and we're using a 12V supply on a car, that's going to require 2500AMPs continuously for an hour. If we have a 240V alternator it will take 125A. That's a seriously large alternator to have to carry around in a car. And electrolysis tends to be around 30% efficient, so multiply those figures by three for a rule of thumb figure.

I was thinking of posting a listing for one on eBay as there explanation for how it works bends every aspect of science I have ever known, but it dose have a nice picture of all the petrol molecules lining up.

Yep. You could make it work, and the performance wouldn't be too much worse than before. The mods would be fairly straightforward, if a bit radical.

Start by fitting an engine of a fair bit higher power than the car's current one somewhere else in the car. Add an alternator capable of absorbing all of the power from the new engine and hook it up to a

*vast* electrolysis cell. Pipe the resulting HHO mixture to the original engine, which will need modding of course. Bob's your uncle!

All you have to do now is keep filling up the new engine's petrol tank with a lot more petrol than the old one used to use.

Cheers,

Colin.

Thanks for the explanation Steve. Even I can understand those figures. Mike.

If it worked, all cars would be built that way. They aren't for a reason ;)

Of course you could fill your garden and cover your house roof in solar cells and use that to make hydrogen in your garage via water electrolisis. Discard the oxygen. You really dont want to compress both hydrogen and oxygen in the same cylinder! Or do the same with windmills and old car alternators free from the scrap yard... Or even plug it into the mains power since theres no road fund tax and its massively cheaper than petrol.

Then use a pump like an old fridge compressor to fill ex pub co2 bottles with hydrogen at around 800 psi since thats the best an old fridge motor can do..

Fit a regulator set to 3 bar.

Fit a solenoid and jet (small) that allows a small amount of hydrogen into your intake system. The closed loop/oxy sensor will then reduce petrol added to your engine automatically to get the mixture right.

Use a microswitch on the throttle that adds the hydrogen at say 1/8th throttle va the solenoid. And another to disable it at WOT.

Because both idle (on some cars) and WOT (most cars) is not mixture controlled by the oxygen sensor.

Now it would be a right pain in the bum to do but now it really WOULD save "GAS" as they call it..

Of course a DIY method of running a car on household organic waste, on the face of it also sounds a bit far fetched, but there are a few people who are doing exactly that. Mike.

I'm not so sure that sounds a bit far fetched at all. At least there's some chemical energy in there with the potential to be used, unlike in water.

Thermodynamics is a zero-sum game - see Flanders and Swann. When you burn the gases resulting from the electrolysis of water, what do you get? Water. So you've got the same stuff at the beginning and at the end. So where does the magic extra energy come from? (ans = it doesn't).

cheers, clive

Not only is there no extra energy it COSTS MORE per mile afterwards because even if the water splitting was 100 percent efficient (its not) then there is a few other problems!

The power comes from the engine (WAY less than 100 percent efficient) to drive the alternator (less than 100 percent efficient conversion) and even the wiring gets warm due to internal resistance so that too wastes energy.

Obviously only a fool could actually fall for this crap, since if it worked you wouldnt need a fuel tank at all and all energy would be free!

I've also wondered about the economics of running a car on household gas. Not that I'm thinking of having a go, but during WW2 a few vehicles were running around with enormous gasbags on their roofs. Presumably filled with mains gas. A no-no at higher speeds because of the drag, but at city and urban speeds, drag is not very significant. Except in high winds. :-)

I can't see it ever being permitted, if only because of the risk of fire in an accident, but I still wonder if it would actually be cheaper than diesel or petrol. Presumably if it were allowed, the fuel tax would be similar to that of LPG. OTOH I suspect a simple low pressure gasbag would not hold enough gas to make it worth while. Just an idle thought. I'm not thinking of making any modifications to my cars fueling system. Mike.

Probably would be, yes. Some vehicles do/did it - "CNG" is the thing you're looking for - compressed natural gas.

cheers, clive

Ah but they didnt have old fridge motors to compress it to 800 psi and bung it into a pub C02 bottle though did they...

Massively due to no rip off tax.

Presumably if it were allowed,

A lot of buses and trucks that do mainly local driving, normally council and health service type vehicles (so there is a fairly large central area for fuel storage) get converted to CNG.