Hydrogen-Boosted Internal Combustion Engines -- Scam Or Not ???

wikipedia isn't a proper cite. You are citing a specific NASA cite but not doing it such that there is any way to tell what it really says then chastising me for not knowing it.

If it was only the H2 from a quart of water for every 1000 miles one could hook up a propane torch sized cylinder every 1000 miles...

Wikipedia has 16 citations for where their information came from your just to lazy to look them up. They all appear to be reputable sources like universities and testing labs. The NASA study was back in the seventies. There are more current studies. The point I was making was the process has been plausible for many years. 50 years ago Computers were "plausible" - it just cost millions of dollars to own one. If you had said what you need to do to make hydrogen enrichment work in your car isn't practical I wouldn't argue - when you say it isn't plausible it is obvious you just don't know. Simply saying it takes energy to produce hydrogen therefore there can be no possible savings is simply a statement based on ignorance. More than 70% of the gasoline used in automobiles is wasted. At idle pretty much 100% is wasted. So for you to claim that the laws of thermodynamics tell you there is no room for improvement seems to be what is not plausible.

Here is another article - it looks like it cites a number of studies (including the NASA one):

If you don't know then you shouldn't claim you do.

Yes one could, but that would mean setting up a manufacturing and distribution system. The generation of the hydrogen as it is needed is one of the engineering hurdles but not the major hurdle. If the engine isn't designed to take advantage of the faster leaner burning fuel it won't produce the energy savings.

-jim

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I'm generally suspicious of web-based sites that claim miraculous energy savings so I can't say much about those sites. I do know that the U.S. Department of Energy at it's Argonne laboratory is working on blended fuel vehicles that use hydrogen. You might want to visit the DOE website.

Here has another method. Good for environment.

Do you suppose a pint of lye is more dangerous than 15 gallons of gasoline? Have some perspective. And what about the sulfuric acid in the batter?

1) The claims of increased efficiency are made out of nothing, meaning that there is no explanation of . 2) Why have the car makers not implemented this when amateurs are able to get 10% improvements? 3) Why have research chemists and research mechanical engineers not measured and given a theoretical explanation of the supposed efficiency improvement? Why is this being argued on Usenet and Yahoo groups instead of in scientific journals? 4) Some of the electolysis advocates want you to put their special circuit board between your oxygen sensor and your computer so that the computer believes the exhaust has less oxygen than it actually has. fooling the computer into believing the intake mixture is too rich. Then the computer runs the engine leaner. Gas mileage is better while the engine turns to junk due to running too lean.

Check the references here

I saw that page, but I didn't see that it applied to these electrolytic boosters, since the article considers simultaneous natural gas injection. If you can point to a refereed research paper that considers efficiency improvement of Brown's gas injection, I would be more than happy to consider it.

I don't know what research chemists would contribute. It isn't about extracting more energy it is about using the existing energy in a more mechanically efficient way.

Hydrogen injection has been studied scientifically for about 80 years. NASA studied it and said it works. They studied it at MIT and said it works. You just haven't been paying attention. And there is a good explanation of why it works. Mixing a small amount of hydrogen with gasoline does 2 things that modify the way gasoline burns. 1) It allows for complete combustion at much leaner mixtures. 2) It causes the fuel mix to burn much faster without causing detonation.

The first one means a decrease in pumping losses, particularly at low RPM and low load operating conditions where pumping losses are huge relative to useful work output. And the second means less power is blown out the exhaust because the energy is released earlier in the power stroke and thus more of it is used to do work.

However getting it to work with an unlimited budget by a well equipped laboratory is different than getting it to work with a few components an amateur buys at the hardware store. I wouldn't assume that the kits advertised on the Internet are going to work. Most of them may well be con artist that prey on the gullible.

Interesting analysis. You seem to be now claiming it does work but will damage your engine. What I guess you are trying to imply is that the making the engine run lean is what gives better mileage. You seem to expect the reader to infer that the hydrogen injection is irrelevant. Unfortunately, the underlying assumption that all you do is make an engine run lean to improve gas mileage is incorrect.

FYI it has been demonstrated that at idle speeds hydrogen enrichment can make it possible for an engine to idle at up to 50:1 air fuel ratios. Normally you won't be able to get an engine to even run at all with that kind of lean mixture.

-jim

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The mass of hydrogen burned when using one of these boosters is under

1/1000 of the mass of gasoline burned.

So we can expect the car makers to be all over it.

And the point of injecting that information at this juncture is what? Maybe your trying to say that it takes very little energy to produce the needed hydrogen?

Car makers have their own interests. If this technology can be utilized to sell cars then yes I would expect there will be interest.

-jim

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Really? Take a guess.

That is one consequence, and it implies an upper bound on the energy gotten from the hydrogen. That is not the main thing I had in mind though.

If you had a choice between two cars that were basically the same except that one got 10% better gas mileage than the other, would you be inclined to prefer one over the other?

I already did.

The energy derived from the hydrogen part of the fuel mix is minuscule. The assumption that fuel economy would result from hydrogen adding to the total energy is foolishness. Its role in a working system is more like a catalyst causing the flame to propagate faster. The result is more pressure on the pistons earlier in the power stroke. But it does require engineering to make it work. Hydrogen enrichment can also help overcome the problem that hydrocarbons burned in spark ignited engines don't burn completely if there is more air than stoichiometric. Normally, in a gasoline engine running lean will not improve fuel economy (excluding when decelerating down hill).

???? I'm out of guesses.

It is not that simple. But it might become almost that simple in the near future. High fuel prices will change lots of things. The greatest profits in the last 8-10 years or so in the auto industry have come from selling vehicles that are not fuel efficient. The motivation to focus research and development on fuel efficiency has just recently returned. Time will tell what that produces.

From reading the MIT study it sounds like they believe the biggest obstacle to hydrogen enrichment in production gasoline engines is the water/electrolysis part, which requires maintenance and has issues with reliability. They believe that eliminating the water and extracting the hydrogen from the fuel is the way to go. That would make the whole system transparent to the driver and would truly behave the same as a car without hydrogen enrichment.

-jim

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My recollection is that hydrogen is VERY low octane. Running a car engine on hydrogen requires a lot of EGR or some other method to control detonation.

The octane rating for hydrogen is something like 135 I don't know if there is anything else higher than that?

-jim

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(((((

increase in fuel economy, but a great increase in nitrogen oxide emissions, and the risk of damaging the engine due to detonation and excessively high exhaust gas temperatures. )))))

You're saying that with a leaner mixture the fuel burns less completely than with a richer one? I can hardly believe that.

Where can I find that study?

Well I didn't say running an engine rich burns fuel more completely. Hydrocarbons will only burn in a spark engine when the mix of air to fuel is within a fairly narrow range. This is one of the combustion properties of gasoline that hydrogen enrichment modifies.

To support combustion hydrocarbons have to be very close to the right air/fuel mix. Any fuel that doesn't completely burn is usually due to somewhere in the combustion chamber the mix is either too lean or too rich to support combustion. When you run a lean mix near the end of the combustion process the ratio of remaining fuel to oxygen gets to the point where the last little bit is too lean to support combustion. This is well known and engines are designed around this, so just fooling the engine computer to run lean will likely not improve gas mileage. It certainly would never improve gas mileage whenever the result of any modification is detonation severe enough to cause engine damage.

There have been several MIT studies. They are heavily pushing the "plasmatron" technology which they invented and undoubtedly they will gain royalties from if it is commercially adopted. The plasmatron converts some of the fuel to carbon monoxide and Hydrogen. The first link is one of the original studies which was intended to use hydrogen enrichment for emission control. The last link is 7 years later where they are claiming

20%-30% fuel efficiency using an engine designed to take advantage of the combustion characteristics of hydrogen enhanced fuel. The engine is high compression turbo charged engine designed to run very lean.

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