Make fuel from Water?

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 08:00:47 -0800, BananaRepublican scribbled this interesting note:

It costs money. First you have to break apart the molecules and that takes energy. Where do you get the energy to do this? Then you have to recombine the molecules, creating heat. In an internal combustion engine, not all that heat gets used so you lose there as well.

Remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somewhere someone pays for it. Backtrack the source of the electricity to break apart the water and you find losses. Transmission losses in the power grid exist. No IC engine is all that efficient. These are similar factors that work against all electric cars. All you really end up doing is creating more pollution because of these various inefficiencies and you shift the location of the pollution someplace else, possibly hundreds of miles away at a generating plant.

Good luck.

-- John Willis (Remove the Primes before e-mailing me)

Actually for the past year VW of China has been running a car on heavy water (hydrogen peroxide). There is not much room in the car as it is crammed with equipment but this is the first one built that works. I'm sure if you google information, you can find updates and pictures. I have not checked on it for a while.

href="

">Den's1977 Puma

Hydrogen peroxide is *not* heavy water. Heavy water is water made with dueterium instead of hydrogen; a dueterium atom has an extra neutron in the nucleus. I don't know whether/if there's a special word for water made with tritium (two extra neutrons). Hydrogen peroxide has a single hydrogen atom for each oxygen atom.

If you made up a pitcher of Kool-Aid with heavy water, you wouldn't know the difference. If you made one with hydrogen peroxide, you wouldn't survive the drinking.

Don't bet on it. *hic* :-)

I'd rather find out where the information is on the car that runs on Kool-Aid!

What ever happened to the guy who figured out how to run jet aircraft, diesel engines and gasoline engines on naptha and water? He was working with Caterpiller (the tractor folks) and it looked like it was really going to be successful. Suddenly, all information vanished. Kind of makes you wonder if the oil companies saw a threat on the horizon and didn't like it.

Dan

Wasn't one of those big submarine disasters (the Kursk?) thought to be caused by the hydrogen peroxide fuel in a torpedo leaking?

I doubt you could swallow much. Just gargling with that stuff is enough to make me start vomiting.

Ok, so it's not heavy water but that is not the point. I went to google to see what I could find on the car. I put in the words, hydrogen peroxide china car. 17000 + pages came up and you guys can read about the china vw that runs on wet stuff not from OPEC. This is old news (last year) and not BS. So read about it and discuss it, not hydrogen peroxide......I should have worn a condom.

href="

">Den's1977 Puma

Story of my life. :-)

Hydrogen Peroxide was a popular rocket fuel in Germany's early efforts, some of them were manned aircraft. It was just too expensive to make and very dangerous to handle at that time. If an aircraft crashed and the fuel spilled onto the pilot, it's likely that all that would be left is his flightsuit and a few bones. Pure h2o2 interacts with catalase (blood 'n stuff) at a literally explosive rate.

We know what you mean, Den. That's the important part. Here's a link:

BTW, with some luck I might be going to China on business in the foreseeable future. I'll take pictures.

................Hydrogen peroxide was the oxidizer and was known as T-Stoff. The fuel was a mixture of hydrazine hydrate & methanol known as C-Stoff. C-Stoff was indeed very dangerous and getting it on skin or breathing the fumes was often deadly for those who filled the tanks on the Me 163 Komet........the worlds first and last operational rocket powered fighter. I learned a little about the history of that plane when I built and flew a scale remote control model of the Komet back during the early 90's that was powerd by a solid propellant cartridge that is used by model rocket hobbyists. It was essentially a glider for most of the flight after about a

3 second burn of the cartridge which propelled it to a height where I had trouble controlling its flight attitude because it was so high up. The velocity during climb out was too much for my balsa & silk span construction methods and it didn't hold up for more than a half dozen flights before it disintegrated on me while I was diving it toward the model field.

Thanks John, I would love to hear your reports. Dennis

href="

">Den's1977 Puma

Thanks for the extra information, Tim. What was the little propeller on the Komet's nose for? Airspeed detector? Looks pretty strange.

Modern rocket-plane?

I think I remember that the water was very corrosive to the engines. They tried running the engines on pure diesel or gas at shut down but that didn't seem to work out.

My understanding is that it's a generator, but I'm no expert.

Tim, where did you say you work again? NASA?