Hydrogen Conversion for Cars
I’ve just seem more nonsense for supposedly increasing fuel economy in vehicles. Various companies are selling products that are supposed to increase fuel economy or convert your car into running on water. These things all work the same way. They take water, pass electricity through it from the car’s electrical system, break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn the resulting gasses in the cylinders of the car.
These systems sell for from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Some even claim they will run your car on nothing but water. This is all a load of nonsense. It takes energy to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. It takes more energy than you get from burning the resulting hydrogen and oxygen. Water is not a source of chemical energy. Water is a product of combustion. You can not run your car on water as an energy source.
There is a lot of talk these days about a hydrogen economy and use of hydrogen as a fuel source. Hydrogen is not available in its elemental state on earth. It is bound with oxygen in water, or bound to carbon in methane and petroleum. Hydrogen in fossil fuels combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to release chemical energy and combine into water. If you want to use hydrogen as a fuel, you will have to supply energy to generate the free hydrogen in the first place. In a car engine system, using electrical energy from the alternator to generate hydrogen from water will not supply net energy to your engine. You will lose more energy to heat and inefficiencies of electrolysis than you will gain from burning the resulting hydrogen in an inefficient engine.
Do not waste your time or money trying to get something for nothing. You will only lose whatever money you spend on this system. You can not improve your gas mileage by recycling mechanical energy from the engine to generate fuel gasses. I can’t believe people get away with selling such ridiculous systems. This is a ripoff. Your car can not run on water as fuel. You will only decrease your mileage and compromise your engine by installing any such hydrogen generator in your car.
This technology has really gotten me to think hard about converting.
HHO Man
May 9, 2008 at 12:24 pm
There will be a way to be able to use electrolysis in some way shape or form, to separate H2 & O, to power our cars. Some genius will figure it out and will become a billionarie because of it. To say it can’t be done is sheer ignorance, or a scheme of the oil monopoly.
Phil
May 9, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Maybe, but it isn’t feasable yet. I can tell you from expierence it takes an arc welder to produce enough hydrogen to run a car. Now, I just read that they are using radio waves to break down sea water but I believe salt is required for that equasion. Either way, any increase you could expect would be from small particles of water vapor. Not burning but expanding. I don’t believe the car will run that great in the process either. If someone wants to prove me wrong please, send me proof. Until then I am going to keep expierimenting with heated, vaporized gas as a fuel. They got a Ford Opel to get 371 miles to the gallon. If you don’t believe me check the Guiness Book of World Records for 1971
Joe
June 2, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Look up the works of Stanley Meyer. He ran his dune buggy on hydrogen produced by the power of his alternator. There are many ideas out there (that work) about increasing the efficiency of electrolysis. he problem right now is that we like big high powered vehicles. Those vehicles are more difficuly to power with hydrogen on demand because they need more of it, A LOT MORE. But like chemists in the lab we have to practice small and then dream big. That’s where innovation comes from.
Matt
June 18, 2008 at 9:32 pm
TO JOE: Arc welder electrodes, submerged in water, produce hundreds of times more gas than standard electrolysis… Unfortunately the gas is 92% Carbon Monoxide… with only trace amounts of Hydrogen and virtually no Oxygen. I can attest to this by virtue of the fact that in running the experiment in a closed room, I accidently killed my daughters cat, two gerbils and a hamster… CO is a lot heavier than air… and only by virtue of my remarkable powers of observation, did I manage to escape with my life.
TO MAT: Stan Meyer’s “public” system was a ruse, in the sense that he used the aforementioned welder electrode system when “showing off” for the public, but used a large HEATED standard electrolysis cell to actually run the vehicle. In testing his system, the patent office “engineer” ran the output tube through a hole in the wall and vented the gas to the atmosphere… They never checked to ensure that it was producing Hydrogen since THAT was assumed from the start AND the thought of actually igniting the gas was TOO DANGEROUS to contemplate… What a bunch of idiots. After three and a half years of head-scratching, they finally issued his patent. The patent eventually expired because he wanted Millions in up-front cash before he would reveal the actual “secret” behind the REAL operating method, since NO INDEPENDENT AGENT could get the as-issued patent to produce ANY Hydrogen… Just Carbon Monoxide. Meyer’s brother is still towing the same line… He wants $7,000,000 up-front for the secret.
It’s sad but interesting in a way to watch thousands of experimenters on youtube jerking around with Stan’s 555-timer driven multi-phasic generators, (another ruse) trying for all their worth to find his ” Secret”… Unbelieveable… Kinda like watching a train wreck… Horrible, but you just can’t seem to turn your eyes away.
Having said all that: It is, in fact, possible to generate enough Hydrogen + Oxygen to achieve something approaching a 50% savings in fuel efficiency in an internal combustion engine. Try to do better than that and you have to build yourself a ceramic engine to tolerate the extra heat… Gasoline has 18,000 BTU’s per pound and Hydrogen has 54,000 BTU’s per pound. That means that Hydrogen has better than THREE TIMES the energy than does gasoline and you need to feed the engine a LOT LESS of the stuff to get the same “push”. Feed it in at anything approaching a respectable rate and your engine block will turn into a small Neutron Star.
A part of the “secret” is counter-intuitive and is simply that HEATING an electrolysis cell significantly reduces the electron potential between any adjacent set of plate electrodes in the cell, so that instead of needing 1.47 to 1.54 Volts-Per-Cell… you only need about a volt or even less at 210 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s more than a 30% reduction in operating energy required to rupture the molecular bonds…. and Guess What ???… That 30% multiplied by the current transfer ratio gets you over the “break-even” problem AND you produce between 7 and 15 times (depending on about six other variables) the volume of gas that you produce… at room temperature.
The ONE waste product that vehicle engines DO produce is HEAT !!! You have LOTS of it to play with.
OH, and contrary to popular belief, the recombination efficiency (when burned) of the Hydrogen and Oxygen you generate in your three-way-jiffy electrolyzer, is so close to 100 Percent that I doubt you could measure the loss with standard instrumentation. At any rate, you don’t lose anything on that end of the equation.
tony@expresscnc.net
Tony
September 20, 2008 at 3:38 pm
PS: In response to the original blog “Hydrogen Conversio For Cars”
He is absolutely correct regarding all of the “Baby-Bottle”, “Walmart-Caniste”r and PVC-Pipe “Boosters” being flogged on Ebay and elsewhere on the net.
Not ONE of them is capable of producing even a fraction of the volume necessary to produce any significant fuel savings… They all operate below break-even and eventually end up forcing you to buy more gas than you otherwise would have had to.
There is ONE exception: Some of the Oxygen sensor systems indirectly detect the presence of “extra fuel” and instruct the engine to BURN LEAN… You DO use less gas… and THINK you are getting better mileage because of the Hydrogen… Right up to the point where, on a trip to Flagstaff or Denver, the vehicle craps out on an 18% grade at 4,500 feet or when your engine is completely destroyed from the chronic Lean Condition.
tony@expresscnc.net
Tony
September 20, 2008 at 4:00 pm
In my opinion, people have or will “figure out” how to build and implement an “on-demand” hydrogen system that supplements the existing fuel system AND actually provides a real increase of MPG in their vehicle as a result.
Check out my website that discusses the possibility of using nano technology to increase the surface area of the electrodes used in hydrogen generators of up to 1000 times! What does this mean to the experimenter? From my understanding and interpretation, this means, that one can potentially use less power to produce more hydrogen.
DISCLAIMER: My website is for entertainment purposes only. AND my hope is that we can discover ways of making hydrogen in a scientific manner and a do it yourself setting that allows everyone to experiment with this fascinating topic.
Jeff
February 8, 2009 at 3:39 am
thanks
oo
April 19, 2009 at 3:22 am