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Hydrogen Generating Module to Help Your Car?
TomClancy_Jack writes "A Canadian man claims to have invented a hydrogen
electrolysis box that can be fit onto any existing internal combustion
engine. He claims that engines using his "H2N-Gen" box
'produce a more complete burn, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing fuel
consumption by 10 to 40 per cent - and pollutants by up to 100 per cent.'
If this doesn't turn out to be vapor-ware or just a regular scam, it could turn
out to be one of the biggest recent innovations in transportation history.
He claims it will be on the market in 6 - 12 months, so time will
tell."
And a study of physics will help you understand that more energy is consumed splitting the water than is returned by the combustion of the hydrogen. Try this some time, start your car and let it idle for a little bit just to get a stable warm idle rpm - now turn on your headlights and listen carefully to the engine or watch the tach if you have one. The engine will bog down slightly from the increased resistance from the alternator which was previously spinning freely. Introducing any kind of electrical strain will have the same effect - the engine has to work harder to turn the alternator.
Ok, that IS funny. But seriously, they would like this product much more than other alternatives, like solar, electric or biodiesel (my personal favorite)
According to TFA, the main advantage of this system is it makes much less polution. The fuel savings looks around 10%-20% realistically. This is very good but is about the same as global fuel need growth. It means people will have a reason to still use gas instead of alternate technology, so the move to full hydrogen might be slower since this would take some of the urgency out of it.
Very interesting (slightly fishy...) and worth more investigation. Don't look for it soon, it seems the different companies making similar stuff are more interested in margin % than in producing millions of them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Car runs on water...yeah...how many times have we heard that before.
Let the shredding of ridiculous claims commence!
1) 80 million miles of testing.
That's 500 man-years of driving at 55mph for 8 hours a day. The article says he employs 15 people and he's been in the business for 11 years. If we believe this claim at all, we know he hasn't been doing the testing in a scientifically controlled manner. At best, we have to assume his customers are doing it. But if the savings are only around 10%, how do you distinguish variations in driving style from actual fuel savings. There are plenty of ways to get a 10% fuel saving from a typical car by limiting it's accelleration ability for example. If he glued a half inch wooden block underneath the gas pedal he could probably get a 10% saving from most people's driving habits.
2) Montreal Gazette drove the test car on cruise at 63mph and saw a 10% fuel saving.
Well, that's really unsuprising. A carefully set up vehicle with properly inflated tyres and driven at the optimal speed on a single highway run can easily out-do the manufacturers milage rating because the test conditions for highway milage ratings from the EPA (or the Canadian equivelent) are less optimal than that.
3) "The tailpipe was not hot" "...proves that hot polluting emissions are not coming out of the tailpipe"
Hmmm - everything that goes into the engine (air, fuel) has to come out again - and it has to come out of the tailpipe. Even if what comes out is non-polluting, it *does* have to come out again. Removing the pollutants from the exhaust would make little if any difference to the temperature of the exhaust gasses. This proves *NOTHING*.
4) He's selling this unit himself.
This is a HUGE give-away. If this thing was real and had worked solidly over millions of hours of testing - the car manufacturers would be all over this development. He could walk into Ford or GM and pick up a cheque for a billion dollars tomorrow if this worked.
5) The amount of hydrogen his system could produce must be microscopic.
The amount of water that's in that little box lasts 80 hours. He talks about his company doing development work to shink the weight of the box down from 20lbs. If the box was mostly one huge water tank then you'd have to deduce that the only way to shink it noticably would be to reduce the size of it would be to shrink the amount of water it holds - but doing that wouldn't require significant development effort. It would be a trivial matter of telling people to refill it more often. So we have to assume that most of the 20lb box ISN'T water. Let's be generous and guess that half of it is a 1 gallon (10lb) water tank.
So just how much water is consumed over 80 hours of driving? 80 hours of driving would consume - what - 200 gallons of gasoline? So one gallon of water - when electrolized in to hydrogen - drastically improves the fuel efficiency of 200 gallons of gasoline?! Mmmm'K.
6) How come the hydrogen fuel cell developers aren't making a killing by injecting hydrogen into conventional gasoline engines? The amount of hydrogen in even a modest fuel cell would provide that tiny amount of hydrogen to the engine and last for maybe a year! Much more practical than this gizmo I think.
Electrolysis driven by a car battery...sheesh!
7) There are a LOT of unverifiable 'facts' in this paper.
Google this 'Gene Stowe' guy - who'se plastic version exploded with enough force to fling plastic disks 200 to 300 feet into the air...which we're told were then sighted as UFO's. No sign of him anywhere.
Oh - come *ON* - if you throw a plastic disk 200 to 300 feet into the air, it comes back down about 20 seconds later. How the heck could anyone ever imagine they'd seen a UFO? Furthermore, if they had a 'lot' of UFO sightings, that means that these things exploded an awful lot. How come the guy continued testing them after they exploded? Why isn't this story all over the Internet?
Bogus.
www.sjbaker.org
This can't be the most efficient way to increase efficiency. 30% engine efficiency, 90% alternator efficiency, 80% electrolysis efficiency -> ~20% hydrogen production efficiency. You're then using that hydrogen to burn residual gasoline (again at 30% efficiency), in addition to getting (30%?) of the hydrogen's energy back, so 0.2*0.3+0.2*0.3=0.12, so you'd need to get more than 8 times more energy's worth of gasoline burned than you inject energy's worth of hydrogen.
Then, you have to refill it with water every 80 hours. Surely there's a liquid catalyst that you could buy, or (less dense) compressed hydrogen made by a more efficient process, that would increase efficiency that wouldn't take some convoluted electrolysis process.
From a chemistry standpoint, what would the hydrogen be doing to increase efficiency? I suppose it would increase the temperature of combustion, but wouldn't it take such a significant percentage hydrogen to make a difference in the percentage of fuel that is combusted that you're outpacing the amount of uncombusted fuel left in the exhaust? It just doesn't seem like it would be effective.
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favorite artist is Picasso.
Lets see
"We're marketing a 20-pound unit for $7,500."
So, why don't we take $7500 per vehicle, and invest in other measures to get fuel effeciency at a lower cost. More composits to save weight. Active polution mitigation systems (carbon sinks.) R&D into h2/fuel cell vehicles.
There's better ways to spend $7500 pre vehicle if you want to make them more green.
Take that $7500 per vehicle and but a s**tload of trees and go replant deforested tracts that one always hears about.
Don't get me started.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
Sorry, I have a hybrid - my engine doesn't idle, or waste gas - the only excess energy being produced is when the car is using the regenerative braking system.
Assuming this guy's invention produces even a 15% gain (which I'm profoundly skeptical of given a lack of comprehensive 3rd-party, scientific proof), simply having a gas engine which shuts off when the car is stopped will save more fuel than this gadget will ever manage.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
That 35% (note) number in the article is the first error I noticed. He contrasts the thermodynamic efficiency of an engine, which he claims is a (highish) 35% with 97% of the fuel being burned using this gizmo. Those are not measuring the same thing. Almost all of the fuel in a modern car is burnt, the problem is that the resulting heat is not (and Car not) be turned 100% into work, practically.