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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."
Of course, it has nothing whatsoever to do with hydrogen, other than water contains hydrogen. What is happening is the water makes the air more compressable (increased humidity) and the engine works better. This was far more true in the 1950's where such water add-ons were more popular.
Now, with the addition of the keyword HYDROGEN we have an entirely new set of rubes which will certainly pay $7500 for this without batting an eye. See, if it uses hydrogen, it must be more environmentally friendly.
Rubes. Marks. Suckers.
Unfortunately, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And pay for it.
The 35% efficiency is the thermal cycle efficiency, with 65% of the heat being lost through the cylinder walls, cylinder head, and exhaust.
The problem is that to maximise the T1-T2 difference, heat loss must be minimised, and the compression ratio needs to be high since the gas expansion is what drives the temperature change. Spark ignition engines cannot run at very high compression ratios due to the phenomenon of pre-ignition, and this limits their efficiency. Diesels can run at very high compression ratios indeed, because the fuel only burns when it is injected. Their burn cycle also reduces heat loss. That is the reason why Diesels are more efficient than spark ignition engines. Direct injection gas engines (semi-Diesels with auxiliary spark ignition) have been developed by the Japanese but they still require a fuel that costs more to refine than Diesel, and are no more thermally efficient.
Adding hydrogen can promote more complete combustion and perhaps allow a slightly higher compression ratio, but it still does not get you anything like Diesel efficiency. (You can actually raise the compression ratio a little by injecting ordinary water, but the complication -DI water, extra tanks adding weight, injection gear- outweighs the advantages.) And anyone who has spent time fighting, as my R&D dept did over a period, with those water/KOH hydrogen generators will be aware of the problems. Like keeping the KOH out of the output gas stream.
In short, sorry, nothing to see here, Sir Harry Ricardo did all this stuff so long ago it was already old when I went to U and I'm over 50. There is no cheap fix to the internal combustion engine, but lots of expensive R&D is producing ever cleaner and more efficient Diesels at ever more competitive prices. Just as fuel cells advance a notch, so do Diesels in lockstep which is one reason why fuel cell tech is always just around the corner. Dr. Diesel's invention is not glamorous, it is perceived as being dirty, noisy, old tech but with companies like VW, Daimler Chrysler, Peugeot Citroen and BMW betting the farm on it, perhaps they know something small inventors don't.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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.
You'd think that, but it just isn't so. Common alternators place a constant load on the engine once they spin at a few hundred RPMs, even when the regulator is off.
You can make a DIY version of this same thing. Other people sell kits to do this exact process. Electrolyzing water into Hydrogen and Oxygen but not separating them produces what is called Brown's Gas (the Hydrogen and Oxygen mix). Brown's Gas can be generated easily with a very few amps of current. The draw on the circuitry can be regulated by way of control of molarity of the electrolyte.
My friend is currently experimenting on a cheap version of this with a manual shutoff switch (hey, it's cheap!) and has gone from 24MPG to 27MPG in a recent model Nissan Maxima (3.0L V6 model). We're not even done experimenting!
This stuff is for real. It just uses surplus electricity being generated by the alternator whether the battery needs charging or not. The engine is already doing the work, we're just recuperating it in the form of a mileage increasing, emission reducing water electrolysis system.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
you have extra power in your car because of the altenator. it is turned because your car is running and producing more power than you are using unless you're going up hill or accelerating. If you're at a dead stop and your engine is at idle where is the power of the combusing gas going? into heat, noise, and the altenator recharging your battery which is probably full after the first 5 min. So you have extra electricity.
No. There's no extra energy. The resistance of the alternator to turning is proportional to the electricity generated. Add more electrical load, and the alternator is harder to turn.
They have tried using this extra electricity for charging batteries for use in hybred electric cars but you have the offset of dragging around large batteries that weigh 50 lbs each and you have to have a couple to really get any extended electric mileage out of the system.
No. Hybrids are successful mostly because they recapture braking energy and allow the engine to be shut down when it is making more power than necessary.
They have tried using this extra electricity to power flywheels to store the power and release it back into the system when you release the brake but again you have this giant heavy flywheel to drag around.
No. Such systems were mechanical variants of a hybrid; that is, capturing the energy of braking and storing to use to accelerate the vehicle. There were some systems that used a huge flywheel as the vehicle's store of energy, but they never caught on.
The article uses this electricity to release the power that is naturally stored in the water solution. Einstien proved that all mater has a great deal of energy but getting it out has always been the problem. With gas we are getting no more than about a third of the actual energy out of the material we use up. That means that out of a gallon of gas we get the output of 1/3 actually making our car go. The rest is waisted.
No. Cars are not nuclear powered. Einstein has nothing to do with internal combustion. No material is used up or converted to energy. We're just rearranging the matter to a state of less potential energy. We harvest that energy as heat, which we then try to convert into kinetic energy. We only convert about 1/3, the rest stays as heat.
If we made an engine that recaptured the unspent fuel or had a system of burning the fuel completely we would have a better ratio of conversion from matter to energy.
No. There is very little unspent fuel, less than 1% in most modern engines. Again, the car is not nuclear powered, no fission or fusion taking place, no matter converted to energy.
Now we can't get the entire subatomic amounts Einstein was talking about but we can have the best chemical reaction amounts if we make a system that extracts the energy more effeciently from this reaction.
I don't know what you're talking about here, and I don't think you do either.
An example of this is when we add oxygen to gas (common practice now) to make a better chemical reaction inside the engine. We are taking a cheap additive and mixing it with a relitivly expensive main ingredient to make it burn better. If we add different chemicals we get different outputs, some help some hurt, most do both. Adding water helps the combustion by adding pressure and oxygen but hurts the engine by pressing water vapor into the oil and making our engine grind and wear out. Additive are nothing new and they have been proven to work. The main difference is that the right additivs are dangerous and hard to introduce to the system easily.
No. Oxygen additives don't produce a better chemical reaction, just a cleaner version of the same reaction. Adding water doesn't help combustion, just try adding some to your campfire. The old water injection systems reduced intake charge temperature by the phase change of water to steam, allowing greater compression ratios and greater efficiency.
The article stat