Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Company Says Laws of Physics Don't Apply — to Cars
Fantastic Lad, among many others, points out another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry. What's scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters of such extraordinary claims quite unbacked by extraordinary evidence. "Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology. The snippet Reuters is carrying says "Jun. 13 — Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it." Fantastic Lad, deadpan, goes on: "Check out the Reuter's story and accompanying video. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of conservation of energy thing happening in the whole 'separating hydrogen from water' game? I wonder what the real story is on this. Investment fraud? Magic?" Show your work; bonus points if you use Haiku.
I want my Mr fusion and I want it now!
Mine runs on hot air!
Just put Cowboy Neal at the exhaust!
booo hyuck. Ill be here all day.
Whats the problem? My windshield wipers have been running on water for years.
I used to use about a gallon of water per tank of petrol to get 40mpg out of my '82 Volvo 340, with the engine running quieter and more smoothly, and better low-end torque. Water is great, you've just got to put in the engine the right way. If modern cars used water injection, they wouldn't need catalytic converters.
water runs your car
rain, tea, and cool gentle mists
maybe piss does too
Profane Muthafucka
Would purchase a water car
And fuel it with sperm.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The molecular bond that holds the two hydrogen atoms to the oxygen atom is pretty weak. So weak, in fact, that a small electrical charge is able to separate them.
You can buy an aparatus to do this in most any catalog specializing in science gadgetry.
It really may be so simple as that the oil companies don't want you to have it... Not to pull out the conspiracy theories -- but unregulated commerce IS a powerful thing.
Gropes around blindly, with his peril-sensitive sunglasses on full tint.
Garden hose pressure
Spins turbine blades to release
BS upon world
reuters report it /. refute it
mere car or water bourne?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
we obay the laws of Thermodynamics
like a weird hoax to make gas price go down a little, it may work this way.
just the prototype, http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/13/genepax-shows-off-water-powered-fuel-cell-vehicle/
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2239/1801128557_043a923ea2.jpg
Rainy season comes
bringing with it a fresh crop
of nutball scammers
Thermodynamics
Isn't worth a damn when you
bring home the bacon.
car runs on water
being fooled is never fun
want to buy a bridge?
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Funny to my mind
Magic Water Powered Car
This Haiku Stinks Bad
Homer Simpson says
In this house we all obey
Thermodynamics
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
strangely told stories bringing wind-up energy utterest bollox
asks the guy in the summary. pal. conservation of energy always goes on. but, energy doesnt necessarily need to convert into forms and from forms we know up to date.
there are so much stuff thats being discussed, and even experimented in quantum physics that they would shatter what you know as reality up to this date.
zero point energy is something that has been discussed since einstein and 30s scientists started to convene in switzerland and other places to discuss matters about budding theoretical physics.
unified field, zero point energy - these stuff are a reality. however we do not have the necessary tools and mathematics to explain the nature of them, and their workings.
this may seem far fetched to you. it shouldnt. nuclear energy was much more than science fiction at the start of century, and it was only 'deduced' that atomic nuclei bonding energies might be holding immense energies, and it was as mythical as zero field energy is today.
Read radical news here
and do NOT believe is true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb9urNUFzAM Would love for Consumer Reports to do an expose on it.
I really dont care
On what my car runs today
Just let me drive now
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Car running on water
driving in a desert.
Which way do you go?
My version runs on spit & piss.
Supposedly -
Aluminum reacts with the Oxygen in H2O and releases the Hydrogen. The Aluminum is they re-recycled.
it's actually powered by the driver's energy (you have to be a Newtype to use it)
Scotty, I need warp nine! "Och, ye canna change the laws of physics, Jim!"
So water may not be the only thing fueling this car. They use a chemical reaction to crack the water, and then use the hydrogen from the water and oxygen from the air to run a fuel cell. The real questions are: What is in these membranes? How long do they last? What does it cost to renew the membranes?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It seems possible that the energy to separate the hydrogen could be coming from suppling the water at high pressure to the membrane, if so then the source of the energy to separate the water would be the original pump that is being used to supply the water to the membrane. One of the articles I found mentions that the pump supplying the water to the membrane was run from a dry-cell battery, and then turned off after things were started, so they could just be moving the energy from the dry-cell battery to separate things.
It would be useful if the membrane was more efficient at separating things than using electrolysis, but it would not be making any real power, the power for the original pump would still need to come from somewhere.
Shades of Fleischman and Ponds
People believe what they want to believe. Conspiracies: 9/11 Troof, Obama "whitey" tapes, faked moonshot, 1947 Roswell, Bilderbergers, communist flouridation, vast rightwing conspiracy, etc. Fake science/technology: magnets in gas tank, cold fusion, perpetual motion, perpetual oil, etc.
Now combine the two: Big Petroleum is keeping this technology off the market, but if you subscribe to my newsletter, I'll tell you how to get an extra 10MPG!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Forgive me for being sceptical of the sceptics here, but without knowing what process they claim to use to separate the hydrogen from the water, how can we reliably debunk it as not obeying the laws of physics?
It's one thing to claim that their car doesn't work, it's another to claim it doesn't work because what it proposes to do is impossible.
A few decades ago, people claimed it was impossible to go to the moon...
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I could explain things to you, but I feel that it will be about as useful as trying to run a car using water, so I will simply skip to where the discussion would inevitably end:
FUCK OFF.
As far as I remember, you need to put energy on water to split it into hydrogen and oxygen.
There is a whole branch of experimental battery development that works on this principle: you store energy by splitting water and retrieve the energy by converting it back to water.
From the article and video:
Car removes hydrogen from water: Easily done with electrolysis. The technology for this has been known for over a century.
Car extracts electrons from the hydrogen (... as it recombines with O2 to form water) Otherwise known as a hydrogen fuel cell. Again the technology has been in use for many years and if you ignore some "small" problems with membranes, this also works.
Car runs on electric motors powered from the hydrogen conversion - Electric motors for powering a car, this one is easy
So to summarize, customer buys this car. Then uses water to power it !!! As long as "customer" can plug the car into someone elses electrical socket to run the hydrogen converter, his only consumable is water.
I wonder if his neighbors would get suspicious about the large orange extension coming across the yard between the two houses ??
But back in reality; Aristotle provided evidence for a spherical earth way back in 330BC and the Earth's circumference was first determined around 240 BC by Eratosthenes. What else do we 'know' ?
I did the same to my '73 Dodge Dart with the 318 V8. I stuck a hypodermic needle in the distributor vacuum advance hose, it took a while to get the exact size of needle, a pharmacist friend gave me the needles.
The V8 was already smooth and quiet, and had torque enough, but I got significantly better mileage, something like a 30%~40% increase.
Now, if moderators did some research first...
I enjoy your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you check the picture in TFA (preposterous!), you will know the energy source for this car.
Hint: look at the date.
Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don't make sense.
Refridgerator.
If I understand correctly, this car claims to burn hydrogen to power itself. So, since burning hydrogen = producing water, you can just take the water from the exhaust and put it back in the little thingy that separates hydrogen. So, they were being modest, you don't even need to add water (or tea)!
Seriously now, I see serious posts here about things that "we don't know / don't yet comprehend" like "zero point energy" etc. Guys, perhaps if you take a couple of physics courses you will both "know" and "comprehend" and in addition you will be able to discern obvious scams.
Unless they are using a nice tiny fusion generator here. In that case when you pour water, it would be taking the deuterium out of it. Then I imagine they will tell you to throw in some old lithium batteries you have lying around, so that tritium can be generated. So, with your deuterium-tritium fuel you can power up Mr Fusion and have all the power you need!
Seriously people...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Poor education
Drool from your lips runs the car
Reporters buy it
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You CAN'T run car on water. That's impossible without exotic things like cold fusion (which doesn't exist).
You CAN run a car on water AND some other reagent. Like magnesium, aluminium, sodium, calcium carbide, zinc, etc.
However, you'll NEED TO REPLACE this reagent once it's spent. And guess what? It's much more expensive than simply buying gasoline.
I didn't realize that Youtube and Google were the most premier venues for publishing groundbreaking discoveries that revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and scrutiny. It's downright dangerous for the popular media to say that there are cars running on water when (as in the case of this one) it likely requires energy inputs to create the materials necessary for the chemical reactions to electrolyze water. I've already seen people proclaiming that there's no energy crisis just because they saw a Youtube video and that we don't need to build out a better energy infrastructure with much less reliance on limited fossil fuels. An unmitigated energy crisis (with preparations that must start NOW) will cause a lot of suffering and deceptive marketing is only delaying those preparations.
The critical eye
May be easily blinded
By cherry blossoms
Truth is what you want it to be.
Adding a certain % of water might work if it helps improve internal combustion efficiency. Current internal combustion engines waste approx 80% of the energy and some of that might be recovered.
Some use a small amount of water plus a shitload of electricity to do electrolysis. They're as dumb as the "I get 200mpg with my hybrid" claims where electricity is the primary power source.
And the rest??? Well until you see independent evidence they're probably all hoaxes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
a bright new future
made by this technology
suddenly beckons
limitless power
for all my modern machines
even flying pig
... because there are none in TFA:
WES system (Google-translated)
Genepax homepage (English)
but it must be true
I read it in engadget
trustworthy news source!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/13/genepax-shows-off-water-powered-fuel-cell-vehicle/
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I pour my soul into a post and forget to log in!
H two oh you minx explosively you fall short best as ice in booze
.."long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report).. With what we're currently paying for bottled water, I think you'd be better off sticking with gas.There is exactly one way by which you can make hydrogen extraction from water a net power gain: if the hydrogen extracted is used for nuclear fusion. Assuming any remotely efficient fusion (i.e. worth bothering with), the energy gain from fusion should vastly exceed the cost of splicing water, separating out deuterium, etc. For combustion in oxygen, no... water is already the ash of that process.
You could theoretically burn hydrogen in a fluorine atmosphere and get more energy out, but that assumes a ready supply of elemental fluorine (doesn't exist) and something to do with the hydrogen fluoride that results (HF will corrode glass.)
Why is it always cars? - if they would would only build one of these magical water-powered engines into a generator, then I could cut myself off from the grid and just go outside and piss in the tank whenever the lights are getting dim.
Turn on the engine
This hatchback retains water
Much like my girlfriend
Posterity, my posterior.
Science is based on observing the universe around us, formulating hypothesis, and then testing them out repeatedly to confirm them.
Ignoring opportunities to investigate that which appears to contradict your incomplete formulas should be looked at very seriously, because if anything, it could help you complete them.
Now, how about organizing a set of Western scientists to go to Japan and study this baby reported by Reuters and available commercially: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME
Why spend your time being arrogant, when you can spend your time finding labels & formulas for this new reality, and end this entire Oil/Energy price scam? Arrogance, ignorance and holding on to old ideas do not make for a good scientist.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
How is this so different from adding water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium to achieve this effect?
This application doesn't seem so far fetched to me.
http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Industry_News&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=63705
You can use old motor oil to fertilize your lawn.
The Environmental Protection Agency
Photo of the water car.
I'm pretty sure that's not Mr. Fusion unless that's the alter-ego of Jason Voorhees. In which case you might not wish for you Mr Fusion right now after all. It's more like Mr. Fission I'd say. Well I guess at least they got the date of publication right.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Too much sake
for designer Ohake
on water we must go...
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
How many gallons of Bling water do you need to fuel that toy ?
Mr Fusion Car
Running on Water
Everybody make money!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
According to QI - a TV show with *real* researchers from Oxford University whose sole aim is to dispel some common myths, including everything Admiral Lord Nelson's last words ("Drink drink, fan fan, rub rub" and not "Kiss me, Hardy" even though he said the last one as well) to the number of natural satellites the Earth has - Columbus KNEW for certain that the world wasn't flat - he believed it to be pear-shaped. And as you rightly point out, there is any amount of earlier evidence that show people KNEW it wasn't flat.
But people perpetuate thousand-year-old myths as easily as this.
Hence, when someone claims free-energy, perpetual motion, etc. then you need SCIENTISTS (real ones, with respect in the community and a pot-load of previous research in the area which has all been peer-reviewed) before anything is "real". The fact that there is little to no information about HOW it's done is not due to patents, etc. (which as soon as you apply for, you are able to TELL people, and they still can't just steal your idea), it's because the real scientists will point out the holes (like - you need to plug it in for it to work, it consumes a lot more energy than it produces in useful work, etc.). Any decent scientist/company that had "invented" this would be SCREAMING it from the rafters and have a slew of patents and scientific papers available, along with a hundred papers on *how* well it works and how they can make it better.
To sum it: It's balls. It's sales patter. Don't trust salesman.
Additionally, even IF people thought the world was flat, it was because of ignorance, not that they had an incomplete knowledge of science. Simple science experiments show the curvature of the Earth very quickly. There wasn't a good stock of "true" scientists until at least the 1700/1800's. The simplest knowledge of science shows you that the world is an oblate spheroid, and in the same way, the simplest knowledge of science tells you that what they claim can only be true if there are caveats - such as it needing some other material, some other energy input etc.
But your logic I think is flawed. Hypothetically, they would use some process to start it, and then feed back in as it goes. Any typical car acts at a high level the same. To start extracting energy from gasoline, an electric motor starts the work, and then the fuel is consumed, mostly gone to heat, some used to move the car, and some reclaimed to recharge the battery.
In this case, it's describing sort of 'mining' hydrogen from the water. So it's not claiming a closed system is self sustaining, but that they burn hydrogen somehow in a way that yields more energy than goes into extracting it from the most stable source of it, water.
I'm not sure how this will actually pan out. As far as I know, separating hydrogen from oxygen has been considered expensive energy wise. But I don't think laws of thermodynamics are necessarily being violated here...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Just like those at Steorn
Here fantastic claims abound
Just a money grab.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
it would've been more believable if they said it runs strictly on green tea
Lake zombie Jason,
scary machete killer,
is in the front seat.
YOu are genius. How compact but drawing in so much context. I salute you.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...believes the laws of thermodynamics now? What is the internet coming to?
0 1 - just my two bits
So thats why I get a big electric shock everytime I try to take a bath- water.
It would be so awesome if this group figured out a way to break those nasty water molecules with less energy than you get from burning hydrogen.
I won't believe it until I see it. Still, best of luck to them. Anything that breaks the current rules is good and opens up a whole new world of possibilities. It's how science has operated for hundreds of years. If a new discovery breaks the rules, modify the rules accordingly.
Arrogance, ignorance, and blindly accepting new ideas that have not been proven do not make for a good scientist either.
Openmindedness
does not excuse the claimant
from providing proof
Well. If you had some kind of catalyst, or other reaction, that could separate water molecules into it's base elements of hydrogen and oxygen, you'd have loads of combustible gas for later use.
Good luck with that one though.
If you put solar panels on the car to gather energy for splitting the water, then the issue would practically solve itself, as the source of input energy (the sun) is inexhaustible in our lifetime.
They'd just need to be some damned-efficient solar panels.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Haiku is 5-7-5, not 5-5-7.
-- Soruk
In my humble opinion the claim of carrying a small amount of water to power a car is total nonsense. In the first place a car of half way normal size requires several hundred liters of Hydrogen per minute to travel at 60mph. Even if some whiz bang new process enables more efficient liberation of hydrogen from water we are talking about a lot of water and one heck of a lot of energy to liberate the hydrogen.
As far as this stuff being new there have been jewelers torches that gain their own hydrogen from water and an electrical power supply for decades. There are even some larger torches in industry that make their own hydrogen. But these systems burn lots of power in making their hydrogen. This is old technology with known limits.
1) Physics laws are broken all the time as science moves forward. Science is accurate and obsolute, until it is proven wrong, this is how sciences work.
2) Separating hydrogen from water is NOT breaking any form of phsyics. The question would be the chemical/energy cost to do it.
For something to think getting hydrogen out of water is UBER crazy talk, doesn't realize that the laser printer on their desk is creating ozone by the electrical charges bouncing oxygen atoms around.
Using water as energy is not hard, converting it to a 'useful' form of energy that is more than the energy required to convert it or break it apart it is the trick, but wouldn't break any Physics Laws...
Absolutely. So let's go study this thing, instead of claiming "impossible" and ignoring it all together.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Sodium, Lithium, Potassium all combine with water in a vigorous fire. But seeing as this car runs on water and not sodium theres no way that would be the case. What I want to see is a car powered by Phosphorous; as it burns at room temperature without a spark or pressure.
I prefer to remain optimistic. Maybe they really have found a method to extract energy from the vacuum of space in order to accomplish these reactions. Who knows
It'd sure be nice if these amazing stories actually panned out for once.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
You can't take an atom apart then put it back together and have energy left over.
Can't be done.
No sig today...
the truth is, we don't know all the laws nor are we always right when we think we do.
There are many in the scientific community who are comparable to religious zealots and every once in a while someone stumbles on something that either gives us a new set of laws or changes those we have. Thats the great thing about science, its not static. It can appear to be at times but that is simply the properties of human ignorance and ego.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The shape looks familiar on Indian roads and even the steering wheel which has an "R" makes me think of the electric cars branded Reva in India. Is the the same thing? You can find Reva's home page at http://www.revaindia.com/
Scientists don't NEED to explain it... that's the job of the "scientists" that invented it.
If it's real, every scientist will then nod and go "Yup, they're right".
Scientists really don't give a crap about people's crackpot theories unless they *are* going to affect the known laws of science. That's where science gets interesting. Did you know, for example, that there are quantum effects that "get" energy from nowhere and then "return" it later in time. They literally "borrow" energy from the future. Much, much, much more interesting that most scientific things. However, when you do the maths, it *still* all works out and comes out to nice equations in X dimensions etc.
But a car that "runs on water" is so much crap it's unbelievable without MUCH, MUCH more information - how do you start the reaction, what inputs are there to the systems, how much energy is produced, where does that energy come from? There are a million unanswered questions and it's only a scientists job to ask them of such an "inventor", not to answer them. When the answers are forthcoming, then we can check them and see if it adds up. If they don't fit the theorems we have (for which there are no known counter-examples), then we need to investigate more. But "it just does" means they won't even look. It's a crackpot-answer, as is silence.
If you invent a perpetual motion machine, the top scientists in the world are not going to come running. Hundreds of them get invented every single day. If even science students ran round to every one, there'd be nobody left to do any real science. It's not up to science to disprove your theory, it's up to you to prove it. That's how it works, even between scientists in their own community.
A hundred scientists looking at your theory and not being able to disprove it is NOTHING in comparison to being able to provide a complete proof compatible with all known laws. It's not even close to rigourous science to say "it runs on water" and even the pseudo-science explanations are NOWHERE near rigourous answers. This is why mathematicians (who all also scientists, just as much, and in fact physics is more maths than what you would call science) hated the four-colour-theorem proof, it was done on computer and although they couldn't find any counter-examples, they also couldn't understand the proof because of the sheer size of it. However, within a few years, they were able to prove it's "correctness" and THEN they accepted it.
Signs of a crackpot:
No detailed scientific information on the critical process: Check
No peer-review of the technology: Check
No published papers: Check
Unknown, heavily-debunked or non-existent scientists: Check
No announcement of breaking scientific laws BEFORE you've built a product on the basis: Check
Pseudo-science statements that are empty and meaningless: Check
A magical, unexplained source of "energy" (amazing how much that word is misused in everything from Reiki healing to water-dowsing): Check
Breaking KNOWN laws of physics in so many ways without explanation of how the equations match up, or where the extra energy comes from, or what the "new" equations would be: Check
YouTube before New Scientist: Check
did she say "made in Osaka"? Or rather she said: "made in... Oh sucker!"
This car they describe is like a car that... um.. What do we use for analogies when we can't use cars?
The water is being used up. In the video it says that a liter of water lasts about an hour.
If the water is being used up then there can be energy for moving the car.
No sig today...
If the fuel cell and water separation unit are in the back, what's under the hood?
It's a 300W fuel cell system. Pep Boys sells scooters with 750W motors. A quick, unscientific check at a store that sells scooter parts shows that their smallest motor for a scooter is 250W. Did the video show the car going downhill at top speed?
(My guesses are the batteries that run the motor and yes)
This sentence no verb.
There is not exactly one way, you could just substitute the second part of the equation above by the first and voila, a net gain of about 9x10^16 J per liter of H20. The way it looks is that a compact fusion generator is only slightly more plausible than a perfect mass-energy exchanger, unless you have a magnetic monopole and an anti-monopole laying around.
Just from reading the article it would seem that what they have done is recreate a technology which started in the US a few years ago. You can learn more about HH2o here:
http://lionheartcreationsworld.com/WaterFuel.wmv
Just search for HH2o on Google. It's all over the place and has been proven authentic by many third party witnesses. But it's also VERY new so it's not mainstream knowledge yet.
Energy Crisis
The gas prices are climbing
And the fraudsters smile
The scared and foolish
Will buy the stupidist hope
With their last dollar
Someone always wins
Whatever the latest fear
With a well timed scam
Wasn't there just a slashdot story about this? "How To Teach a Healthy Dose of Skepticism?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/129232
The combustion of hydrogen to produce water is an exothermic reaction, and it releases exactly the amount of energy that splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen requires. Anything else would violate conservation of energy.
It is possible to "liberate" the hydrogen in water, if you use a reactant that is a very strong electrophile to "steel" the oxygen atoms from the hydrogen atoms. But the ability to produce hydrogen would be limited by the available quantity of reactant.
The only way this claim could be true is if the laws of thermodynamics are wrong.
Aquarian auto
Water box for spinning wheels
Cold steam future stream
has it ever occurred to you that they may be using a hot fusion reactor in the car to power it with water? No, didn't think so. Get your facts straight before shooting off your mouth.
The web page claim they are a conpany, just to prove their conman intentions.
People want to fill up with one thing, not two. Also, water freezes.
If people would tolerate that, we'd be using water with electrolysis to supply a tiny bit of hydrogen into a diesel engine. The hydrogen production and usage are both insignificant in terms of energy, but the diesel combustion behavior changes greatly when you add hydrogen.
But I'm not sure I buy the idea of the inventor needing to explain it in scientific terms to the scientific community, before the world embraces it because:
1) Perhaps the inventor is not a scientist or not well versed enough to explain it suffciently well. Not a great excuse granted, as he could probably find a scientist to do this for him if he tried hard enough.
2) Chances are that for an invention such as this there is no way to explain it with today's science.
Alternetively, there is a very high possibility that these Japanese guys are not telling the whole story, and that some chemical reaction is going on WITH water, implying something else must be added/replaced from time to time.
But I think your last point about the four-colour-theorem proof is a good analogy for the point I'm trying to make...
If it works, it works, let's start using it. Just how much does it matter that we have formulas to describe this new found reality? Yeah if we had the formulas, we could improve upon the system and likely create entire new systems beneficial to humanity; however, let's not sit on this for years while scientists scratch their heads in some lab. Reality existed way before science even came to be. Reality doesn't need science to exist.
Now this is not to deminish the role of science, as it has been extremely useful to humanity (a huge understatement); however, people hail it around as if it were some kind of fundamentalist religion. "If we don't know about it, and can't explain it (yet), it can't be true"... until the day they can explain it, and then all of a sudden you see the headlines "Scienctists discover new blah blah blah". Nearly all scientific discovery had no formulas to explain it prior to its discovery.
In countless cases, discovery comes first, the science to explain it comes AFTER.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Fine. First, demonstrate that this "thing" is happening in the first place.
Do this in such a fashion that independent researchers can replicate the "thing" at will.
Step two, assuming that you succeed in the first step, is providing a testable hypothesis that explains why the laws of thermodynamics and the way the world works as we know it have to be tossed out.
I don't think they'll get past step one, actually.
Water with powered aluminum produces hydrogen and aluminum oxide. You burn the hydrogen and go. Of course, you have to replace that soggy aluminum oxide every now and then.
Also, miners lamps use water and calcium carbide to produce acetylene and burn that.
Once we somehow get plentiful supplies of pure aluminum and calcium carbide, we're all set.
Thermodynamics? Laws were meant to be broken. Screw you Faraday! Electrolysis Is clearly the solution For our carbon woes. Some water and a Big Hoffmann Voltameter: All we need for cars. How soon till we see Bumper Stickers that proclaim "Powered by my tears!" What to do with this? It seems to good to be true. We should wait and see. As for me and mine, We will continue to use Flux capacitors.
for comparison Lance Armstrong can produce 480 Watts for an hour on his bike.
Average car is more than 100 hp or 75,000 Watts. So, although this is a great invention it will not be the only power for the cars any time soon.
They do plan to introduce 1000 Watt (roughly 1.5 horse power) engine later.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
My year of Japanese doesn't quite qualify me to make a decent translation of the site, but perhaps before dismissing the claim outright based on a 30 second vid and article we might want to understand what the actual claim is first? http://www.genepax.co.jp/
You forgot good old hot fusion.
Look I'm a scientist at heart. Absolutely nothing can exist if it breaks natural laws. PERIOD, no exceptions - EVER! My main point is that we don't yet know all the natural laws, so why cling so hard to the few that we do know, dismissing anything that appears to bring them into question, when we simultaenously admit they are incomplete?
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Apparently, physics don't apply, but chemistry. They apparently use a chemical reaction to separate hydrogen from water. From an article that was posted here.
in modern japan
thermodynamics obey you
??? profit
At least according to Bush.
I am not some toy to be used!
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
2) Separating hydrogen from water is NOT breaking any form of phsyics. The question would be the chemical/energy cost to do it.
For something to think getting hydrogen out of water is UBER crazy talk, doesn't realize that the laser printer on their desk is creating ozone by the electrical charges bouncing oxygen atoms around.
Using water as energy is not hard, converting it to a 'useful' form of energy that is more than the energy required to convert it or break it apart it is the trick, but wouldn't break any Physics Laws.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Water injection can improve automobile performance in a couple ways.
(1) Leaning out the mixture. This can be about 10% savings right there. For every cubic inch of air, a properly proportioned amount of gasoline is needed. Too much, and it burns too slow and wastes gas. Too little it burns too fast or detonates. Adding water allows you to reduce the ratio without causing detonation.
(2) Steam. One of the things that water injection does right is convert part of the heat component of the combustion into energy in the form of expanding gas by causing the water to convert to steam and acting as a propellant in addition to the burning gasoline.
*most* of the energy of burning gasoline is in the form of heat. It should be possible to use that heat as well. Steam engines do it.
And if they COULD do sustainable nuclear fusion in a small car engine this would be great news. They can't. We are still trying to build our first nuclear fusion experimentation plant. No sir, if we ever achieve this technology, we are years and years off.
Well, there's a small problem - all fusion reactors emit neutrons and x-rays. It should be (barely) possible to shield x-rays without making your car to be the size of a small tank. However, there's no way to effectively shield from neutrons (even submerging the reactor in a tank of boronated water won't help much).
So let's calculate how fast you'll receive a fatal dose of radiation. Let's assume the fatal dose to be 10 grays - that's 1000 joules of whole-body absorbed energy for 100kg of body weight.
Even aneutronic boron-proton fusion produces 0.1% energy in form of neutrons. Let's assume that 1% of these neutrons reaches you.
So you'll absorb 0.01% of engine's power in form of penetrating radiation. Let's assume that engine's power is 100hp, that's 75kWt in SI. So the neutron flux through your body will be about 7.5 Watts.
So you'll get the fatal dose in about 2 minutes.
Have a nice ride!
He said pour dirt into the radiator, not into your monitor and keyboard!
Why should we disprove
it? It's their claim, so they should
have to put up proof.
So many skeptics... :)
Do a little experiment(8 grade chemistry)
Bowl of salted water, 2 glass tubes(one end closed), battery and 2 copper wires.
Fill tubes with water, turn them upside down both tubes inside bowl with water so the water doesn't run out. Run copper wire from battery terminals inside each tube and wait.
One tube fills with hydrogen the other with oxygen. 2 to 1 ratio as in H20.
To prove its hydrogen, light up a match and turn the tube with hydrogen up side down so the gas can escape. It will cause a small explosion. Those were the fun classes.
If it is true, I'll bet you it runs of the vibrations of the universe. If it doesn't, I'm speculating that is how we will get there, our understanding is simply flawed.
The first place I saw the idea of extracting hydrogen from water to create power was the method used in the original Jules Verne (not the Disney version) "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea".
So, it's definitely not original and if it were possible, don't you think that somebody would have done it by now?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it."
Oh great...TWO ways to die in a Gee Wiz... in a crash, AND in a hydrogen carbecue!
http://www.topgear.com/content/news/stories/1832/
... in comics.
OK, yes, water is the result of oxidizing hydrogen. Thus probably *more* energy is required to break apart hydrogen and oxygen than would be returned by re-igniting it.
Now, lets assume what they are saying is "true" (for some value of true) but they are leaving out important information for the reason that they don't want people to copy them just yet.
(I'm not saying I believe them, but this is a thought experiment.)
Their name includes the word "gene" which seems to imply bioengineering. Lets assume that they've engineers a little microbe that eats some substance in the presence of water and fart out hydrogen. Yeast fart CO2 when the produce alcohol.
So, assume aluminum. The little microbes emit a chemical that causes water to bind with aluminum, very quickly and in a very controlled way, that emits O2. Not impossible.
I do not believe it is water alone, but the other consumables may be plentiful, negligible, or biological.
Wolfgang Pauli says
physics of the water car
is not even wrong
I hate my flatmate
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Mechanism
The text that accompanies the water molecule breaking apart says 'chemical reaction'.
The first yellowish block is labeled 'catalyst'.
The second orangish block is labeled 'electrolytic membrane'.
The third yellowish block is labeled 'catalyst'.
The red text that happens in the yellow says 'the hydrogen releases electrons'. The labels are 'hydrogen ions' and 'electrons'.
The benefits:
- It eliminates the need for an high-pressure hydrogen tank with potential explosion risk;
- Fuels the PR-people with hype
;-) - Fuels
/.ers hot air on slow weekends
The drawbacks:- The other product must be replaced from time to time (longer than a gas fill up);
- It was expensive as compared to gas, but since gas prices are must higher now it might have become competitive.
The thing is that hydrogen is extracted from water reacting with an expensive chemical AND was already feasible a while back ago -- just not economically.sometimes i think that
people have lives of some kind
then i read slashdot
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
My take is that the're separating the hydrogen from water outside of the car (consuming electricity in the process) and then they use a fuel cell inside the car - regaining electricity and producing water.
No new technology here - all is well known, except that efficient fuel cells for use in cars are still quite expensive - too expensive for mass production and the problem of hydrogen storage is still not solved to satisfaction.
--- Eat my sig.
Fuel for car: water
Source of water: Jesus Christ
Quite simple, really.
Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
This is interesting, enough English to be helpful.
http://www.genepax.co.jp/mechanism/system.html
Assuming this isn't plastic sushi...
What pulls the electrons through the 'lamp' instead
of the membrane? I don't see why the path of least resistance would be that way.
"I stomp in clown shoes where daemons fear to tread."
Come on people, this is the same Reuters that published photoshopped images from the war in Lebanon in 2006. Learn to take their reporting with a giant grain of salt.
I bet that it is somehow Bush's fault that these "water cars" aren't being mass produced yet. He and his oil cronies are keeping the technology down. They have also discovered how to create perpetual motion, but are keeping that under wraps too.
check water level
add broccoli and carrots
else replace hamster
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
My guess is that they plug the car in overnight to generate hydrogen, for use the next day. Air powered cars work the same way - plug in overnight to pump up a tank, then run the next day. Nothing particularly mysterious here.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You've designed air conditioning units and don't get basic thermodymamics?
The short version is this. Heat engines are limited to a maximum efficiency E = (Tout - Tin)/ Tout. E is always < 1. The smaller the temperature difference, the lower the efficiency. Temperatures are measured from absolute zero.
Refrigerators/heat pumps are heat engines in reverse. They have a maximum coefficient of performance (heat difference out / energy in) which is 1/E of the efficiency of a heat engine operating between the same temperature difference. Coefficients of performance can be > 1; values like 9 can be achieved with real hardware, but only for small temperature differences.
If you use a refrigerator/heat pump to provide the temperature difference to drive a heat engine, the coefficient of performance of the refrigerator times the efficiency of the heat engine will always be less than 1. Which is why you can't build a perpetual motion machine by running a refrigerator's compressor from a heat engine.
There's nothing mysterious about this. There's a fairly obvious relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature of an ideal gas, and once you get that, everything else more or less follows.
According to what I can make out from Genepax's site, the design appears to be a conventional fuel-cell device with an added facility for separating hydrogen from water. Their animations and diagrams show the water separation, which appears to use a power source outside the system - probably some sort of rechargeable battery. The "perpetual energy" stuff appears to be some marketing hype. What it really boils down to is a fuel-cell vehicle with the convenience of making its own hydrogen from water.
Even so, the design is still embarrassingly foolish. It would be far simpler and efficient to use the electrical power source to drive the vehicle directly instead of pushing the energy around to include a fuel cell.
I wish I could read Japanese.
No, you don't get free energy... at all. It takes (significantly) more energy to break the oxygen back out of the metal and recycle it. But it's not too terribly an inefficient or crazy way to store energy for a car. The power density of the sodium/cesium is quite high. And the infrastructure for delivering water to the car is well developed :-).
Of course, the dangers of having that much sodium metal sitting around waiting to be exposed to water during an accident have to be considered. But it's not an insurmountable problem.
Of course, it could easily just be a hoax (and, in fact, the marketing hype *certainly* is fraudulent). But there's nothing impossible here.
Most people drive as if the laws of physics don't apply to them.
It's called a Catalyst...
Look it up...
All that companies like Genepax (they are hardly the first) are claiming is that they have a catalyst which breaks water down into Hydrogen and Oxygen with out using a thermal process.
These catalysts are almost always based on an alloy of Palladium with other Noble metals. (See Cold Fusion)
MORE than 100 years ago, Albert Einstein said: E=MC^2
He NEVER said any thing about heat being a required part of the equation.
It is the C^2 that is the tricky bit...
This season a car
It breaks the laws of physics
Investor fraud aye
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oh no! The Police! Quickly hide the Budweiser Down the tank it goes
... on the subject of energy.
Years ago pretty much everyone was exactly alike. Pretty much everyone was scruffing around gathering food, hunting for shelter, and having babies. Years ago almost no one understood how things worked. Things would pop out of nowhere and eat us; earthquakes, hurricanes, and diseases would kill us. We just didn't get anything at all, especially the forces that cause things to happen, energy.
Well we finally got some bright ideas, and in time, those ideas built on other ideas, until finally we have now amassed a collection, a mountain even, of ideas on what energy is. Science describes how things work, and on the subject of energy, its word is final.
You see, we used to (and many still do) cling to the idea that energy is some sort of hazy, cloudy, ethereal, and formless "stuff". Some even believe that this "stuff" can just appear (or be made to appear), as if by magic. Maybe someone can speak an incantation and suddenly "poof", presto things just happen. Or maybe, like the ancient alchemists, we just combine one thing with another, or we play with magnets in just the right way, and energy is created. Well, in some respects that did happen. If you combine sodium metal and water, you get a reaction. Or, if you move a magnet in a coil of wire, you can get electrons to move. Or, even if you fire enough neutrons at compressed plutonium things just might start happening. Yes, these things were done. If you play around long enough with stuff, you might get something unexpected and random to happen.
However, at the bottom of it all, we've learned that energy is NOT hazy. It is NOT ethereal. And, it is definitely not unquantifiable. With the combination of Einstein's e=mc(squared) formula, and further quantum mechanics, we've learned that not only is energy similar to money, or bits in a computer, no it is EXACTLY LIKE money and bits in a computer. Energy comes in exact and indivisible packets that CAN BE COUNTED, one by one. Matter too, being converted to energy (or vice versa), can be counted in EXACT amounts. As a metaphor, if you get 10 dollars of energy by combining hydrogen and oxygen into water, then it should take exactly 10 dollars plus the extra money required to cause the splitting process!
Electricty, or for our conversation here, electrical current in a wire, is the movement of massive numbers of electrons. Each electron CAN BE COUNTED, one by one. If you can move a magnet through a coil of wire and cause electons to move, then for each electron there was an associated photon of work generated by the magnet to move that electron.
ALL PHYSICS IS ACCOUNTING. IF YOU ARE NOT AN ACCOUNTANT, THEN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND PHYSICS!
Energy (that can be put to use) doesn't come out of nowhere. If it did, then we would be in a whole heap of trouble. It would be like living in Alice in Wonderland every day. Matter, or energy just doesn't suddenly happen, because there's only so much of it to go around. It would be like printing money and expecting the government to acknowlege it as being real. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!
Well, if they are generating energy they could split the water and use it as fuel. People have being doing that for years off-board and storing it in their vehicle.
The on-board nature makes the claims bogus, but just the idea of using water isn't all that strange. But aside from that little point, if they are 'generating energy' why not just use that directly?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This particular example doesn't have me excited, but shouldn't be barking cold fusion at the idea like it's a thermodynamic impossibility.
Split water with endothermic catalysis process. Temperature of the water goes down as the hydrogen and oxygen are released. Ambient heat of the surroundings drives the splitting of the water. Burn the hydrogen and oxygen to do work.
What part about that would be impossible? Take another look at some cold-fusion claims too. Nobody's saying they have built a reactor yet, but not everything is thermodynamically/physically impossible when you stop making assumptions about the entire cycle.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
Self unfulfilling prophecy:
"...which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry"
Why is the "water" they put in the car the same colour as petrol?
I'll pretty much say that you are right, there is no way that a car like that would work, you would need more energy from somewhere.
I always wondered if you could use solar panels to charge a battery system and split water into h2 and o2, kind of like a home fuel cell generator.
... it will by now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Assumptions:
The only consumed chemicals in the system are contained in regular water and air.
This system releases more energy than it consumes (the chemical reaction has a negative energy cost).
Facts:
Composition of air in percent by volume, at sea level at 15ÂC and 101325 Pa:
Nitrogen -- N2 -- 78.084%
Oxygen -- O2 -- 20.9476%
Argon -- Ar -- 0.934%
Carbon Dioxide -- CO2 -- 0.0314%
Neon -- Ne -- 0.001818%
Methane -- CH4 -- 0.0002%
Helium -- He -- 0.000524%
Krypton -- Kr -- 0.000114%
Hydrogen -- H2 -- 0.00005%
Xenon -- Xe -- 0.0000087%
Ozone -- O3 -- 0.000007%
Nitrogen Dioxide -- NO2 -- 0.000002%
Iodine -- I2 -- 0.000001%
Carbon Monoxide -- CO -- trace
Ammonia -- NH3 -- trace
Reference: CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, edited by David R. Lide, 1997.
Argon, Neon, Helium, Krypton, and Xenon are Noble gasses - they are very nonreactive, and it is doubtful that they play a part in the reaction.
Most probable solution:
The system relies on Nitrogen to perform a reaction in the presence of some exotic catalyst that splits the water molecules into Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Probability this will work:
Really really low. The catalyst would have to be something not naturally present on earth (or we would have found a magic hydrogen producing well). Nitrogen doesn't react well with other chemicals. It does better than Noble gasses, but it's still difficult to find exothermic reactions involving Nitrogen as a reactant.
What is a Haiku?
Could someone explain it please?
Yours, Annonymous.
Drinking beer (and soda) releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
(Quick, call the thought police! Grab his IP address!)
That explains it - just put an atomic vector plotter in the tea, hook it up to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain and feed in the probability of this being a load of hogwash and - tadah! the infinite improbability drive!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
lets use yet another scarse resource to fuel the car
estoy demasiado vago.
This system does not use electrolysis. It is a wet cell battery that uses a new catalyst from already proven materials to generate electricity by a chemical process which is harvested by conduction.
Proof of Concept experiment that you can do in your home without exotic materials or Genepaxs magic. Suitable for 6 and up I think.
http://www.miniscience.com/projects/airbattery/
Alot like an atom bomb it is exploiting physics to release energy from a system. I'm not saying it's fusion just as a comparison. The first A-bomb system used metal, explosives, a radioactive isotope, rubber etc. Yet it could make a huge release of energy with a small electric charge from the detonator. No more energy than was already there in the system when it was being built. Just normally un-exploitable. Same concept here.
The energy gained (electrical charges) is gained by slow oxidation of the anode in the battery. It is not producing more energy in the system than there ever was.
What usually makes such simple systems un-useful is how big the battery would have to be for it to produce enough energy to be worth it. The same designs are used in old car batteries, same basic designs just wildly different materials.
Because the cost benefit of using an semi-easily produced acid, the anode and the cathode where/are more cost effective than making some giant battery that had the same performance.
Efficiency gains have been made in how much energy it can produce from what in the past. If you want to how and from what, look it up. I think platinum and the like were used in their construction.
What Genepax is saying that it has at least developed a new anode material to be used that, they think, is long lasting and cost productive.
They are going to be testing the material over a long period of time to see if that is true.
I have no idea how or if there are any other improvements but that seems to be what they are saying.
I strongly DOUBT that if a limitless source of energy had been discovered and successfully exploited, that the media would cover it. The discoverer would be dead or hired by the government, and his discovery would vanish like a mirage in the desert. Free energy of any sort would not just upset the ideas of thermodynamics, but would shake up the governing structures of the world. Most governments retain power over their subjects (ahem: "citizens") by denying them access to resources. They oppress others by killing them for their access to energy and resources.
The design is either a flawed one, with limitations (catalyst, etc) or it is a fraud. That being said, I have more of a beef with the absolute knee jerk "it isn't possible" mentality, than with the actual article. Something like this would've been shut off long before it ever got to the mainstream Joe Six Pack (heretofore J6P). That's why I don't think whatever they're presenting is entirely accurate.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
It is possible
Just if the braking used is
Regenerative
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"Michelle Carlile-Alkhouri, the reporter for the story of the amazing Japanese car that runs on only water and tea, was heard soon after asking if she could get BlondeStar online road service to deliver her favorite herbal tea if she were stuck out in the desert with nothing but a six-pack of T@B on ice..."
Beat me to it. IANAP, but I think that for extra mileage you could bang the oxygen together too (up to iron), but the engine will need some sturdy casing.
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
ok, but how often should I change the snake oil ?
Fools and their money
Parted by free energy
while wiser men laugh
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Water for cars now?
Corn for fuel. Bad idea.
Water in cars... worse.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
There once was a car from Japan
that seemed like a zero-point scam.
Then slashdot derived
that the H2O drive
got more energy out than you can.
If they have found some ingenious way to separate out D2O from H2O (using some hitherto unknown membrane process ) and run Cold Fusion on D2O, it would be a Nobel prize class invention. With my current knowledge of science, I don't know why that should be impossible.
Correct. The "somewhere" are the remains of plants and animals that were somehow preserved from biodegradation, and eventually converted to coal and mineral oil over millions of years.
Obviously, we are burning that fuel much faster than it is created (in about 200 years, we have used up a significant part of what was formed in millions of years). There are two problems with this:
1) Oil and coal will eventually run out. It looks increasingly likely we have already hit "peak oil": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
2) By blowing huge amounts of CO2 into the air, we are promoting a global greenhouse effect. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming.
While such climate swings have happened before in prehistoric times, there is some danger that we are in the process of triggering a particularly fast and violent one that could give us major problems.
Because of that, I agree we need alternatives. The water car from TFA sounds like a scam to me, but wind and solar power are certainly things we will use more of in the future. Also, some improved ways of making biodiesel are in the works.
Finally, maybe the physicists will eventually manage to get nuclear fusion going. The research is expensive (10 billion or so for ITER), but cheap compared to oil wars in the Middle East. For the cost of one Iraq war, you can build a lot of research reactors.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Personally, I'm a big fan of the first law of thermodynamics. That's the one that says that the Universe doesn't pull energy out of its butt.
I'm sure that all of those laser printers are plugged in to an external source of electricity. It takes a lot of power to do that, and it all has to come from somewhere. If you had a big enough power supply you could get all the hydrogen you want out of water, but you won't get back any more energy than you put into it.
That's exactly it. If you convert a water molecule into its component atoms, you need to use energy to do that. That's exactly the same amount of energy that you get back by combining them into water again. Anyone who says that they can create a closed system in which water is broken apart and then recombined to produce excess energy with no other processes involved is lying. If you're getting excess energy from those two reactions, then it has to come from some third reaction which is going on.
Nobody is saying that it's not possible to design a car that runs on something other than gasoline, they're saying that the running a car which is powered _only_ by water, in the manner described, is impossible. If this car works at all it's because there is some other process involved which we aren't being told about, not because of some magical but hitherto unnoticed property of H2O.
-- Paul Johnson, "Modern Times"
Why do you think we do it--all the space probes and particle accelerators? We are looking for things we cannot explain, and it turns out that there are a lot of them. The truly revolutionary moments of discovery are not heralded by shouts of "Eureka," but by someone quietly rechecking the math and recalibrating the instruments because things just didn't add up. Most often, the battle-cry of science is "hmm, that's strange."
I'm not saying that these guys have rewritten everything we think we know about the universe, but they would be well within their rights if they had done so. More likely there is some other reactant consumed or the water is pressurized or ionized or heated or whatever. Steam locomotives ran on water too, you know. The articles linked do not describe the process in sufficient detail to talk intelligently about it one way or the other.
Really, all the posts here are about whether or not you, the reader, can accept something into your world that does not look like what you see every day. If not, well, you just keep waving that femur. Maybe we'll send you a postcard from The Future.
Hydrogen and oxygen go into the fuel cell, electricity, heat and water come out.
To turn the water back into Hydrogen and oxygen you need more electricity than they gave up to make up for the heat lost.
If the bullshit on Slashdot was more than figuratively, we could use it for making biogas and driving a power plant. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gober_gas.
Actually, my brother-in-law is running a biogas power plant on his farm, with a maximum output of 250 kW. The biomass is partly cow dung (it is a dairy farm), partly plants that are directly added to the pit.
C - the footgun of programming languages
And used motor oil is good for your lawn.
That is a dangerous attitute to take. I mean that whole physics justice system is pretty messed up.
I mean when you get busted trying to break the laws of physics
1.You get no appeals
2.No body has even been allowed to face their accuser
3.Pentalties are widely varied and often inconsistent; often its nothing, but sometimes its KABOOM!
4.The system of laws is STILL not entirelly codified!
Really the only good thing about physics justice is that it really does seem perfectly egalitarian, no matter what color you are or what economic class you might fall in, if its nothing its nothing and if its KABOOM well its KABOOM!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
so this is a battery powered car then?
Making and Breaking
What is, was, is not, was not?
There is no free lunch...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Because these idiots are trying to sell us something. That gives them a reason to lie.
If you believe every press release you read, maybe you should stop reading them.
If water was fuel
No smoking near the ocean
The world could explode
-BMojo
without violating the laws of physics quite easily: you use falling water to turn a water wheel, you could heat the water up and extract heat from it, you could use capillary action, or you could use the evaporation of water as used in a drinking bird(releases 2.4 kj per mole of water evaporated, does not work on humid days).
Weren't you listening? Mr Fusion only powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor - the car still runs on regular gas...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
While this is the permanent disqualification of reuters for reporting any news on science it makes me wonder where else - on a topic I'm not competent at and would not recognize easily - Reuters is reporting nonsense.
So this is not only the disqualification on science but an absolute one.
this would vialate both the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and therfore is not possible.
I hope no one confuses the company name with Genapax, which is a tampon infused with Gentian Violet....
And I replied to that poster:
It is uber crazy, it does violate the laws of physics.
Powered by hydrogen means they are converting Hydrogen with oxygen to water. H2 -> H20. But wait their source of hydrogen *is* water. So they are also doing H20 -> H2. There can be no energy gain in that loop, and energy gain is needed to power a car.
Using water as a power source might be possible, but not as described here.
meh
"What's scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters"
You're just now getting that "Newsclowns" and Minitrue agencies like Rooters , Dissociated Press and others
spin anything for either a dollar or a drop of political clout for whatever the cause du jour is for the minds destroyed by dumb hippie journalism professors tenured in like weeds everywhere.
(ha,say that in one breath,I did.)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Announcements like this prove that more attention is being paid for alternative means of producing energy. When a gallon of gas cost a buck no one cared about alternative energy sources. Now is a good time for such initiatives to get the spotlight. Only if major investments are made will there be a chance of finding alternative energy sources. Clearly very little effort has been invested in this area but it looks like things might change.
1.31 GIGAWATTS, this thing won't work at all.
Besides, it's nowhere near aerodynamic enough to handle worth a damn at 88 mph and above.
I am my own gestalt.
Can a physics boffin help me out here? What sort of a coefficient of drag would this need in order to be able to sustain the 80km/hr that it's makers claim it can achieve with the 300w that their fuel cell claims to achieve? IIRC when you start getting up to highway speeds a not insignificant amount of energy is spent just to overcome drag.
300 watts hardly seems like enough energy to power the headlights & radio on most cars these days.
I call complete and utter bullshit.
car runs forever
on single glass of water -
can't get it started
They've discovered *and* exploited virtual particles before the particles in the LHC have collided.
proud caffeine whore
Is it possible that the water is simply an electrolyte that is used in a battery? You can, after all, make batteries from all sorts of things; and creating a battery by adding water would mean that the laws of physics weren't violated.
The question is how long does it run on a charge?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
For replying this high. But, I have people at work who aren't complete idiots who use a similar method and have claimed mpg benefits. Being the geek I am, I claimed hogwash at first, then thought through it. BTW, the site he used was Water4gas.com which is only pawning a book, not an actual product (genius!)
The basic premise is that by pulling "free" energy from the alternator, you crack H20 into H2 and O2, then reintroduce them together back into the air intake via a crude nozzle. The site/book's author does not understand why this "works" but claims that the gasoline is "more potent" in some way. This is apparently the "new science." Ugh.
So anyway, I did some looking around and first found out that all the sites found with "water4gas scam" are scripted posts about how it could be a scam, but "you should buy the book anyway to figure it out!" Is this fraud I thought? Maybe, but I decided to look further anyway, and found a patent! and found a patent! Holy crapola! However, the cynic in me knows that a patent doesn't mean that something works, so I looked further. Then I found there is some actual research on the subject of H introduction to gasoline environments. However, I can't look at it because I'm not willing to pay money.
So can anyone figure out if this is a bunch of crap as I suspect (initiating my gloating), or are my gullible co-workers correct (initiating my apologies).
They add water to a cell, get energy. However, inside the cell is a metal
hydride. These are very good at holding hydrogen.
Bottom line: yeah, you add water, release some of the hydrogen; fuel cell
turns the hydrogen + oxygen from atmosphere into energy....until the hydrogen
in the metal hydride is exhausted.
So it looks like water generates the power...until it runs out and the metal
hydride must be replaced. You can make this look, to the untutored, like some
battery hardware maintenance for a while, but you get no longterm gain.
ass full of pork fat jiggles like a jello mold mouth is flapping too
well... the technology exists... but its large and expensive?. I think its called electrolysis of water... i believe i've done it in High school -_- but for amounts large enough to power a car... i'm not so sure we can fit a generator that big in a car. (but me my guest, power your car with water, i'm sure u can backwards engineer a child's "mini car on water" building set for your own use.
What sometimes appears to be magic, can just be sufficiently advanced technology.
you hurt my feelings
but I'll hold onto my tears
(to power my car)
These are the metals who are going to replace oil for energy production. ( uranium & plutonium are needed for generating the energy for the alumina/gallium recycling plants ) Now let's see who has got the most of that! My bet is that it's the location where the next US invasion will be ! ;)
And what does it take to drive electrolysis?
Hint: it too uses the "electro" root and is already something you can drive a car on.
The water obviously isn't providing the energy input. It's acting like a less environmentally catastrophic battery.
...there are other problems, but that's usually about where everyone's interest trails off. This really leaves one question. Have they developed a way to store large amounts of pressurised hydrogen next to highly pressurised oxygen in a small lightweight container?
...unless they have some kind of miracle catalyst... (^_^) ...maybe it powers your A/C too!
I'll assume that the car uses solar power (more likely mains power in Tokyo) to split water into hydrogen & oxygen. The car stores pure hydrogen & oxygen to burn together when needed. There is nothing new about the concept. The problems are pretty significant though.
Obviously you need to store a substantial amount of hydrogen & oxygen together in a little high velocity box that you intend to move randomly through populated areas...
If they have then there are other benefits to the concept. If you can provide the oxygen needed for the combustion, then you don't need to draw in oxygen from the atmosphere, so all those nasty nitrous oxides (smog) that conventional combustion engines produce are removed from the equation. The output of the combustion is energy & water. Obviously you need to feed the energy back in again to get the hydrogen to go again...
I'd wait for an answer from the tech team, cause their marketing people are clearly full of it.
thx e
All it would take to make this feasible guys if you look up HHO water conversion is a battery. Having a car run as a water/electric hybrid is completely feasible and has been done in the past. Water alone, no. Electricity + water = WIN
There's atleast one method for extracting hydrogen from water in a compact manner for getting hydrogen as a fuel source.
Source http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html
The problem is that the extraction process requires an aluminium alloy and is not a catylitic reaction. So really your fuel isn't just water, but water and aluminium. You end up with a waste product of aluminium oxide. There is likely a "hidden" energy cost in the processing of aluminium.
But it may eventually be a possible energy storage medium depending on the energy cost of aluminium production and reprocessing.
Catalyst change the reaction path, for example by lowering the activation energy. BUT it won't change the starting energy compound and ending energy compound which are SOLELY related to the energy of the bonds. So when you crack a H2O you deliver the energy of 2 HO bonds, and take the energy of a H2 bond and energy of a 1/2 energy O2 bonds (multiply by a real quantity to get real world numbers). Since H2O is lower in energy than H2 and 1/2 O2 this is an energy loss and you have to provide energy so that it get activated with a significant rate. Energy which due to efficiency will be partially lost. Catalyst won't change that fact, they can only lower the loss a bit. And you still have to provide the energy of splitting the bonds from somewhere that is at least an amount equal to 2*Bond(H-O)-1/2.Bond(O-O)-BOND(H-H).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ok. I hope this will clear up some confusion about this and whether they are claiming to violate thermodynamics... Although the hype articles and the company itself are calling it the "H2O car", the slashdot summary says "The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank," so obviously they are not really claiming that water is the energy source. Something else (the real energy "generator" - which is actually an energy carrier itself, see last paragraph) splits the water to make hydrogen which is then used in a hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity to power an electric motor and drive the vehicle.
The engadget article says the same: "The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction."
So most likely they have something that is reactive with water sitting on or near the electrode of the fuel cell (MEA) which splits the water, and then the fuel cell electrode consumes the resulting hydrogen. This material could be a metal, which spontaneously gets oxidized and reduces the water, for example Zn + H2O = ZnO + H2. In which case zinc is the energy source. Lots of metals have been tried for similar systems for vehicles. Or it could be other materials besides pure meatls that can get oxidized (e.g. an iron oxide (FeO) to a more oxidized iron oxide (Fe3O4)).
The claims that get very close to lies are when the company says you only ever need to put water in the car. Well, if they load it up with enough zinc (or whatever splits the water; probably not actually zinc) to begin with to last for the life of the car, that is true, but very unlikely. They would more likely have to sneak in and replenish the water reducer without you knowing for the claim to appear true. In any case, regardless of if you are replenishing the real energy source or you get the car containing a huge stock of it, it's going to be as expensive as hydrogen. The reducer must be produced by using a similar amount of energy as hydrogen. e.g. if Zn, one starts from an oxidized form of the metal, either zinc sulfide or zinc oxide (like the "spent fuel" of the vehicle) and must reduce it with energy (see zinc smelting). The reducer is an energy carrier and the energy that is stored during its production (or extraction from an oxide) comes from heat or electric energy sources. This is analogous to water splitting to produce an energy carrier - hydrogen (so the water in the vehicle is just one of the last steps in a chain of energy transfers).
They've been talking about this forever, and usually the prototypes are gas/water hybrids.
However, every time I see this tech rise up, I hear the same stupid excuses blurted out by armchair "physicists" -- "You can't do that 'czu thermuhdinamicas!"
Guess what? We do the same exact thing with gasoline. Ignite gasoline - harvest power from explostion - charge battery to ignite more gasoline. This simply adds 1 more step. Seperate water/oxygen (electrolysis) - ignite oxygen and hydrogen - harvest power from explosion - charge battery to conduct electrolysis and ignite more oxygen and hydrogen.
I could teach this concept to a 10-year-old and have him grasp it faster than you apes. The matter isn't whether it obeys these laws, the matter is whether enough power can be generated by the oxygen-hydrogen explosions to energize another cycle and move a car forward.
Listen carefully to the Reuters clip, and you'll find that the reporta at one moment says: .. oh, sukka!"
"Genepax unveiled the eco-friendly vehicle in
Says it all!
Accused of breaking the laws of thermodynamics?
Better get a good lawyer!
easy. its called steam power you idiots. i saw it on the internet so it must be true.
Water can be split.
But the Second Law always
Bites you in the ass.
(insert loud gong sound here.)
That car is for sale here in Ireland: it's a standard Reva i and it's a plug-in electric car. Greenaer.ie.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.genepax.co.jp%2Fmechanism%2Fmechanism.html&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
Blue stuff is water?
MEA is a membrane electrode assembly as seen in traditional fuel cells.
So, What is the GREEN stuff ? ? ?
This is some kind of fuel cell.
I don't believe automotive hydrogen fuel cell technology is all that astonishing. I do believe the basis for this story is malarkey, but not because it is implausible with existing technology to concentrate elemental hydrogen for purposes of powering a vehicle. Insofar as oxygen is required, it can be drawn from the air, no less easily than internal combustion engines inhale that useful chemical. The problems of containing hydrogen, while not trivial, are dealt with much more practically than in the days of the Hindenburg. The shortcut to seeing through this is understanding that the final product of hydrogen fuel cell power generation is water. Any process that starts with water and ends with water is not likely to be a wellspring of useful new energy. Hydrogen powered cars are simply a means to keep the industry rolling when real world concerns (sensible public policy or exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves) demand that energy production take place with a mix of centralized facilities and natural collectors (wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal.) A lightweight reserve of hydrogen fuel can power a car over a fair distance, and vehicular power demands energy be concentrated in some sort of lightweight feature of the vehicle. Perhaps battery technology will change this situation, but in the mean time fuel cell technology is worthy of continued development. However, public confidence in that work may be undermined by trickery like this ridiculous notion that a car might be powered by turning water into hydrogen fuel, which would then be returned to water on consumption. Unless the Japanese effort involves something really sci-fi like a working fusion reactor, it is simply not plausible that it produces more energy from hydrogen fuel than it would expend to extract that fuel from water intake.
With a funny animation! *hypnotized*
http://www.genepax.co.jp/mechanism/system.html
Clean air whispers truth.
Scam car cuts the breeze.
Yet no green bliss follows.
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Never mind water - in Australia conversions are using LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas) injection with Diesel engines to increase mpg (decreased fuel use), increase engine power, and clean the engine.
http://www.dieselgas.com.au/home.htm
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
That can't work that way.
Cars do not run on water.
Can't we just ride bikes?
stuff |
of the inside of the box.
FYI the video that's been going around is a bit misleading. The guy talking in Japanese doesn't say the car ONLY needs water. He says with water, the car can keep running, not denying there are other factors. The translator made news where there really wasn't any, and the company obviously benefited from the mistranslation. They were probably even counting on it.
Any claims from the company carefully state their system, WES, uses water. And they never say WES doesn't need maintenance.
The company does repeatedly emphasize how the car doesn't need gas, and they basically lead anyone to think that: no gas + water = water powered car. Although, like many here have noticed, they never claim water itself is powering the car.
I don't have time to look for them, but apparently, like all inventions made public, there are already patents on file regarding this technology. And they are along the lines of using aluminium.
Hopefully there is innovation here in performance or efficiency, although it might be the case where they put some previous invention in a car for the first time.
I do like the idea of having the main tank only needing water though. Like maybe have aluminium powder cells recycled every few weeks, while filling the tank every few days with water. Assuming the cells take less space, we could have them shipped to us, and stack them in our basement. That would end the need for gas stations and gas to hydrogen station conversions (which I doubt will ever happen).
Most types of fusion use an isotope of hydrogen, which you extract from sea water. These are also proving tricky to implement. Also with cold fusion a lot of people don't even know if it exists yet.
Here I present this.
My full worked description.
No extra water!
To Stan Meyers?
Rick B.
why Jason is driving this car?
I don't understand you guys to make fun of this. It is this kind of childish behaviour that makes science look like religion. Be curious, not judgemental, be positive and optimistic, not dogmatical - you end up looking like fanatical paradigm *ss *ickers, who in history, time, and time again, have been made to eat their own words at some point. Give this a chance - if it *would* be real, it could help the world move on from a crisis.
How in the world *can any* scientist be expected to dare attempting to invent anything new in energy technology with thousands of lemmings standing ready to plunge over them and drown them in insults? It would take somebody brave, and I hope these are. You people are making a culture which impedes progress. People "defending" thermodynamics and other scientific "laws", like many of you do, seem to me to be like the people who defended the spanish inquisition.
Why would they think running cars on water would even be a good idea? Where I live, we aren't even allowed to water our lawns more than once a week from May to September. Bottled water costs more than the equivalent amount of gasoline. A car that runs on water would just mean a huge spike in the cost of water (not to mention the complete shut down of all "free" sources, such as water fountains, hose taps, etc. They would pass laws making it illegal to take water from creeks and rivers.
These unfounded, ridiculous claims regarding this "water car" certainly are getting a lot of attention from you folks..........or is it the verbal battling back and forth?
Per http://www.takeoka-m.co.jp/reva/reve.html and the name of the Indian company is "Reva India", it appears, Reva India is a joint venture with Takeoka of Japan. They would not be calling it Reva India, unless it had some subsidiary relationship with a foreign company.
If you remeber Einsteins E=mc^2, this is not necessarily against the laws of physic. You may call my a conspiracy nutt, but there's been tons of cases like this which have been silenced and in some cases ended in murder of the inventor. The best known case is probably Stanley Myers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8stApCmxYEM&NR=1
I'm seeing claims of 100 mpg cars implemented by plugging the car into wall socket every night. The car would store extra energy in extra batteries compared to "ordinary" hybrids.
Last time I looked the 34 kilowatt hour-equivalent energy to a gallon of gasoline costs nearly six dollars form my electric company. Not to mention much of it was from messier coal.
carbon nanotubes
piece together a puzzle
it's called "cold fusion"
Well, there's a small problem - all fusion reactors emit neutrons and x-rays
That is wrong.
It depends on what is fused. Only "some" fusion reactions emit neutrons. X-Rays are mainly a result of bremsstrahlung from the particles decelerated.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So the neutron flux through your body will be about 7.5 Watts.
So you'll get the fatal dose in about 2 minutes.
That is also slightly wrong. Depending on the "speed"/energy of the neutrons you might not be vulnerable at all. Neurons mainly interact with the hydrogen in water. If they are to fast they can not "interact"
But you have a point regarding the general picture you draw, it is basically right.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
While top cyclists are happy to put out about 400 watts of power for hours on end, the average person would struggle to do half that.
As Jesus was reputedly half-man half-god, you'll get all the power you need out of Jesus if you're a believer, but only 100 watts if you're an atheist.
Maybe they're on to something in the Bible-Belt...
syllable count wrong
haiku nazis will correct
fix and try again
i think people are missing the concept: use precious metals to cut the water into hyrdrogen for use. replenish the metals (expensive like a couple thousand worth) every few years. this would move the fuel consumption process towards a centralized area (like factories). don't be so quick to down the idea, it is 10 times the concept gasoline ever was
Uhmm... Nope.
In D-T reaction more than 70% of fusion energy is produced in the form of fast neutrons. In p-B reactions only about 0.1% of energy is emitted is carried away by neutrons - that's why it's called 'aneutronic fusion'.
X-rays are directly emitted by a heated plasma, with bremsstrahlung as a secondary source.
In any case, neutrons alone should be quite enough...
You are stupid.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2464139837181538044
You are missing the logical conflict, however.
If it is water, then why would they need to keep adding water to
continue powering it? Why not simply recycle the water?
(Apart from the answer that they are too stupid to recycle the water after they've just solved breaking it apart and getting a net 'energy' gain....
(note...there is a slight bit of tongue-in-cheek in my comments on this, as I
it doesn't seem it would be easy to perform the below reaction, but their 'converter/catalyst' box is of unknown composition or origin. It could even be
alien or future technology for all we know.
As for possible output if it isn't water? Helium. (2P+2N+2E)
Add H2 (2P+2E) + H2 (2P+2E) -> 2P+2e + [ (2(P+E))=>2N+ energy) ]
The amount of energy you'd get by combining a Proton+electron -> Neutron is far
greater than the chemical energy you'd need to break apart the Hydrogen from
Water.
Seems obvious....:-)
Sign me up for some of that alien technology goodness.
Slightly more realistic answer:
You are correct, producing helium from hydrogen would give you a very large net energy release. Problem: Last I knew anything that remotely resembles a fusion reactor is about the size of an office block. I don't plan on driving that around anytime soon.
Until then I'll keep riding my bike.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Come on...the japanese have has a history of mastery in miniaturization....
Is it April already?
this is a fuel cell
nothing too spectacular
cowboy neal is fat
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
From TFA
super awesome car
it runs on bull shit I mean
nothing but water
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
This one wins best haiku in my book.
A WHOIS lookup shows that genepax.co.jp is all of five weeks old. A bit recent for a company claiming 25 years of research in this area, wouldn't you think? The 300W output of their cell is maybe 2% of the kind of power you'd need to run even a small car as in that video at 80 km/h. In other words, they showed an electric car running on off fully charged batteries (i.e. stored mains grid power) taking its fuell cell (and the Reuters viewers) for a ride. The real scandal is not so much the deception, but that the journalists fell for it.
I've been trying hard to get the mainstream media to alert the public to the growing number of fuel-saver scams that are appearing on the Net since gas prices started skyrocketing - but they seem totally disinterested.
In fact a local TV channel here ran a piece last week effectively endorsing those lame HHO systems that anyone with half a brain knows is just bad science.
So I've set up a few webpages to try and educate the great unwashed as to the nature of these scams.
The Great "run your car on water" scam
and
More fuel saver scams
Unlike the scammers, I've used some *real* science and pretty simple math to prove that these scams do not, can not and will not work.
The cruel irony (for the scammers) is that the Google-ads which appear on those pages are invariably hawking HHO systems. They help subsidize the cost of the pages that expose their scams.
I love it!
But seriously, I find it really hard to believe that so many otherwise sane people get hooked up with these lame scams.
Water is fuel
The oceans catch on fire
Major problem
---
Latest technology transforms
Stupid people into smart ones
Most simply vanish
---
E=mc^2.
M = 2 gals water. E = very large.
It could work.
---
Water made into fuel!
Other liquids made into quantum computers.
Car becomes self-aware,
with tummy ache.
---
Water burns efficiently
Tech journalists self-combust
World still using gas
Chances are that since your buddy added the water gizzmo be's also being much more careful about the way he drives and that is improving his mpg.
To get any credibility, one of these experiments needs to be done with instrumentation or blind tests (monitor mpg of people who don't know that their car has been altered).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As I said, this isn't a closed system. Less water comes out than goes in (why else would they need to add water so much?). Obvious, the hydrogen and oxygen are being used for something else than being made back into water. Obviously, there is something else going on, and some other byproduct. Other commenters have mentioned an Aluminum reaction that probably requires the Aluminum to be replaced ever so often.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
While misleading, the key is that water must be added to the system. *IF* the reaction took the hydrogen and consumed it in *any* sort of combustion or whatever, the product would be H2O. If the products are the same as the 'fuel', then why would it keep needing more.
As others have pointed out, there is another component here, a different reaction. The reactant is probably a solid, and probably (hopefully) the output is a solid. As such, 'water' is perceived as the analog to the lay man as gasoline (the stuff you have to frequently add, that causes nasty gaseous emissions), and the other reactant is a 'maintenance' thing, that is consumed at a fairly slow pace compare to the volume carried, and 'replaced' when it has been consumed.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Seems to me that about 50 years ago in high school, we did an experiment of separating hydrogen and oxygen from water using a small electric current and two plates of dissimilar metal (I don't recall what the metal plates were). Am I missing something here? Has the capability of separating water into it's gaseous components has significantly changed in the last half century?
Put it another way: Einstein, Von Braun, Bell, Darwin - where are the european equivalent's of them?
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
pee in that guy's gas tank!
It uses a Metal Hydride reaction in the electrode membrane, and it supposed to last longer than most metal hydrides. So, it's a chemcial reaction. Then the question is not if it violates any laws of physics. It doesn't. The question is: how long till I have to replace the metal hydride electrode membrane, and how much will that cost? If it costs $5000 but lasts 10 years, then I'd say it was a good investment. Especially considering how expensive this car is going to be. The savings in gas over 10 years will easily pay for the replacement by many fold. But, if the cost is higher and it lasts a shorter amount of time, then there will be questions. It might be cheaper in the long run to use gas. Also, materials research is really booming. They might eventually produce a metal hydride that's workable for this application as cheaply as salt. After all, negative index of refraction materials have already been developed for infrared and low red spectrums, rendering them invisible to those spectrums. Figuring out a way to make cheap metal hydrides sounds a lot less far fetched than that. Even if it still operates in the laws of thermodynamics (costs more energy to produce hydride than you get from burning hydrogen). Also, if we ever find a planet with no oxygen, which ours supposed was at one point, then it would definitely be possible to find metal hydrides in nature, and would be a great mining resource. Just have to have that interstellar travel thing first ;-)
Mark Anthony Collins
"Kiyoshi Hirasawa, president of Genepax Co Ltd, unveiled part of the reaction mechanism of the company's new fuel cell system called "Water Energy System" in an interview with Nikkei Electronics." http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080616/153301/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Known for their accurate representation of Pro-Palestinian reporting, creating new palestinian towns for Israel to bomb every few years, and now apparently leading the world forward in h2o powered cars...
A previous poster was right, you can't argue with posh pommie accents...
I'm no engineer, but I've seen a similar claim made here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Lwea2JXdQ (sorry I'm not sure how to post it directly as a link, if it doesn't work youtube "aquagen car") Now this seems pretty fantastic but I cant seem to find it ANYWHERE else on the net.
With oil prices near 150 USD, it would really be interesting to se water prices pumped up PUN! to the same realistic price range, so think ahead a few years and it means a whole lot more : "Drink or Drive" ... fool!
water in gas tank
never have to buy fuel
again... for that car