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.

Comments

Running cars on water?

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:Running cars on water?

[c_forq]

You must not live in a northern climate. In my area if you have water in your tank in the Winter you are screwed (unless you park in a heated garage).

Re:Running cars on water?

[Gordonjcp]

It's not actually in the tank - you have a separate tank and pump for the water injection.

If you *do* get water in your fuel tank, you've got problems. The answer is to drain as much water as you can, get the engine running on clean fuel, and then dump a few litres of meths in the tank. Run the tank dry, and then fill it with clean petrol again. You might need to do this a couple of times.

Re:Running cars on water?

[jamie]

Water injection is used in large engines and high-performance engines. Installing a water injector in a 70 hp Volvo might be a fun project but it's a little silly, as it's not going to give a dramatic improvement in either gas mileage or power.

If your car ran quieter after installing a water injection system, it's because you weren't using high enough octane fuel to begin with, and you were getting engine knock.

(This also has nothing to do with the "car runs on water" claim...)

Re:Running cars on water?

[evilviper]

This is 100% BS. Please cite a single reputable study or article that demonstrates you can increase mileage by adding water to gasoline.

No, actually it's NOT (entirely) BS. Water injection is a well-known technique which does improve fuel efficiency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_(engines)

Don't you think that if it did work, more people would do it, and it would be built into modern cars?

Now THIS is BS. There are innumerable reasons a technology, which can improve fuel efficiency in modern vehicles, might not be used. Things like weight, maintenance, reliability, etc.

The fact that superchargers aren't used in mass-produced automobiles is evidence enough of that. Higher compression ratios and water injection would be a welcome improvement.

Re:Running cars on water?

[shiftless]

So if it works so great, why arent you still doing it. I have to remain skeptical of fantastic claims like this as well. If this is so, and you can boost up mileage just by adding water to gas, why isnt everyone doing it?

It's not "adding water to gas." It's called water injection, and it was first used on fighter planes in WWII to improve performance and operating ceiling. Racers have been using it for decades to improve engine performance and economy. It is especially popular with those who used forced induction (i.e. turbo or supercharger) as the water significantly inhibits detonation ("pinging.")

As a matter of fact, water injection was offered by Oldsmobile as an option on their turbocharged Jetfire cars in the 60s. It was discontinued because people didn't like the additional chore of having to fill up the water reservoir.

Re:Running cars on water?

[caseih]

Water injection isn't a scam at all. It's not a panacea either. You can probably get better mileage by driving less aggressively. But it definitely *does* increase efficiency, in some cars (older ones that are already very inefficient by modern standards) quite a bit.

Water injection isn't about putting water in the gas. It's about injecting water into the combustion chamber which regulates and slows the burning. Also the expanding steam helps extract just a bit more mechanical energy out of the heat from the combustion. I'd say the reason it's not mainstream is because we've already improved efficiencies a lot using other, easier methods. Modern engines are already doing other things to regulate combustion (fuel injection and fuel stratification, multiple ignitions per cycle, etc) that the benefit just doesn't make it worth their while. Consider that modern IC engines with the improvements I've mentioned are much more efficient and powerful than ever before. However our cars are heavier now, offsetting a lot of those gains. If we'd stick our modern engines and transmissions in the cars (hopefully not as ugly!) of the 70s, 50 MPG would be routine on highways. Anyway now that the low-hanging fruit has largely been picked, what we have left are more complicated things like water injection to try out. One problem water injection always had, besides the complication of pumping and injecting, was rust.

But don't discount it completely! You're right to suspect any dramatic claims. I'm thinking 10-20% improvement is all any one technology could possibly bring. But don't forget that at less than 18% mechanical efficiency from an IC engine, there's *lots* of room for improvement. Lots of efficiency improvement is somehow still possible. Obviously claiming to surpass 100% efficiency is BS!

One exciting thing being tried right now on big diesel engines is hydrogen injection. It's looking like it improves efficiency quite a bit (as much as 10%) while reducing emissions dramatically, which more than covers the energy needed to split water to get it on the fly. A 5-10% improvement in fuel economy on a truck is huge. Can equal savings of thousands of gallons of fuel a year. Of course the proponents of this technology note that efficiency improvements are much less on modern engines that already control combustion much better than they used to. But there still are some benifits (at least a few percent!) as well as major decreases in particulate and NOx emissions.

Re:Screw water

[DaedalusHKX]

Actually when I first got into extreme overclocking for gaming back in the Athlon Slot A and Celeron A days, I remember that we were told that peltiers were the way to go and were only going to move as much heat as they consumed power. Someone even derided an article I wrote mentioning that small Airconditioner was the way to go for extreme cooling. When companies such as Asetek picked it up and made their VapoChill case, the "all knowing" geeks screamed that it was against all the laws of conservation of energy if a 10-50 watt AC unit could move 200 watts of heat... it was 'unpossible' they screamed.

Strangely, having built and designed air conditioning units for some time, and having done a LOT of installations, I have a few ideas on how the laws of physics can be exploited to use LESS energy to accomplish a job that normally requires MORE energy. Air Conditioning is only one of the visible uses of compression and decompression as well as radiation of heat in order to transfer heat for a much smaller energy cost than the standard peltier technology once used for "extreme cooling" in computers.

Refrigeration technology is OLD and works admirably well. Until I see a proof and more than just a "not possible" debunking, I will remain skeptical of the claim and of its eager debunkers. Just my 10 cents.

Sounds like...

[Quebec]

like a weird hoax to make gas price go down a little, it may work this way.

Parent is NOT Troll, it works!

[mangu]

I used to use about a gallon of water per tank of petrol to get 40mpg out of my '82 Volvo 340

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...

Not saying it's credible at first glance..

[Junta]

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...

Re:Not saying it's credible at first glance..

[irtza]

well, it is quite possible that the press release is a bit over dramatic and it is not an "only on water" style design what if it is powered at home through an electric powered catalyst that works as so: 2H2O + energy --catalysed reaction--> 2H2 + O2 now the H2 is stored and in the car you go 2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O + energy if they can find a good catalyst that brings the cost of the first reaction down, then this isn't such a poor deal after all. it in essence provides a way to store electrical energy using hydrogen, but to the laymen, it uses "water" as its fuel after being charged up.

Re:Not saying it's credible at first glance..

[jonbryce]

So in other words you have a aluminium powered car.

Aluminium smelters use huge amounts of electricity to produce the aluminium, so you just have a replaceable battery here.

Re:Not saying it's credible at first glance..

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS, go back to elementary school.

It's a closed system once the water is in there. Let's imagine all the water in the damned universe is in there. Now it's a closed system because you can't add any more god-damned water.

You cannot go from 2H_2O -> 2H_2 + O_2 -> 2H_2O again and give off energy. It doesn't matter how much fucking water you've got. You cannot make this reaction give off energy.

Now, you can add in other reactants. Some other people claimed that there was aluminum in here. Then this is not a water-powered car. It's an aluminum powered car because that's where the energy comes from. Water is probably the exhaust. You don't say today's cars are CO_2 powered cars, do you?

Also, what else are you going to do with the hydrogen if not recombine it with oxygen to make water, eh, dumbass? If you provide anything else, it's an input and therefore, it's still not water powered.

Either way, you cannot, ever, make a water-powered car. It is impossible. If you can't see this, you're too stupid to post here. There are likely other processes that involve water that can be used to power a car. However, here's a hint: If you ever hear of a system that generates outputs that are the same as its inputs, then the system can never produce energy. Try keeping that in mind for next time. Maybe you won't look like such an idiot to anyone who's done a grade school chemistry course.

Everything obeys the laws of physics

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:Screw water

[Dun Malg]

Doesn't it depend on how much energy is stored in the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms? Is it more than the energy required to split the molecule? If I remember correctly, normally the answer is no, but adding the right catalyst can change that. No, the answer is always no. It might help you to think of it as analogous to kinetic energy. The amount of energy you can harvest from a weight falling one meter will never be more than the amount of energy required to lift an equal weight up one meter. Like a see-saw, it'll balance and remain static until either the end height of weight 2 is reduced by moving the fulcrum, or weight 1 is made heavier or weight 2 is made lighter. This is the basic reason why perpetual motion machines don't work. Chemistry is no different. You can't get more out than you put in. A catalyst can only "grease the wheels" of the reaction, reducing the amount of excess energy needed to start the reaction.

the process works with splitting the atom...splitting an atom leaves a whole lot of excess energy. Fission reactions have nothing to do with chemistry. Fission power takes advantage of nuclear physics. Chemistry is like reconfiguring lego blocks into different arrays, while fission is like smashing the blocks with a hammer.

Re:Open your minds, please.

[Adeptus_Luminati]

(I borrowed the below from another poster)... 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.

Re:Open your minds, please.

[Cyberax]

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!

Re:Screw water

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also important to note where the energy comes from in the different kinds of nuclear power generation.

Fusing light nuclei (those below iron) produces energy because the product nucleus has lower potential energy than the original components. It is very much analogous to the way power generation from hydrogen and oxygen works. Ultimately this energy came from the Big Bang (or whatever your favorite creation story is) which produced a rapidly expanding fireball of matter, so that there would be physical separated hydrogen atoms for us to find laying around.

Fission, on the other hand, requires heavy nuclei (above iron). In this case the fission fragments have a lower total energy than the original nucleus. The obvious question here is: Where did the energy to make the heavy nucleus come from? The best answer we have so far is supernova. In effect, the trans-iron elements we find in the Earth have soaked up some of the energy from exploding stars in the distant past, and by cracking these nuclei apart (like U-235), we can recapture some of that energy.

Missing "Gene" in the name

[mlwmohawk]

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.

Re:Screw water

[mikael]

For atoms below Iron, when you fuse two atoms together, the mass of the final isotope is slightly less than the individual masses of those two atomic nucleii. The change of mass gives out energy.

For atoms above Iron, fusion actually requires energy, so you have to use fission to get energy (nuclear reactors).

Maybe this car uses dynamos as brakes to convert the rotational energy of the car wheels into electricity and convert water into hydrogen. Then, when the car needs energy, the hydrogen can be converted back into water + heat.

Re:Screw water

[RickRussellTX]

The article makes it pretty clear (emphasis mine):

... According to Genepax, the main feature of the new system is that it uses the company's membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Their fuel cell has a chemical in it which is consumed when it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Eventually, that chemical will be consumed and need to be replaced. That's where the energy comes from. The guy in the suit is just lying about the external inputs to a credulous reporter.

Pardon Me..

[gerf]

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).

Re:Pardon Me..

[networkBoy]

Using the alternator is a bad idea.
An experiment that will show this:
collect an alternator to a hand crank and a variable load.
set the load to minimum, turn the crank, note how easy/hard it is.
start turning the load up, continuing to turn the crank. Note that it gets progressively harder to turn the crank at the same speed.
By sapping "wasted" power at idle you're making the engine work all that much harder to maintain RPMs. More work == more gas consumed.
Water has a substantially lower potential energy than 2xH2 and O2 separately.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen06/gen06234.htm

Re:Pardon Me..

[aurispector]

Magic water car.
Technobabble explains but
winter is coming.

Re:Pardon Me..

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

i can see how introducing the O2 produced would make the fuel burn faster, creating stronger explosions and forcing the ECU to reduce the ammount of fuel on the mixture, saving some fuel.

is the same as going from a 1000m elevation to sea level, the engine will work more eficiently at sea level thanks to greater density and increased level of oxigen in the air.

the drawback of this is that to electrolize the water you're not using "free energy" from the alternator, there's no such thing as "free energy". if you add an electrolizes equipment to the car's electrical system, you're pulling extra amperes from the alternator, to supply this, the engine will have to work harder since the aditional charge makes the alternator's axle heavier.

maybe the increased eficiency of the O2 injection will pull enough extra joules from the gasoline to ofset this, but it's not "free energy" by a long stretch. you're just wasting less of the energy contained in the fuel.

Re:Screw water

[SerpentMage]

WAIT ONE MOMENT...

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-11/turning-water-fuel

http://www.topix.com/forum/tech/TTIH6KF6MDPN1SS51

A cancer researcher using radio waves to target cancer cells stumbled upon a novel method to split water atoms into their hydrogen and oxygen component gasses using radio waves.

A research assistant noted test a tube with saline solution bubbling gas while the tube was in the path of a radio wave emitter operating at 14 megahertz. The researcher exposed the gas to an open flame and the gas stream lit. The photo in the article shows a yellow white flame coming from the mouth of the tube much like that of a propane torch. What is different about this method from run-of-the mill eletrolysis of water is the volume of gas being produced. It appears to be measurable in several liters/second rather than several liters/hour obtainable from laboratory eletrolysis equipment. Since it is not safe to store hydrogen and oxygen together because of the potential for violent explosion this method would be ideal for producing hydrogen fuel for immediate use or for storage of hydrogen after the two gasses are separated.

The article stated that the reaction was observed by others, but it did not say that the method has been duplicated. The article also did not say what the energy consumption was for the radio wave emitter. The observer surmised that the reaction may be asisted by the presence of NaCl in the solution.