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?

[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.

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..

[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: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.

[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

[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).