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!
Garden hose pressure
Spins turbine blades to release
BS upon world
we obay the laws of Thermodynamics
like a weird hoax to make gas price go down a little, it may work this way.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2239/1801128557_043a923ea2.jpg
Rainy season comes
bringing with it a fresh crop
of nutball scammers
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.
Er, except that the amount of electricity you can generate with those two hydrogen atoms and the oxygen (and even add in some "free" oxygen) will not be enough to separate the next set of them, so you will have to keep adding energy to the system. Sorry, I got a 'D' in physics, but you get an 'F'.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Car running on water
driving in a desert.
Which way do you go?
The amount of energy required to separate the molecular bond is equal (or greater after losses) to the amount of energy you get back when you run them back through a fuel cell, you don't gain anything. The question is where are they getting the energy to separate things from.
It costs more to produce hydrogen through the electrical method than by reforming natural gas to make hydrogen, so almost all hydrogen the world currently uses is made by reforming natural gas.
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!
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.
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.
No. The oxide layer on Al already exists before submersion, preventing further oxidation. Thanks for playing, though.
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.
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.
... because there are none in TFA:
WES system (Google-translated)
Genepax homepage (English)
.."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.)
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?"
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.
Lake zombie Jason,
scary machete killer,
is in the front seat.
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
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
This car they describe is like a car that... um.. What do we use for analogies when we can't use cars?
The energy doesn't have to be 'magicked' out of thin air, you just need some way of obtaining the energy that already exists in something. In this case, the 'news' bit seems to be that they have developed a better fuel-cell electrode. The basic power generation mechanism of the new system is similar to that of a normal fuel cell, which uses hydrogen as a fuel. 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.
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.
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!
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.
Also, hooray for Professor Pirate! That was worth it just for the eye patch.
The enemies of Democracy are
This season a car
It breaks the laws of physics
Investor fraud aye
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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."
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.
-- 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.
If water was fuel
No smoking near the ocean
The world could explode
-BMojo
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).
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).
syllable count wrong
haiku nazis will correct
fix and try again