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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!
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
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.
Homer Simpson says
In this house we all obey
Thermodynamics
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Yeah and my boat runs on water.
Car running on water
driving in a desert.
Which way do you go?
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!
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"?
... 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.)
Lake zombie Jason,
scary machete killer,
is in the front seat.
> 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.
Conservation of Energy says that what they are claiming is impossible. Water simply cannot be the fuel source for a hydrogen fueled energy source. When you burn (i.e. oxidize) hydrogen you get water as the result. Since no machine yet devised by man is 100% efficient the machine can't even sit and spin, to say nothing of produce enough excess energy to move a vehicle.
What they are claiming is more fantastic than a perpetual motion machine and the Patent Office stopped bothering to examine perpetual motion applications decades ago. Used to be every generation of half educated 'scientists' would learn just enough about magnets to get convinced there just 'had' to be an arrangement of them that would create perpetual motion, totally ignoring conservation of energy. Now the fetish seems to be moving to the water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> water cycle.
Now the claims of some in this thread that they are actually getting the energy from an Aluminum + water -> hydrogen + ? reaction is possible, but that isn't what they are claiming. And if they did it would be an Aluminum powered vehicle and we would be asking how many miles per pound it gets.
Democrat delenda est
Since one Jesus walked on water you probably need two or three Jesuses to run on it.
H2O powers cars
Pigs fly out of my buttocks
Your check is in mail.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Everyone can see that. Can you not see that the person you're replying to insisted that this isn't a closed system?
It's a poorly explained system. It's probably something like this. In any case, a system like this is perfectly workable and does not violate any physical laws. The process to create the hydrogen uses less electricity than the process of burning it. That's not magic, that's chemistry. Eventually, you pay for it when you recycle the aluminum in the linked case. Not sure how it works in the Genepax system, but doubtless it's something similar.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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!
That link you've sent might have the answer to this problem. They're using an alloy of aluminum and galium that breaks the water molecule, generating aluminum oxide. But then the energy comes from this reaction of Al -> Al2O3 and therefore there's no magic here. In this case you will have 'extra' energy, that will be consumed when reverting the oxidation of the aluminum.
Hello? Did you even watch the video? It's pretty impossible to argue with what the video shows.
The video clearly shows a little, blue car with the words "Water Energy System" in small, green letters. What's more, the car has the words "H2O POWER", in big, white capital letters, written on it. "H20 POWER" is written on the front, the back, AND even the sides, in ALL CAPS so it's impossible to miss that this car uses H20 POWER. If it's NOT powered by water, then how come it says "H2O POWER" all over the car, Mr. Smarty Pants?
If that wasn't enough to silence the skeptics that the car uses H2O POWER, the video features a guy in a suit talking about the car. The fact that the guy talking is wearing a SUIT clearly shows that these guys are professionals, because professional people wear suits. Now, I can't tell what he's saying, because it's in Japanese. But that's not important. The fact that he is saying it in JAPANESE is the important thing. Because that PROVES that he is Japanese! And everyone knows that Japanese people are very, very smart. To top it all off, the video is narrated by a woman with a sophisticated-sounding British accent. The same kind of sophisticated British accent you will hear on the BBC, one of the world's most reliable news organizations. You can't argue with information that is presented with a sophisticated sounding foreign accent.
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.
If water was fuel
No smoking near the ocean
The world could explode
-BMojo