Running cars on water?

ailbek

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There are loads of websites that claim they can show you how to run your car on water wtihout major conversion. If you part with anything from 49 to 99 dollars they will send you a book on how to do it. Surely if this were true would it not be worth a lot more than 49 dollars.
Has anyone tried it or know how the principal of it works. Don't want to part with hard earned cash without being sure it would work.
ailbek
 
I dont see how this is possable since you cant compress water and thats what your doing in a cylender in a engine of car.
 
From what I can work out it uses electrolisis of a jar of water using electric power from the car battery. The hydrogen and oxygen produced is then fed through the air intake system of the cars engine. Thus reducing the petrol consumption of the car
 
That works at over 9000 miles a year. Depending on your driving needs could significantly reduce your fuel bill
 
Running cars on water - I tried that once but it sank :(

;)
 
Its a scam otherwise everyone would be doing it and the book author would be a millionaire.


There's lots of talks of using electrolysis with water to do it but it's a process far faaaaaaaarrrrrr away from being suitible.
 
Here's a link to the japanese water car think it cost them millions to develop not $49. :)

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jivb7lupDNU[/ame]
 
Correct me if I am wrong but hasnt this been done for years with steam?...lol (I am Joking)
 
the hydrogen generators which split water into oxygen and hydrogen then feed into intake

all they do is give u a more cleaner burn

best thing to do is to try it on a old car

they do work but only give u around 5 - 10mpg increase

plus add a water bubler for safety
 
Veryimpressed wih that hydrogen generator on ebay. Even if you were getting just 10mpg extra I would imaging with the current price of oil that a viable return could be made on such an investment.
Looking through the web sites and trying to get little scraps of info through all the sales garbage , what i can figure out is the secret is in the electrode. The rest of the parts seem basic enough and could even be produced just by looking at the picturers on the website. Anyone know of a way to make a good electrode?
 
The wikipedia article on electolysis suggests using platinum as its non-reactive and conducts electricity.

But the amount of platinum needed to get an electrode even half the size of the Molybdenum/Nickel Alloy electrodes in the ebay item will cost a small fortune...
 
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Let's do some sums:

Say the average car gets 50mpg (overestimating by a lot).
That's 11 miles per litre, or up near me that's about £1.17 / 11 miles (11 pence'ish per mile)

From wikipedia a litre of petrol contains 34.5 mega joules of energy.

That means that you need around 3 mega joules of energy per mile in a pretty efficient car. (note this will assume the combustion efficiencies of petrol and hydrogen will be the same, which is probably not reasonable (H2 will be more efficient than petrol)).

Price of electricity is apparently 13p / kWh (from here, which means for 13p you get 3.6MJ. (the price was the most up to date I could find, but seems a little high to me, maybe someone else can find a better value)

Since you need 3 MJ per mile, it costs you 13*(3/3.6)=10.8 pence, or 11 pence.

I.e. You won't save any money, it will cost about the same. And the above is assuming that the electricity->fuel conversion is 100% efficient, which it won't be even close to. There's a reason the two numbers come out the same. The price of oil and other power is linked (whether genuinely or artificially), for a home user, there's no getting away from it.

As for the video that was on ebay, it says you get up to 2 litres per minute of gas being produced, which is about 0.0015 moles of gas per second (H2 + 1/2 O2). The heat of formation of water is -285kJ/mol, so they needed to be putting in 428W of electricity to generate that amount of gas.

Combining the stuff above, we see that you need around 10 litres of gas to generate the required 3MJ / mile. That would take five minutes. There's no storage medium that I can see, so the gas must be generated 'in situ'. That means you're running off the battery. From a quick google, a car battery will produce 10kW for a short period. Let's be very generous and say that's 5 minutes. That gives you 3MJ of energy contained in the battery, or enough for 1 mile. After that, you're burning up petrol to convert into electricity to convert into hydrogen to power the car.


As you may have guessed, I think this is a load of BOL***KS. It's nothing more than a well known electrolysis cell (which by the way will need fairly strong acid to work properly, and is even shown in the video!). Not to mention the danger of having litres of gaseous hydrogen in a car. It'd be lethal. Please don't buy one of these. Common sense should tell you it won't work. If it did, it sure as hell wouldn't be up on ebay for £150.
 
the gas is injected into engine as a addative to burn petrol more efficiently

thats all
u dont run the car just on the gas

as the gas is made it goes straight into engine mixes with petrol and burns


think of it like this

nitrouse oxide is injected into a engine to put more oxygen in the burn cycle = more power .etc

what this does is inject the hydrogen and oxygen mix into air intake with normal air to make the petrol burn better, u could use 2 of these cells for power boosts similar to nos but far better using 1 to increase burn efficiency

and most car ecu will recognise that the fuel is bieng burnt more efficiently so will adjust the mix for the extra oxygen and hydrogen

u can pick a simple cell up for £30 just to test it
 
I realize that, but you're missing the point of my argument (which I didn't really make very well). You can NEVER get more energy out than you put in. This means that however much 'extra' energy you put in to generate the hydrogen, you'll always get less back from the improved efficiency. Since I showed the cost per unit energy was at best equal for petrol and hydrogen (and that's assuming 100% efficient electrolysis), there's no point in doing it. It's a scam. Really it is. The chemistry has been known for over a hundred years. It is not a viable way of producing power.
 
I had a (sober ;) ) think about what you saying fez, and while it's still a scam, I can see why so many people might believe it. The 'increased efficiency' angle does sound promising, but it's still major problems. I'm now not sure that the thermodynamics laws are being broken (I have a hunch they still are though). Have a look here this site for a very complete debunking of systems like these.
 
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