Hydrogen As Fuel

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SleepyKeys
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Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by SleepyKeys »

A friend of mine called me up asking if I knew anything about using water as motor fuel. I paused for a few seconds and then replied you mean though electrolysis? He said yes. Then I said I'm not so sure you would have a net energy gain.

1. Electrolysis takes energy
2. An IC(internal combustion),SI(spark ignition) engine is only so efficient.(20% or so I would guess)

He went on to say he had heard of someone using hydrogen as a booster to get more out of a given quantity of gasoline.

What do you guys think???
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shameem
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by shameem »

Yeah there are a lot of HHO kits on ebay - i dont know if the theory (or the kit) is any good
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jbelanger
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by jbelanger »

Snake oil. This is the same idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion.

The only thing it's good for is making money for the guy selling it.
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SleepyKeys
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by SleepyKeys »

That's what I thought(no such thing as free energy).
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Fred
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by Fred »

So you don't buy the catalyst theory Jean? I'm pretty much un-sold on it too. I had a hilarious conversation with my father about this the other night. He claims to know of a few vehicles locally using that system on diesel engines (which by definition can run lean without modification) and getting much better economy (40% was quoted) I still gave him endless stick about it. If the conversation is not too embarrassing on both of our parts, I may clean it up and post it for a laugh :-)

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jbelanger
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by jbelanger »

Anecdotal evidence is just anecdotal not evidence. Getting better economy after installing a device like this is akin to a placebo. You're just unconsciously doing everything to get a better mileage (not to mention any measurement errors).

If it were that easy to get a significant economy boost, every car maker would be using it (unless you believe in conspiracies...). This is just one more trick to make money from people who don't understand physics and chemistry. Some people have such a thirst to believe they'll grab any opportunity they can and reject any actual proof that they're wrong while offering their "proof". Unfortunately, the opportunity is for the unscrupulous people (or well intentioned believer?...) selling those devices.

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Fred
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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by Fred »

Fair enough, though, without drastically changing your driving style it's hard to get 40% better economy for most people.

For me, I could double my economy easily. Any given car I get in I use twice as much fuel as most people and break it twice as soon :-) I could definitely skew the results.

Typically people use 10 litres per 100km, I use 20 litres per 100km consistently. The ute managed to drink 30 litres in about 50km - 100km, but I was hammering it pretty hard :-)

If we did the experiment with my girl driving a car over a few weeks with and without it (with a break in period to ensure consistency) the test would be fairly fair. We logged her gas usage for a year or so, and they only times it deviated more than 5% or so were when I got hold of it :-)

Given that I'm a non believer, would you trust my results if I conducted an experiment in this at some stage (to prove my old man wrong) and found it to be true?

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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by jbelanger »

But that's the thing: people do change drastically the way they drive and the way they measure things, at least those who report huge gains. As you say, you can get a huge difference from different driving styles. Also, if you use a single tank of fuel as a data point then the way you measure how much fuel was used can make a big difference. Also, if you tune up the car as you make the installation then that's another big contributor. And people do those things without even thinking about it (consciously or not).

The problem with the test you propose is that it is still not a controlled environment. There is still the human element that could skew the results significantly. However, if you can do some test where the conditions are similar then it could be interesting. If you get no improvement then I'll say your test was valid and proves my point and if you do get some improvement I'll say that some error in your test skewed the results :) For the fun of it, if you do the test, do 3 sets one of them being that you install the device but don't make it operational and you don't tell your girlfriend which test is which.

What would be more interesting (from a non-psychological point of view) would be to inject H2 from a storage bottle in a controlled way. This way you would be able to control the parameters more precisely to see the impact of H2 on combustion efficiency. Generating H2 on-board is a very inefficient method if very practical.

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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by Fred »

The thing is though, you have to drive in an extremely annoying dangerous way to noticeably affect mileage. Either you have to be reckless like me in the first place (easy to drive normally to make better economy) or you have to drive UBER slow and smooth afterwards and if you actively *try* to do that its actually not that easy to achieve. If you made 1000 people try to drive economically but legally and safely across their normal path, most of them would come back with very few savings if there was plenty of other traffic involved.
jbelanger wrote:For the fun of it, if you do the test, do 3 sets one of them being that you install the device but don't make it operational and you don't tell your girlfriend which test is which.
An excellent point.

The thing that bothered me was that he wanted to install this BS on our boat... In my mind, even though the risk of an explosion is probably fairly low, its still a terrible idea to add any risk when you are far away from safety. Taking a boat trip in NZ to me doesn't mean a half hour trip within site of land and rescue crews... I've been as much as 50+ miles off shore looking for bill fish, and something going majorly wrong out there could easily spell the end.

Our boat holds 1000 litres of diesel. That's up over $1000nz these days and you can burn that much in 2 - 7 days depending on weather and usage etc. It can make for an expensive holiday these days. It wasn't long ago we were getting it for 32c nz per litre in bulk. Hence his motivation...

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Re: Hydrogen As Fuel

Post by KW1252 »

It's easy to do the maths for on-board HHO generator systems;

Regular fuel is used to create the energy that turns water into HHO; alternator won't do anything for free. A good IC engine might achieve 25% efficiency (30 for diesel). Losses in the electric line (from crank pulley to electrolysis device) makes to about 95% efficiency. Electrolysis efficiency is around 90%.

Now you have HHO worth the energy of 1 * 0.25 * 0.95 * 0.9 = 0.21375 of the fuel used.

Then you put HHO into engine. 25% IC engine efficiency comes to bite you in the arse again. 0.21375 * 0.25 = 0.05

And there you have it. 5% net efficiency; still, you'd need to achieve over 100% to actually save any fuel.
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