[Ken Fry]

Originally Posted by Olympiadis

You sound as though you're trying hard to convince me and perhaps yourself as well.

No, I rarely try to convince HHO promoters (or those who put forth magic as possibilities for how HHO might work) of anything. It's a loosing battle. They typically have little or no understanding of engineering or science, and operate only on belief. One might just as well be arguing religion.

It is for the benefit of the others, the ones who can be reached through reason that I debunk this stuff.

John Heywood is not one of "the younger crowd of freshly trained physicists". The nobel prize winning physicist who testfied for the FTC against Dennis Lee (the famous HHO promoter) was also not one of these fresh new physicists you seem to hold in disdain. Nor, of course, am I, particularly given that I had been teaching for more than a decade before you took your first physics course. While you were in high school, I was consulting with Ford Motor Company on methods to prepare their engineers for the rapidly increasing use of electronics in all automotive systems -- it was no longer going to be good enough for mechanical engineers to be just mechanical engineers.

The reason I rebutted your contention that HHO serves as an oxidizer, is that such assertions, which are not based on the science involved, only drag down the level of discourse, making this site less usable. Such assertions belong in the Unicorn Corral. If you want to make outlandish assertions there, so be it. But here, it just dilutes useful info with fairy dust.

Your accelerant theory has been advanced hundreds of times in the past. And no, it does not work that way. Sorry, I am not going to believe that my own training as a chemical engineer was for naught, that John Heywood is dim witted, but you are right. Your oxidizer theory is wrong: HHO is not an oxidizer. It is also not an accelerant when used in the microscopic quantities produced by HHO units.

What I see you doing here is what I have seen numerous times by the younger crowd of freshly trained physicists (not meaning you), and that is to target the alternator of the vehicle as the weak point, having such a poor energy conversion rating.

You have also misread the alternator issue. Alternators are 55% efficient on average according to Delco, although I have tested a few that are somewhat more efficient. Engines are no better than 25 percent efficient when operating in actual drive cycles. The "typical" figure often cited is lower. (If you run cars through the EPA drive cycles in a computer model you can verify that even the Prius does not have an average efficiency above 25%.) So if you want 100 watt hours out of a car's alternator, you must put in 100 / (.55 x .25) = 727 watt hour's worth of gasoline. Then you use the alternator output energy to produce hydrogen at 50% efficiency, so you get 50 watt hours worth of hydrogen for 727 watt hours worth of gasoline input to the system.

When people say that automotive alternators convert fuel to electricity at 20% efficiency, (implying the requirement for and impossible 500% efficiency in electrolysis to just break even) they are giving the HHO promoters the benefit of the doubt.

You've misinterpreted the meaning of a closed system. See the Delco paper in which they use 21% efficiency even in truck engines (of substantially higher efficiency than car engines). These energy balance analyses of sequential systems are very common.

If you yourself have done testing on an automotive engine with regard to scale of HHO production vs engine air demand, then I would be curious to see your results, beyond your calculated estimates of course. I have yet to test such a thing and the data may become useful to me in some other area of tuning.

Yes I have done testing of combined duct oxyhydrogen units. Such units, supplied by electricity from the wall, have been used in engine research, as a convenient method for producing hydrogen. Before you were born, I built a battery powered unit, (larger than the typical car unit) that could supply enough hydrogen to allow a lawn mower engine to continue to run at idle. The energy to run the lawnmower engine came from the battery of course, and the hydrogen was a low-efficiency carrier of that energy. Just running an electric motor from the battery would have been about 10 times as efficient. The battery was actually 2) 6V golf car batteries.

But beyond that parlor trick, no, of course I haven't run dyno tests on HHO units. What an incredible waste of time. Do you not already know how much air a given engine takes in? We know what the HHO units put out, from the claims of the promoters, and from the chemistry.

John Heywood can do the dyno tests and get paid for it. And of course the HHO units do not work -- he showed that convincingly. No one has ever advanced a plausible reason for why they should work, and no independent testing has ever shown them to work. If there were some plausible reason why they might work, then you'd see some research.

The glaring fact remains that an automotive engine is not a closed system due to the majority of chemical energy in the gasoline not being converted into usable motion.

You are confused on the meaning of a closed system. The fact that an engine runs at low efficiency does not mean that you cannot consider it a closed system for the purposes of thermodynamic analyses. When we say that and engine is 25% efficient, we are saying that 25% of the energy value of the fuel shows up as mechanical work.

That is exactly where my discussion of burn-rate comes into play. An improvement in fuel efficiency that comes from a slightly better energy conversion rate in the combustion chamber is completely separate and, depending on tuning specifics, can far outpace the quantity of energy lost to an inefficient charging system, no matter what that power may be used for.

You are conflating two issues. And creating fiction to support one. 1. HHO promoters often claim that the hydrogen comes, energetically "for free," that the alternator does not have to do work to supply the electricity for electrolysis. That is obviously incorrect -- we've been over the numbers above. 2. Changes in burn rate due to HHO is a fiction. HHO is not an oxidizer. It is also not an accelerant in the microscopically small quantities supplied -- even if you take the promoters 1 Lpm claims at face value. If you increase the amounts by about 100 fold, then changes in combustion can show up. However, even then the base fuel mixture must be very lean.

I have yet to see an algorithm that is programmed to increase the efficiency of the burn, or result in less fuel used.

You have not looked far. Every car with an integrated engine management system does this. Obviously economy is balanced with emissions, but it has to be, just as it has to be balanced with durability, performance, etc.

Also, in the scope of what I've seen personally, the adaptive spark logic and adaptive fuel logic operate separately and completely independently of each other. This precludes the possibility of the ECM/PCM automatically tuning for best economy.

Integrated engine management systems have been the norm for decades. This is from the Wikipedia article on the Bosch Motronic system:

Motronic is the trade name given to a range of digital engine-management systems developed by Robert Bosch GmbH (commonly known as Bosch). The unique feature of these systems, compared with their predecessors, is combined control of fuel and spark in a single unit. By controlling fuel and spark together, many aspects of the engine's characteristics (such as power, fuel efficiency, driveability and emissions) can be improved.