Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Fry
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
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.
But beyond that parlor trick, no, of course I haven't run dyno tests on HHO units. What an incredible waste of time.
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.
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.
You have not looked far. Every car with an integrated engine management system does this.
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Assuming you have at least average reading comprehension skills, you must have skipped over several of my points made earlier, and you have went on to waste your time trying to re-explain things like alternator efficiency, while continuing on what seems to be a tunnel-visioned crusade of yours to brow-beat anyone who even brings up the term "HHO", even when just citing for example.
You surely must be misusing the term "closed system" when referencing a type of test measuring energy conversion improvement by way of an added oxidizer. Your "parlor trick" of running a small engine completely from HHO was in fact closer to a closed system in that context of how you do you energy accounting.
Clearly the enhancement of a gasoline engine by the addition of an oxidizer is no longer a closed system in the same context. If you were to treat it as a closed system when accounting for all of the energy involved then you would end up with simply a low total % of energy conversion to motion rate vs a slightly different, but very low % of energy conversion rate at the end. This would not even begin to imply any sort of "fiction" or "fairy dust". It is only a reasonable "thermodynamic analysis" as you put it. It would take into account the proportion of the total chemical energy contained in all of the gasoline involved, and all of the chemical energy contained in additive involved vs the energy actually converted into movement.
A clue that signals a change in energy conversion rate would be a measured change in EGT when adding the oxidizer of your choice. This change in EGT has been observed in many engine tests, to include those with only tuning changes and not the addition of an oxidizer. There's nothing fictional about it.
Did you not observe a change in EGT when you were doing your test with HHO, or magic fairy dust, - you know, back before I was born?
If for some strange reason you lacked the proper experience or testing equipment back then to obtain any useful data besides "it doesn't work", then there is the opportunity to observe similar experiments today, even on youtube. What I have observed on the youtube videos is that when gasoline is completely substituted with HHO for a small engine test, with no other changes, the engine runs, but then develops a high rate of backfires where the gasoline did not backfire. For myself and other experienced engine tuners, this is proof enough that the burn rate and thermal conversion rate has changed significantly. This is to be expected when either changing the fuel composition, or enhancing it by way of another fuel type or an oxidizer.
I'm not trying to qualify a backyard youtube video as a true controlled scientific analysis. No, but an observation is an observation and does have some worth.
When the burn rate of a fuel is changed, it then requires a change in the tune and/or mechanical changes in the engine design in order to optimize whatever aspect you want to improve, to include BSFC. This is no more or less than common knowledge, at least in the engine tuning community.
Now for a bit of wild speculation on my part about your extreme perspective in this area. Perhaps when you did your first HHO type experiment as a youngster you were actually still a student and intended to use this experiment as something grade-able by your professor. If so, then how could you go wrong by showing that there is a very high percentage of energy lost at every step of multiple conversion methods? A professor might be impressed with such a validation of the law of conservation of energy that is so important to impress on other students, and perhaps you did a very commendable job in your accounting process at each step.
Of course purely speculation on my part.
The point would be that such a case would not be pure science in that there were more concerns involved than just observation and collecting data. I have been in that same situation myself, and there is very much an experimenter can do during each step to alter the outcome so that the data better fits into the proper range predicted by the calculations. The brighter students learn this quickly, but at the same time they should have been taught the scientific method in its purest form. Most scientists will freely admit that when it comes to controlling variables and collecting data, that they can only work within their limits at the time and do their best. Most real scientists wish they had even more control and better equipment in their quest for truth. The better scientists rarely speak in absolute terms for several reasons. One is due to the limitations of their data collection and control, and another is that they realize that there are still many unknowns and that true science is a continually self-correcting process.
Science is only self-correcting when you can put arrogance and self-assuredness to the side and remain open to experiment and observation, even for sake of merely collecting data, and no matter the source. I know that a big part of the job is verification, repeatability, and proper qualification of methods and sources. I get that, but here's where it gets personal. The attitude that I get from your posts is that of being knowledgeable, but not really scientific. Your active discouragement of pure science (for whatever reason) by brow-beating/bullying, dismissing/discrediting, the use of logical fallacies, and your use of phrases in the same spirit of "what an incredible waste of time" is what I would call a travesty to the pursuit of scientific discovery, or rediscovery.
After reading over your posts and noticing you throwing around terms like: "nobel prize", "best known authority", high dollars amount spent, fact validation due to age or authority, and not the least of which an overwhelming tone of elitism.
At this point it would seem to me that you are a legend in your own mind, and there's nothing wrong with that. It is discouraging to think of you as a teacher and propagating a similar attitude by example.
I am all too familiar with this sort of elitist attitude in academia.
The response or rebuttal is quite predictable in the spirit of:
"facts are facts", and "correcting ignorance with fact is not bullying", etc...
Yes indeed.
In this particular case I have to say that you are far too sure of yourself in some areas. You may be a very competent in some area, but it is absolutely not engine tuning or engine management systems.
Based on what you have posted above, you are talking completely out of your ass once you stepped into the area of electronic engine management.
Legend, authority, or not, I would say without a doubt that I would never ask you to tune an engine of mine, nor could I in good faith recommend you as a tuner, or even to speak competently on the specifics of electronic engine management. Whatever your age, you clearly lack the proper experience in this area, and are apparently loath to admit that.
I can only hope that this characteristic of you has not spilled over into other areas, such as the whole HHO discussion that you have seemingly taken on as a vendetta of sorts. I base that concern on the fact that the majority of your posts in this thread are tied to the "debunking" of the mysterious "HHO promoter" that I have yet to see surface in this thread.
As it stands the only other person in this thread who has presented any credible evidence that they have the combination of a good workable understanding of engine tuning, electronic engine management, and the experience as well has been Robert (E4ODnut) with the Megasquirt systems.
It seems to me that academia could offer more in terms of useful information, support, and encouragement to those who are actually out there doing things. However, it is human nature for elitism in many forms, to be both polarizing and self-perpetuating.
You agree that I'm wrong, and I agree that you're wrong. My guess is that a stalemate will not be good enough for you, and that you will try to bring in more outside unrelated sources for backup, throw in some more logical fallacies, and exert your own style of verbal dominance to the discussion at hand.
This is going to boil down to the fact that I do not trust either your testing methods, or your assessments/conclusions, and you do not trust mine.
Given that, I can think of no better resolution than to encourage more individual experimentation. Why do you seem to be against this?