Quote:
Originally Posted by RedDevil
Mmm. The inefficiency of heat engines is mostly due to thermodynamical limitations, not the combustion process itself. HHO cannot change that.
The challenge is to make the subject understandable for the audience you are communicating with. Unless you just want to make them believe you are right, not truly understand it.
I for one am interested but sceptical; I will not accept HHO does any good until I understand why - or see proof.
I have taken the subject to a specialist in the field, by the way; namely my physics PhD brother in law, who has been working on stirling engines and is now involved in a generator project.
Like many he thinks that small amounts of HHO cannot have a significant effect on the efficiency of an engine.
He is willing to discuss almost any aspect of combustion engines - but not HHO. He said it is just a waste of time.
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He was as adamant as others at the first. He absolutely felt it broke the laws of conservation and so forth. Until I mentioned those same laws of thermodynamics apply to the chemical world and what happens in the combustion chamber. Even there, HHO cannot work as a "fuel". It is simply an ingredient. And in that way it can affect combustion and it can contract the pressure rise. He is not a believer but he sees the possibilities. He is now retired from the University of California, but he provides contacts there.
I have presented the idea to chemical engineers with masters, and some think it is more than plausible. There is no reason it should not be. However, the idea of a contracted combustion caused by seeding is not a very heavily invested research field until the last couple decades. The idea of "railroading the side reactions" is a term that is my own and would need research at the university/government level. It is far from a simple.
And the idea is simple. HHO is not a fuel. It is not a catalyst. It takes part in the combustion. The combustion is accelerated a measurable amount thus ignition timing is able to be optimized closer to top dead center and pressure losses before top dead center (TDC) are transferred to pressure gains after TDC. Is this breaking any laws of physics. No. Do gear heads understand this? Absolutely. Do mechanical engineers know this? Yes. Brake-mean-effective pressure (BMEP) calculations show that a few pounds per square inch rise in BMEP results in horsepower. Can this gain in power overcome the losses to generated quite inefficiently the HHO. With caveats, it can.
Is the gain double or triple the efficiency that HHO scamsmen claim? Of course not. At stoichiometric fuel mixtures, the gain is minimal - in single digits of percentage.
Has anything I said in the above post broken any laws of science? No. And, we haven't even discussed the real DIY value of HHO in extending the lean limit for lean burn. That is where there can be some value to us here on the forum.