Quote:
Originally Posted by teoman
Rusty, did you measure any gains?
How many amps was your cell consuming?
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On the gasoline engines, both carb and fuel injected, an average of only 5% gain was found (2-10% range ) playing only with timing and producing a set power output ( about 20 hp if I recall correctly ). But these were the vehicles that responded to the addition of HHO. Some vehicles saw zero gains. One had a -2% loss. I think you can see what I am going to say next. There are a bunch of parameters that contribute to HHO even being measurably effective, and this is at part load. It must be noted that the dyno we were using was not set up for low power loads and it's 0.4 hp gradients meant at 20 hp testing 2% was its minimum detectable change. We had hoped to get into an EPA approved lab or the local university dyno lab but time and cost meant we had to use time bought on a local hot rod shop which was set up for hundreds of horsepower measurement. Simple A-B-A-B testing was used to verify findings.
The cell stack had 4 cells in series pulling 15 amperes from the vehicle alternator and externally heated with water recirculating at 80 degrees C. A current limiter with a feedback circuit was used. The production of hydrogen is directly measurable by the amperes. One Coulomb per second is an amp, so just multiply that by 60 to get your moles per second of hydrogen. Each cell is cylindrical and was run at 1 atm.
This test was done a couple decades ago to see if these HHO devices held any merit. What we realized was, . . . it depends.
It depends on intake air temperature, combustion mixture turbulence, the presence of hot EGR and the makeup of the combustion chamber material ( iron heads were preferential to aluminum ) .
A test on a 1990 Daihatsu with a 993 cc gasoline engine was done as it's fuel and ignition timing were easily manipulated. It was California compliant with EGR and provisions for a hot air intake from earlier models. Even with it's aluminum head it gained just under 50% increase in fuel efficiency running on lean burn at an AFR of 28:1 which was the limit of our wide band oxygen sensor (WBOs). The 50% gain is from the lean burn, of course. However, the lazy hemispherical combustion chamber of this engine allowed only about 20:1 AFR before erratic combustion started rearing it's head ( COV>5% using pressure sensors under the spark plug and audio readings externally ). With the addition of HHO we could peg the WBOs at 28:1. HHO allowed the extended lean burn.
Now people are going to ask, why didn't we pursue a marketable unit? Simply, it didn't make economical sense for consumer vehicles. And emissions were impossible at that time without the use of the now available lean NOx traps. And with tightened current emissions, the time period of running lean allows the catalytic converter to cool down thus, when the engine switches to stoichiometric running, the cat is too cool to be effective and elevated emissions result. This is pretty much why all lean burn schemes have disappeared from the North American and European markets.