Does HHO REALLY Work????

[smchristin]

I know there are probably some other posts about this topic and I have already looked at a few. Some of them go way off topic and others just don't answer my question, so I'm asking it here. Do the "HHO" mods really give your car added MPG and/or power? I'm looking for "tried-and-died" or "tried-and-true" stories. I am also worried about damaging the engine.

[Arragonis]

No, it doesn't work.

Nobody has yet broken the first law of thermodynamics and there's no sign that anyone will. These laws are immutable and have withstood the test of time and many, many brilliant scientific minds.

Hydrogen is used for power generation but it typically comes from other sources. Hydrogen may end up being a car fuel (amongst other uses) of the future but that is purely because of convenience - unlike an EV for example you can refuel quickly. The argument is that you can use renewables to make the Hydrogen. The energy loss in making Hydrogen and then burning it is greater than using the same energy in an EV.

If you wish to try this out, I suggest you leave your car alone, try hypermiling for real results and if you are still interested get one of these.

[ChazInMT]

HHO systems that rely on the power of your car to disassociate the hydrogen & oxygen by electrolysis are absolutely not efficient. It is essentially trying to create a perpetual motion machine with chemistry. It cannot work due to it defying the basic laws of physics. Also, the ridiculously small amounts of hydrogen produced cannot possibly contribute much to the equation of the fuel & air combustion. You might turn 1 pint of water into HHO gas over the course of 500 miles, in that time your engine will burn 15-20 gallons of gas, since H20 is part of the combustion byproduct due to gasoline being essentially Hydrogen, at a 1 to 1 ratio, the HHO fuel is only 1/80, or 1.2% of the added fuel over that 500 miles, so it couldn't possibly make a detectable difference. Just common sense & basic chemistry here. The people who try to sell these devices rely on pseudo-science (BS) to baffle you into thinking it just might work. It Can’t & Won’t.

[SVOboy]

Gonna move this thread over to the appropriate forum

[Arragonis]

This forum is more busy than the blog

[NachtRitter]

Is there an HHO blog?? Where, where? Maybe the laws of physics work differently there...?

[ChazInMT]

Apparently the blog contains a worm hole and it leads directly to this blog! Or, maybe it exists in a parallel universe where everything that happens there is exactly the same as here, except there, hydrogen and oxygen must be kept together with special force fields, otherwise the combination of these 2 elements does not occur in nature. That's why they get such good MPG's because the hydrogen & oxygen release so much energy when they are recombined, and it is very easy to separate it.

[NachtRitter]

Ah ha! I shoulda thunk of that m'self!

[mort]

Originally Posted by smchristin

I know there are probably some other posts about this topic and I have already looked at a few. Some of them go way off topic and others just don't answer my question, so I'm asking it here. Do the "HHO" mods really give your car added MPG and/or power? I'm looking for "tried-and-died" or "tried-and-true" stories. I am also worried about damaging the engine.

Hi smchristin,
The current theory, which would be easy to test but is not demonstrated in any real engine, is as follows.
First, the amount of hydrogen needed is substantial, like a few thousand watts of electrical power to hydrolyze water. In theory, the added hydrogen allows an extremely lean mixture of gasoline to burn. The normal air to fuel ratio for gasoline is 14.7:1 But if you could get a mixture of 200:1 to burn the cylinder would have 12 times as much air in it for the same amount of fuel. The thermodynamic efficiency of the engine is determined by the high temperature during combustion. If the cylinder has more air in it then there will be higher pre-combustion pressure and when the fuel is burned there will be a higher combustion temperature. So the efficiency will be higher.
The effect should be to get the engine to have the nearly the same efficiency at low power levels that it has at it's most efficient operating point. Maximum engine efficiency for modern cars is about 25% and at low power, as low as 10%

Consider a car that has an engine that can produce 250 HP and is 25% efficient there , but only needs 15 HP (6% of its maximum) to cruise at 55 MPH but is only 10% efficient at that power. It will get about 18 MPG at 55. If the efficiency at 15 HP could be raised from 10% to 20% then the fuel economy goes up to 36 MPG. If the hydrogen generator needs less than about 5 HP you are ahead. You might need to carry a lot of water.

-mort

[UFO]

Originally Posted by mort

Hi smchristin,
The current theory, which would be easy to test but is not demonstrated in any real engine, is as follows.
First, the amount of hydrogen needed is substantial, like a few thousand watts of electrical power to hydrolyze water. In theory, the added hydrogen allows an extremely lean mixture of gasoline to burn. The normal air to fuel ratio for gasoline is 14.7:1 But if you could get a mixture of 200:1 to burn the cylinder would have 12 times as much air in it for the same amount of fuel. The thermodynamic efficiency of the engine is determined by the high temperature during combustion. If the cylinder has more air in it then there will be higher pre-combustion pressure and when the fuel is burned there will be a higher combustion temperature. So the efficiency will be higher.
The effect should be to get the engine to have the nearly the same efficiency at low power levels that it has at it's most efficient operating point. Maximum engine efficiency for modern cars is about 25% and at low power, as low as 10%

-mort

I know logic normally has no place in this forum, but please explain how burning extra hydrogen and oxygen in the proportions generated via electrolysis will cause your engine to run lean? Or did you leave out the caveat of leaning your fuel system in addition to fumigation with "HHO"?