Solar HHO

[ratgreen]

I know you guys are probably sick to death of HHO. From my understanding, they can't actually increase mpg because the power needed to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen is more than what the extra hydrogen/oxygen intake into the engine would produce.

There is no doubt adding it to combustion would give more power / mpg however.

My idea is to have about 50-100w of solar on the roof of the car (slimline flexi panels) and use their power to generate HHO, which is then drawn into the intake for combustion. That way there is no extra load on the engine.

Downsides are that this would only work during the day in sunlight.

This would be going on an old diesel, which wouldn't just add extra fuel to compensate like a modern EFI engine would.

My only thought is that would the power gain be better from the HHO intake, or just to charge the cars battery and lessen the load on the alternator.

Thoughts?

[Daox]

You'd be better off using that solar to charge your battery and deleting your alternator.

To make a long and complicated story short, hydrogen can work to speed up combustion which can improve efficiency. But, in order to see any real gain the engine must be tuned to burn lean (which slows down combustion). Unless you are willing to totally reprogram your fuel computer, its not worth it.

[ratgreen]

Originally Posted by Daox

You'd be better off using that solar to charge your battery and deleting your alternator.

To make a long and complicated story short, hydrogen can work to speed up combustion which can improve efficiency. But, in order to see any real gain the engine must be tuned to burn lean (which slows down combustion). Unless you are willing to totally reprogram your fuel computer, its not worth it.

This would be going on an old diesel, which wouldn't just add extra fuel to compensate like a modern EFI engine would.

So this would just increase the efficiency of the current amount of fuel as there is no computer, purely mechanical injection pump.

[RedDevil]

The best way to integrate solar panels and cars is to put those panels on your house and use the money saved on your electricity bill to buy gas. Or diesel.

A small panel to keep the 12V battery charged is fine though, ahem.

[Frank Lee]

With 50-100w of solar on the roof the engine will see less than 50-100w of assistance, which is kind of like spitting in the ocean.

[Ecky]

As others have said, it's far more useful to reduce alternator load. And, even then, the amount of fuel economy gained will be nearly negligible - though farther from zero than HHO.

[teoman]

I say go for it!

After you have the setup producing H2 and O2 you can measure the increase in FE.

When you see it not changed much, you can hookup the panel to your battery.

As you say, it is an old diesel with not much load on the alternator. So you could delete the alternator and see some gains (up to %10 as reported by some on this site).

[redpoint5]

Solar panels are somewhere around 20% efficient under optimal conditions (directly facing sun, at noon, on a cloudless day, not behind glass). The process of decomposing water into hydrogen is something like 33% efficient. That alone makes your 100W panel output only 33W equivalent power in hydrogen. Let's say the combustion process is 25% efficient at extracting heat energy (combustion) and making kinetic energy. That means 8.25W of power provided by the 100W solar panel, or about 1% of 1 horsepower.

You may as well attach a hamster wheel to the crank, or add half a PSI to all 4 tires.

Efficiency means making as few conversions of energy as possible. If you're capturing sunlight and turning it into electrical power, keep it as electrical power to maximize efficiency rather than subjecting it to these conversion losses:

sunlight > electricity > hydrogen (chemical energy) > heat > kinetic

Exploiting energy in a Rube Goldberg way is not efficient, just as his contraptions for flipping a switch are not efficient.

[oil pan 4]

Yes use solar to do an alternator delete. Which has been proven repeatedly to give a 5% to 10% fuel economy boost.
Where hho has been repeatedly proven to give about a 0% improvement.

[RedDevil]

FWIW, a solar panel can only reach ROI within its lifetime when oriented well and used all the time.
A panel charging a battery in the car would not be oriented optimally, maybe the car would be parked in the shade from time to time as well, the battery and converter etc. add cost to the system - but the revenue is better as it replaces electricity generated by the alternator, which is more 'expensive' than grid power.

If you run the panel to directly generate Brown's gas you either only use it when the car runs or, if run permanently you'd store the gas in some balloon or container. While the former is just inefficient, the latter is downright dangerous.

*** Do not store more than a quart of Brown's gas in any location or you might ruin the car and possibly kill someone if it goes bang. ***