A gift for HHO Skeptics!

[oil pan 4]

"The explosion was likely a result of an attempt to*compress hydroxy gas"

Oh well, one less to deal with.
That like saying "oh lets duck tape a stick of dynamite to my head light the fuse and see what happens".
There is only 1 possible result.

[Frank Lee]

Derp... I mean, drrbc says the fails are the most useful.

[ecomodded]

It Should read ~ con Artist killed in own explosion ~ It says in the article that Tyson also had a patent application filed in March 2009. The application describes a proposed method and apparatus to modify the bond angles of fluid molecules in order to power motor vehicles.

[ecomodded]

I should not encourage. lol

~ thru Plant roof by Powerful Propellant

[repurplecirculation]

Originally Posted by RiceCake

Having made hydrogen at home with a complicated generator designed and built by actual engineers, and having used said hydrogen to power a car (briefly) I can tell you this.

Does "HHO" work? Yeah. It actually does. It generates hydrogen, it can be burned, and it actually does do something.

Unfortunately all it does is a glorified science experiment. The losses in generating hydrogen are extremely high. The amount you get off a car alternator are very little. The energy to run the alternator comes from the cars engine. Burning hydrogen results in water...so even at %100 efficiency a "HHO" generator will only result in a complicated way of moving water down into the exhaust pipe...rendering -ZERO- power output. The laws of conservation of energy apply here.

The only science supporting this increases fuel economy? Efficiency boosting. Hydrogen effects the way gasoline burns since hydrogen itself is flammable. Its a lot like propane in diesel applications, it can cool an engine, increase flame front speed, and it can increase the amount of timing advance the engine can handle without causing pinging. Great!

So lets analyze this NASA paper you post as evidence. Its long and extremely technical so I'll break it down for people. Yes, NASA agrees, adding hydrogen in a piston engine increases efficiency. Perfect. But how much is also posted.

Page 14 (16 on the PDF), "Total Energy Consumption". It goes on to state that the engine they used experienced a %3 (three) increase in energy conversion efficiency. So, taking that for lent, it already means HHO doesn't work, because everyone running HHO claims improvements over ten times higher then that. This was a NASA test to find hydrogen's overall energy benefit and they got all of three percent in a controlled environment, which a car is not.

But just to make sure this horse is beat to death properly, how much hydrogen did they inject into this engine? Granted, the engine is in excess of a 7 liter engine, so I'll do some extrapolation, but NASA needed to inject 0.231 kilograms per hour into this engine to get that %3.

Lets divide that by seven for fun. 0.033 kilograms per hour. This is poor math and bad scientific application, but needless to say you need /at least/ that much hydrogen per hour to even approach the claims that NASA paper makes. 0.033 doesn't sound like a lot except for one problem.

To get 1 kilogram of hydrogen, it requires about 55kWh of energy. This is easily found online because many people ponder if we can use wind or solar to generate hydrogen from water for cars, and needless to say, the energy requirements are massive. Doing the math, 55000 watts / 1 kilogram translates to 1815 watts of power / 0.033 kilograms.

1815 watts an hour. /1815/. Per hour. That is how much energy we're talking you need to generate enough hydrogen to get a %3 increase in efficiency. Bearing in mind, NASA considers an increase in efficiency to be an increase in total usage of gasoline energy. That entire paper says nowhere that the engine, itself, is generating the hydrogen.

1815 / 13.4 = 135.4 amps of current. Awesome; your alternator is absolutely maxed out or way over its capacity at this point. Most cars don't even have an alternator capable of over 80 amps constant. This also eliminates everything else in your car operating. This is how much current is necessary to produce /less then/ enough hydrogen to match the NASA test. Bearing in mind, I divided the required figures /by seven/, meaning this extrapolates to something around the hydrogen required to increase the efficiency in a 1.1 liter engine a whopping %3.

And I could easily calculate the horsepower draw but needless to say, people disabling their alternator have already net more gains then %3 anyhow. According to Google, with a perfect (perfect) translation of energy, 1815 watts equates to 2.43395509. A 1.1 liter engine in a FIAT Panda as an example, generates about 50 horsepower. Using 2.5 horsepower to generate hydrogen to net a %3 gain means you're getting 1.5 horsepower in increased power output from more efficient fuel burn. 50 - 2.5 + 1.5 = 49. Not a lot, but that is a loss anyhow, with the added cost of ruining your alternator.

So, we done yet with HHO? I'd love to know why its so popular when nobody has any logical science behind it and nobody has any independent tests to prove it. There's a reason why. Its a fraud. And being so enthusiastic about it without any verified claims and quoting the amount of members on a forum as being evidence means you're either insane or buying into a fad because you want to be right.

I think one of the biggest problems is that many skeptics (me being one) are not doing their homework in regards to HHO production.

Theoretically, at 100% efficiency, you will always get more power from burning HHO gas than what you put into breaking it apart. That sounds like a violation of the Law of Conservation, but it's just a known fact.

H2O Electrolysis + 249.68 Btu Delta G ==> H2 + (1/2)O2 per mole of water

H2 and (1/2)O2 === catalyst ===> H2O - Delta H 302.375 Btu per mole of water

That's a net gain of 52 BTU/Mol!

The problem lies in efficiency - obviously. No conventional electrolysis will
work - you'd be lucky to get 50% efficiency.
On the flip side (combustion), you're lucky to get 80% efficiency (and lower when you consider mechanical losses).

If a conventional electrolysis method is used and the "dealer" is making claims of OU or any real improvement, then they are full of crap.
However, if another method (e.g. Stan Meyers) is employed to dissociate H2O using a resonance technique (or multi-staged technique) - not to be confused w/ PWM (which is actually less efficient than DC, but more stable and easier to control), then they may be legitimate. (I've seen claims w/only 10% of the input energy yielding the same HHO production).
The proof is in the tests. I'd personally like to see a controlled test using calorimeters, octane engines, etc, etc. - real laboratory equipment & painstaking measurements before investing real cash.
There is another note: Combustion chemistry is rather complex - if someone really insists their mileage is increasing, perhaps the HHO is acting in a catalytic fashion in addition to being a combustion fuel. Who knows? These tests can really only be done in a controlled environment using an octane engine (and a mass spectrometer). Trying things on 200 different vehicles w/different engines, different driving habits, different gasoline, etc. is WAY too many variables.

Resonance is the quick way to let the "system" do most of the work (why AC power is so efficient) with only modest input power - I wouldn't knock any experimenter trying these techniques (or any technique employing "leverage").

[gone-ot]

Regarding that net 52 BTU/Mol gain, I believe you had better recheck your numbers...and ALL associated losses.

[jakobnev]

I think he was electrolysing gas and making ice

[jakobnev]

I was trying to explain his surplus 52BTU/mole.

[repurplecirculation]

Those formulas are just the standard textbook formulas in chemistry (assuming no losses and a perfect world) based on molar masses of ideal water at 1ATM 25deg C. By no means does this imply 100% conversion efficiency in the real world (why I specified that most are lucky to approach even 50% in traditional electrolysis). Just like in fusion or fission (atomic level) reactions, molecular reactions can have apparent violations of CoE (in reality, basic chemistry equations do not include every nuance that may be present in a reaction - e.g. energy trapped/released from a sympathetic vibrating lattice, spin conversions, magnetic bonds, etc.).

[jakobnev]

Repurplecirculation -

Can you name one textbook with numbers like that?