HHO May Benefit Kill Switch System
 

Fellow Ecos,

Recently Ive put an alternator kill switch into my car and a fresh deep cycle. I'm not seeing any noticeable improvements.

I've been trying to figure out a solution to the downside of turning off your alternator - your sparks aren't as powerful and you're losing power due to a slower frame front.

Most alternators put out 13.7 Volts on the battery and when you turn this off you have 12.6V on a new freshly charged battery. That drops the longer you use the batterry without charging.

One solution is to incorporate some type of battery circuit in series with the main battery and ignition coil.

Another I'm considering is an HHO generator. Hydroxy - O2 and H2 mixed is one of the most combustible fuel air mixes and gives a more complete burn and faster flame front for more power earlier in the power stroke.

There's not a whole lot of seasoned ecomodders endorsing HHO and I know the double your mpg claims are myths in 99% of cases.

I've read SAE articles and Canadian Auto Institute research papers on the matter which prove 4-10% gains with TUNED systems (a big factor is that only a 1% HHO mix to fuel/air is required).

So to the post title. An HHO mod could solve the issue of a weaker spark. HHO is so combustible that this will increase your flame front.

I've made hydrogen balloons before and have the perfect car to test this concept. So I'm doing this relatively simple mod for the benefit of you all.

I hoping to get a 10% gain factoring in the kill switch weaker spark losses.

Any advice or comments is greatly appreciated.

Do you have any idea how much HHO you need to supply an engine with 1%?
These typical bubbler jokes I see might be producing a fraction of 0.01% of air flow in hho form and can draw over 20 amps from the vehicle electrical system. If you towed a 20kw generator to power an hho generator the size of a 100 gallon fish tank you might approach 1%.
Everything points to hho being a waste of time.

Oil Pan

Good point.

I made a Hydrogen separator that used about 8 amps and inflated a mylar balloon in two hours. Thats probably 2.5 gallons an hour. The system only had one cell so it wasn't that efficient, i believe you can do up to 4 cells in series for almost quadruple the production off the same power. Plus with closer anodes and cathodes not needed for separation production goes up.

My car has 1.6 liter of displacement so thats about 750 gpm at 2500 rpm with an open throttle. A third of that is 250 gpm for normal operation. So 15000 gph.

Im at .15%

Wait L to G is a 1 to 4 ratio not 1 to 2... So I'm at .3% maybe .5% factoring in vibrations that get gasses of catgodes and anodes more efficiently.

Wait again... My hrydogen balloon didn't have the pure O2.. Double my production again..

Yes I'm at 1% hho mix at 30% load on a 1.6 with basically 10 amps (and a 4 cell series hho unit)!

Note 10 amps is about 1/4 hp of alternator load, so that correlates to 1% of 40 hp so I'm well within the ball park.

I'm thinking that either 1) hotter plugs, or 2) a DC-DC converter would be a more simple, more effective solution here - if a cooler spark is even a problem.

One thing I've always wondered about with HHO claims is where the extra power is supposed to come from. You're certainly not going to get 4-10% gains from more complete combustion, since combustion completion in modern engines is well over 99%.

If it's a matter of gasoline's flame front being too slow for the engine, that sounds more to me like the engine was not designed properly to burn gasoline.

I think you'd be better off putting a small motor that draws 10-20A on your accessory belt to assist your engine than doing something with HHO. That or as Ecky suggested a dc-dc converter to boost your ignition voltage back up.

I've had alt deletes on a few of my vehicles, all of them have shown improvement from it.

BTW what are are you driving?

The thing with hydrogen is it really isn't that beneficial at all at stochiometric air/fuel ratios on a gas engine. Once you start leaning things out, the mixture burns slower. Adding the hydrogen in speeds that back up a little bit. However, you need to be able to tune your car to see that difference and it probably needs to be done on a dyno to get any tuning consistency. That just isn't practical for most of us.

Ecky

There's two factors here

Obviously complete combustion is what you want

And then you have the propogation speed of this combustion

Normally all the energy from the fuel/air is not released until its already exiting the exhaust valve

If you look at the integral function of F=VxP/S from the start of the power stroke to the end, you can see that the earlier on the pressure rises (hence a faster burn) the more force you get per power stroke.

If all the fuel got burnt just a hair after tdc youd have the ideal situation.

Would not the ideal flame front speed be directly related to piston velocity, which is a function of stroke length and RPM, which are easily modifiable design parameters? Again, I would think that a gasoline engine that benefits from a faster flame front is simply not fully optimized for the flame prorogation rate of gasoline - which most all modern gasoline engines should be.

I've seen some calculations there suggest the theoretical maximum thermodynamic efficiency of any OTTO cycle ICE is around 46%, and both Honda and Toyota have exceeded 40% without direct injection. That really doesn't leave a lot of room for HHO to improve things in an already well-tuned engine.

However, I'm not a mechanical engineer, I just know what I've read, and how I've interpreted things could certainly be erroneous.

14 or 16 v battery would be easier