Ronn Motor Company Scorpion uses HHO

[hummingbird]

Christ, you are dead wrong about the calculations. The amount of fuel consumed is no way as high as you have assumed. A typical 1.5L idles at a rate of 0.3 gph. so for a 1L, it will be 0.2 gph or roughly 750 ml/hr. This is 750 ml/60min = ~12.5ml/min/L. A typical idle rpm value is 700, and there is a intake once every two revs. so 350 intakes = 12.5 ml. => 36 micro-liters per stroke / liter of cylinder volume, for idle. This could go higher as you open the throttle, but not THAT much... Your figures are off by a factor of 1000.

[Christ]

Honestly, the calculations were just numbers that quantified the actual actions that occur in a diesel power stroke, and to show that diesels don't run at stoich (or anywhere near it, through the power stroke) I knew the numbers were incorrect, and I thought it was kind of obvious as well.

The point was still conveyed, that diesels don't have a "bang" for a power stroke, so much as a constant expansion of gasses, which is the primary reason for the massive torque curve they tend to have. (Or torque plane, as some prefer to call it.)

If you look closely, you'll also notice that the power strokes timings are completely wrong in what I said as well... producing the initial combustion at TDC (as opposed to before TDC) would mean that the combustion event would have to "catch up" with the engine's rotation, which is no good for torque. Also, if the injector continued to spray fuel until the piston was at BDC, as in that post, you'd have fuel burning in your exhaust stroke, which would create (worst case scenario) a serious fire breathing machine with lots of wasted fuel.

And with that, we're VERY off-topic on this discussion, and should probably take the (completely unrelated) diesel talk elsewhere, so as not to hijack/clog this thread any more than we already have.

[Allch Chcar]

The effective theory behind the HHO generator is basically the same for water injection, methanol injection, ethanol, pure hydrogen, etc. It's that anything added to a gasoline combustion cycle will improve the efficiency. Unless you're adding large amounts, aka enough to actually displace the gasoline used, it's probably going to improve efficiency up to 10% on average. I've heard reasonable suggestion that 25% is possible, but that would be more than altering the gasoline burn and you'd need a groundbreakingly good electrolysis system to get that from a HHO generator. There are people who build and test HHO generators as a hobby/research too.

Typically the injection of another fuel provides a cooling effect. Tuning your engine for the benefit means; better at getting w/e you want from it. Leaving it to it's own devices is not a good idea. You have to compensate for the injection. They didn't build it to accept HHO from the factory aside from the Scorpion. 40% improvement is pretty radical for a HHO generator. That's got to be supplementing on the fuel.

[Christ]

Ok, so what if I used a solar-powered electrolysis system to produce HHO gas all day, contain it, and then keep it in a tank compressed until it's used? (Completely in theory, not sure what would be involved in this).

As long as it's in the tank, I could meter the use of the "additive" vs. normal fuel consumption to vary the effect, right?

And as long as I'm producing it from solar electricity, it's being produced on a much larger scale than those hobbyist kits, in theory, so maybe enough per day to be contained and used over a 10-15 mile trip?

[Allch Chcar]

You'd want to collect the hydrogen not the HHO or Brown's Gas as they call it. Either way storing the gas is hard to achieve economically. Brown's Gas is useful only if you wanted to add it to the air intake of your engine. It'd take a good bit of time to collect enough hydrogen to make a dent in your trips unless you plug it into your home and pump up the rate or used several hundred watt solar panels.

It'd be more cost effective to use the electricity for recharging an electric car. Electrolysis is still very inefficient technology. Unless you were trying to improve the technology. Then it's for research and uses a totally different system for deciding if something is worthwhile. There's a reason it's just a hobby research program.

[Jetta90GL]

Storing hydrogen with oxygen in large amounts would be very unsafe, especially compressing it. One spark and you wouldn't have a car left. I think the best way to utilize solar with electrolysis would be to charge a deep cycle battery. Then use the power from the battery to make your trip with real time HHO.

[Allch Chcar]

Using Hydrogen is a whole 'nother topic though. It's doable but like all the other alternative fuels it's not energy efficient or economic unless you invest a large amount of money for the equipment; solar panels, engine tuning, fuel tanks, etc.

Getting 40mpg from just HHO generator would require converting the water into energy many times the current efficiency levels. I'll never forget that Camaro that converted to running on water. Sadly, no pics of the vehicle ever appeared. I'd compare it to cold Nuclear Fusion, it's possible but no one has a sustainable recipe for the reaction. Don't get stuck on the BTU value of a gallon of water either, there's more to energy than heat. The whole concept relies on the ability to "unlock" energy from water. It's not energy conversion it's more like energy harvesting. Atoms hold a tremendous amount of energy but most of the research has been banned, underfunded, or ridiculed out of sight. The few reported successful attempts have used electricity and a certain sound frequency. Whatever the equation is, it hasn't been replicated and was probably just a lucky fluke from something they didn't consider.