shakran

No, this is trying to accomplish a speed increase by reducing the weight of your wallet. It claims to separate hydrogen from water. This requires a process called cracking, and takes more energy to do than you get from the result.

Nitrous oxide may well be the same story - I don't know, but let's say for the sake of argument that it is, and that making NOS takes more energy than you get out of it. For the application in which NOS is intended, it doesn't matter. NOS is not designed to, nor is it billed as something that enhances your fuel mileage. People buy giggle gas for one reason only - to make their car go fast as hell in short bursts. If your engine were having to do the work of making the NOS when you hit the button, you wouldn't get that burst of speed, because the engine is having to expend whatever energy it gets from using NOS, in the manufacture of that NOS.

There might be an argument that injecting hydrogen into an engine would increase your power (though I'd wager that the problems would outweigh the benefits without a serious buildup. Hydrogen is volatile as hell - ask the guys on the Hindenberg), but if you have to make the hydrogen as you are injecting it, the energy loss from making the hydrogen would offset any power/efficiency gains realized by using it.


As a thought experiment, let's say for the sake of argument that you have a 10mpg car. Injecting hydrogen will raise it to 15mpg. So if you buy the hydrogen (and can buy it at a price that makes it cheaper than the difference between fuel costs at 15 and 10mpg - a big assumption that is patently untrue) and use it, you come out ahead. But making the hydrogen costs you at least 5mpg in efficiency, and probably more. You'd gain 5mpg by injecting the hydrogen, but lose 5-6 by making it on the fly. No point.

What these guys are relying on is a device my car club calls the Butt Dyno. When you buy a whizbang gadget that's supposed to make your car so much better, you tend to overestimate the actual results.

A good example is that Tornado intake baffle, that supposedly makes the air spiral into the manifold and therefore increase its oxydation rate - i.e. gives you more horsepower. People that install this thing tend to run around saying that their car is a lot more powerful, but if you put it on a dynomometer, you discover that the power output is exactly the same as it was before you put the Tornado in the car. Seat-of-the-pants measurements (butt dyno) tend to be influenced by your desire to have the product work, and therefore tend to be inaccurate. In other words, as we say, your butt dyno is full of shit.

The guy that puts this hydrogen dohickey in his car will probably also, maybe subconsciously, drive differently. He now has the goal of higher mileage, and therefore he'll accelerate slower, brake earlier, etc. Meanwhile, this damned thing just sits there, losing water either through the normal evaporative process, or through conversion to gasseous dihydrogen oxide - aka, steam, so that you think it's working.

Put yet another way, these guys are claiming that it doubles your fuel economy. Why aren't they selling the thing to the auto makers? Car makers are getting killed because their vehicles are so damned inefficient. With this thing a Suburban could be getting the mileage of a Civic. If it really worked, GM would be installing it as standard equipment.