Run your car on tap water....
 

..sort of?

www.hydraficient.com Home Page

this is new technology in an old field filled with scams....this seems real and has some backing...what do you think?

xoxoxoo

This is entirely possible, to a degree. See, the problem is thermodynamics. The idea being (I imagine) that the gasoline engine produces the majority of the "power" for the vehicle system. Using the EMF generated by an alternator, the hydrogen generator breaks down water to its elemental components: hydrogen and oxygen. I am a bit worried that the energy needed to produce H2 via electrolysis may well exceed the energy yield of the reaction - due to inefficiency alone.

Neat idea though. We will see more about hydrogen once storing H2 gas in a solid matrix other than platinum is more affordable. My bet is on nanotube storage beds.

Complete and total BS.

What their product does is simply apply electricity to two electrodes which cause it to split 2H2O>2H2 + O2 and then it presumably burns the hydrogen created by either combusing it directly or injecting it into the engine. Either way, the energy you wasted to seperate the water molecule into Hydrogen and Oxygen to begin with will be more than what you gain through combustion.

They offer no references, no technical description, no diagrams, no detailed description, no peer reviewed studies, nothing. Except a few VERY vague claims about improved fuel economy which could very well be due to 1: placebo, drivers who suddenly start closely monitoring their fuel economy tend to drive more conservatively or 2: it restricts how much fuel is available to your engine (it messes with the car's engine control chip) which would force you to use less fuel...You would be more efficient solely becaues you are unable to accelerate as quickly.

Ok, after searching around, I found this description:

Patent Pending Electrode Technology? Does that sound like something a real scientist would say? "electrode technology" has remained relatively unchanged since the 1700's. It consists of a positive electrode and a negative electrode. When you apply a current, the water will seperate into hydrogen at one and oxygen at the other. When they recombine you get the same amount (and no more) energy back, except for what was wasted in the process.

Ok, Seperating water into it's molecular form: Water's molecular form is H2O, not gases, which would be H2 and O2 and are seperate molecules, neither of which are water. That isn't rocket surgery, and anybody who actually knew what they were talking about wouldn't make that mistake.

The gases are pumped into the cars engine where they combust...back into water for a net energy gain of: 0. After you account for entropy and energy wasted due to less than 100% efficiency, you are actually worse off than when you started.


It is a big fat scam.

People with much larger calculators than mine have done the math on this and know that a hydrogen economy (as with ethanol and other "fuels") tend to be energy sink-holes unless we harness renewable energies to drive the process.

My question is what improvement did they make to allow this to be possible. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but the current way of getting hydrogen from water isn't the most efficient. But if they have come up with something like what the LED light is to filament light bulbs are, it would be really cool.

Exactly. They describe their product in the same manner that snake oil is always described.

I also have concerns about their use of tap water and their advice to put antifreeze in the water for cold climates. I'm not sure what antifreeze-laden water does under electrolysis, but tap water produces small amounts of chlorine, flourine, and other reactive gases. I'm not sure what precautions (if any) they've taken to keep these out of the engine. I don't know how harmful this is, but years of elevated flourine levels in your air intake system is probably best avoided.

I'm sorry, Greg, but I have to take issue with you on this. Let me first state that I think this device is almost certainly bollocks, for the very good reasons you state at the beginning of your post, but to say electrode technology is unchanged in over 300 years is clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding of materials technology.

Electrode technology is more than just "some of the electrickery goes into the wires and frightens the atomies apart" or whatever.

Electrode efficiency is related to the total surface area available, the porosity of the electrodes, the conductivity of the wires, the robustness of the surface and many other factors.

Have you noticed that every year retail batteries get longer lives, and rechargeables carry more current? Ever wondered why "having a flat battery" hardly ever happens to a car driver these days?

Improvements in electrode technology.

It also occurs to me that as a petrol engine is inefficient, it may be that this thing actually works - if you divert 10% of the engine output into a hydrolyitic splitter, and that is 80% efficient, if the device makes your engine >10% more efficient, it is a net winner.

It ought to be possible to improve the engine output, and adding O2 to the mix directly would increase the burn heat and probably the volume of unburned fuel would decrease.

As mentioned elsewhere, the problem of impurities has not been addressed - what about hard water, iron salts, calcium salts, halides, etc?

Also, adding combustible gasses to the intake will change the burn heat, and that will probably take it outside the design tolerances of the manufacturer - so there could be a problem there.

I'd not dismiss it out of hand without further testing, but I'm not convinced based on what I've seen so far.

I like this concept...use water for the car, leave the ethanol stuff for me to drink.

He said "relatively" unchanged. Electrode technology is the same as it was 300 years ago. It's just more efficient. Just as the combustion engine remains relatively unchanged - it mixes fuel and air together to make an explosion that drives a piston within a linear shaft. - since the Model T days. The technology is the same, but today's engines have learned to maximize, relative to the early 1900's, the efficiency of that technology. The change in technology would be the Wankel rotary engine, which as near as I can tell, works on witchcraft. (I keed. ;) )


A radical change in electrode technology would be to change the basic way in which that technology works - - i.e. something other than a positive / negative electrode doing the work.

People do put Nitrous Oxide into their air intake for more power. Is that what this is trying to accomplish with hydrogen and oxygen? And if they figured out a way to not have to use platinum, it would be good.

Why don't we have the Mythbusters or Consumer Reports test this and a bunch of other products? If they say it works, well, it would start selling a lot faster.

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.

What I want is a car like the little fuel cell car I can build with a kid's science kit: solar energy splits water, it recombines to fuel the car, solar energy splits the resulting water, it recombines to fuel the car, and so on.

Unfortunately, with the way we drive a battery would have to be involved in there somewhere.. but I'm highly optimistic that renewable resources will be used more often in the future.

FYI....I got the original info from a publication called "Waste News" ,published by Crain Comunications,who also publish Autoweek...not that that makes it true

xoxoxoo

That's like saying gun technology is unchanged since 1700, because guns today ignite an expolosive charge to drive a projectile along a tube towards a target.

That's right. Only the efficiency has changed, not the basic technology.

Show me a gun that uses a magnetic acceleration system and you've changed the technology.

Okay, can I have my aqua car now?


I like the idea of using compressed air to power cars. Can't we use water power to compress air?

I agree that all the magical mystery energy demonstations I've seen are pretty much b.s. or misunderstood or misrepresented.

But instead of thinking about breaking up hydrogen and oxygen (sort of a fission process) so you can use the part/s for fuel, how about using some extra hydrogens (like in heavy water...H3O) and fusing them to release tremendous power....i.e., hydrogen fusion.

I don't believe cold fusion has ever been successfully achieved or that it's even been shown to be possible, but if we fantasize that it's somehow possible without humungous magnets and lasers, a nice little compact hydrogen fusion motor would be a nice gadget to power things.

You're probably on a more productive track than the hydrefficient guys. Unfortunately so far the only known stable source of nuclear fusion is the interior of a star. . .So it's probably a few years off ;)

100% accurate. i totally agree - it´s a simple case of more energy in then energy out, ie pointless.

i agree with greg on tis one. electrode technology is seriuosly lagging and holding back a lot of pregress imho. look at batteries through the last 100 years and look at technology on the whole. the advances in battery technology (at least in the mainstream - i have no evidence of non-mainstream super-advances but just putting this little disclaimer in) have been almost negligible in the last 50 odd years. evedence? just look at the size of batteries, they haven´t changed at all.

again, agreed - nothing much has really changed. i briefly studied the wankel rotary engine while doing thermodynamics and i concur - it runs on witchcraft :p

it´s not unfortunate that a battery is involved, it´s just that the method of storing energy is so ridiculously cumbersome. once we have this figured out alternative energy sources powering cars will become commonplace i suspect.

edit: i refer everyone to the orange text in my signature. i never suspected it would be relevant :)