OK, so the PM article was about water injection, and has nothing to do with electrolysis and hydrogen injection? As for the latter, it’s basic physics and thermodynamics. You have to put in as much energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen as you will get back out by burning the hydrogen. If you’re drawing this energy from the alternator, the engine has to work harder (i.e., burn more gas) to produce it. If the energy was coming from solar cells or something, that would be different.
So far, it’s a wash, as there’s no evidence that hydrogen physically mixed in with the fuel/air mixture will do anything to make the fuel burn more efficiently. Is anyone claiming that? There’s the problem that the hydrogen is competing with the hydrocarbons for the fixed amount of oxygen in the air (is the oxygen produced also being injected?). If the hydrogen was somehow being chemically combined with the hydrocarbons in the gasoline (which would require a catalyst and more equipment that simply an injector), they might have something that would burn more efficiently (only if the long carbon-carbon chains and rings are broken up so that the fuel becomes more like Natural Gas, but this would likely require still more energy input).
Now add in the fact that no system is perfect (or fully reversible), so you have losses at every step of the way. The bottom line is that you’re probably going to end up burning as much gasoline, if not more, than if you didn’t add all this crap onto the engine. Any claimed savings are most likely from drivers being more careful about their driving habits than any real technological fix. This is a well-known placebo effect – all such devices include hints in their instructions on how to drive more economically.
Sdkerekh is wrong about the Popular Mechanics article being about a water injection system. Try reading between the lines AND most importantly, go to the Aqua Tune website for the claims.
Here’s a cut and paste from the the AT website. Sure sounds like they’re promising a hydrogen provider to me. Note how they word that one statement.
produces hydrogen-rich bubbles before being introduced into the engine draft. After this it becomes an even more highly enriched hydrogen as it collides with hot metals and combustion and it drops the engine combustion temperature down. Now the engine timing can be advanced up to 7 degrees over factory specifications, if so desired.
AquaTune is a highly precise injection system consisting of air injection, water injection and an ultra-sonic barometric pressure chamber giving off ultra-sonic frequencies which in turn are splitting the hydrogen from the oxygen creating hydrogen-rich bubbles and hydrogen gases. This in turn gives a promise of 25% better fuel mileage and up to 30% more horse power
“gives a promise of 25% more fuel mileage and 30% more horsepower”. They’re not even guaranteeing anything will be improved; only that it “gives a promise”. That means less than nada.
The Conservation of Energy and the First Law of Thermodynamics Can?t be Ignored.
The Iceland produces hydrogen from hydrothermal energy. The cost of production is cheap because is only a combination of Capital investment and Plant Operation Cost and FREE (geothermal energy).
To produce Hydrogen we have to spend a lot of Energy. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/thermo/electrol.html
By providing energy from a battery, water (H2O) can be dissociated into the diatomic molecules of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2).
H2O => (H2) + ? (O2) -285.83 kJ @ temperature 298K (Eo = 1.229 V)
The efficiency of water electrolysis is not 100%.
This event will occur on any conductive surface. When the proper amount of energy is applied, however, certain materials such as high surface area metals are more efficient and consume less energy to produce a given amount of hydrogen. The precious metal platinum has shown great activity for water electrolysis, attaining over 50% efficiency. Using electrodes composed of QSI nanometals, QSI has achieved up to 80% efficiency at lower current flow rates (100 mA/cm2) and approximately 60% efficiency at higher rates (1000 mA/cm2). The feed water of the electrolyzer must be distilled or deionized water, which is not cheap too.
Using ready to go technology with 80% efficiency and the electrode current density of (100mA/cm2), the water electrolyzer is not very compact and efficient, and the electrodes don?t last forever.
Installed in a car, the energy sourced from the battery has to be replaced by alternator, which in return used car engine energy with an efficiency of 25% to 30% of the burned gasoline. Producing free electricity from the Regenerative Braking System, or from Thermocouple Electrical Power Generator using the heat of exhaust system, is a different but not a simple story.
But the original question was about producing hydrogen by electroylsis and introducing this hydrogen into the intake manifold to increase fuel effiency… The AquaTune product is only a water injection product. No electricity is involved, no electroylsis is involved. This is a quote from the PM article
WATER INJECTION
This technology was developed during World War II to provide emergency sprint power for turbosupercharged fighter planes. At altitude, there is less air for cooling engines. The turbos, however, cram air into the inlet at manifold pressures nearly the same as those at sea level. The compressed intake air, heated as it goes through the turbos, makes the engine even hotter. Spraying water, or a water-alcohol mixture, directly into the intake lowers the combustion-chamber temperatures. This permits substantially more power for brief periods. Several manufacturers have attempted to apply this technology to automotive use. We ordered an AquaTune from a classified ad in the back pages of PM. "AquaTune is like no other water injection system
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So, as you can see even PM calls it a water injection product. No mention is made of electroylsis or hydrogen gas being introduced into the manifold to increase fuel effiency.
I’d like to recommend everyone read this article for himself.
Another rational objective argument: How much hyrdogen is produced every hour? Every day? Would there be enough hyrdogen introduced to make a difference? I suspect the amount of hydrogen produced would be very small.
I’d like to thank those of you who are taking this all seriously! Thank you for providing useful information! I’d still love to hear from anyone who knows of an experiment done to prove whether or not you would get an increase in fuel efficieny when producing hydrogen by electroylsis. If anyone can point me in the direction of that website, I would be grateful.
You can make a gas generator that doesn’t use electricity. Just use 20% solution of sodium hydroxide and add a few aluminum cans then cap. The lye will dissolve the cans giving off the gas that’s piped to the air intake. There’s a few sites where they show generation rates achieved. Using hygrogen alone as a burning fuel requires a special engine design metalurgically. As a booster it helps achieve a more complete burn for more power & less waste/better mileage. As gas treatment like B-12 does the same, yet this method is alot cheaper, recycles aluminum twice (once as a fuel suppliment and twice since the resultant sludge can be turned back into a can so is accepted at recyclers) Plan on trying this out on my work van w/350c.i. gas hog. If it adds 10% or more mpg then great!
Does that paragraph you posted say anything at all about what was tested by PM? No. They mention WWII water injection and how it works. Water injection ceases at the last sentence.
That click and paste I posted is NOT from Popular Mechanics. Where did I say it came from PM?
I said this click and paste came from the Aqua Tune, the company who is palming this scam off. Aqua Tune is the one promising hydrogen gas out of water, not PM.
It’s NOT one to PROVE it’s wrong…It’s for someone to prove it’s RIGHT. If you know someone STUPID enough to buy this…let me know…There are far too many of these gimicks (especially with gas prices going higher and higher) to keep test ALL of them. Many have been tested…NOT ONE proved to save ANY gas mileage. It’s really amazing that there are still people out there who think it coule POSSIBLY work…But then again there still people who think the world is flat.
Despite what the Aquatune website may say, the product is only a water injection product as stated by Popular Mechanics in their test. The Auqatune product does NOT produce hydrogen gas created by electroylsis.
Well, here’s the rub, and maybe a free lesson learned by me that you won’t have to, sderekh!
I had actually posted a question to Car Talk about this last weekend, because I figured if these guys knew anything about it then I would trust them. I was genuinely curious about this option (found online, had been looking for something else) and unfortunately I impulse-bought a document “detailing” how to put together a machine/contraption that would do this. My first think-through made sense, but granted I also could not find a source that I trusted to tell me one way or another – hence I wrote on these boards.
However, I was set right – it won’t work nearly enough to make it worth the while is my impression – and I have re-learned the lesson not to take anything on the web at face value… ESPECIALLY when the webdesign is so gawdawful.
So for the benefit of all, in hopes of getting at least an entertaining return on the $45 I dropped on this, I’m uploading the document with the hopes that I can disseminate it far & wide and get my “revenge” that way.
Sort of like the ‘Neiman-marcus cookie’ recipe story, although I think that was just a story.
Well, better late than never! And better to learn it earlier rather than later in life! Hope the document can get out there far & wide and stop these meanies from takin’ our money…
Sorry, but there is never going to be an end to these scams. They existed almost a 100 years ago, really became a hot commodity back in the 30s, and were being peddled like crazy when I first started work as a mechanic decades ago.
As gas prices go even higher you can rest assured even more innovative scams will crop up. That statement is money in the bank; or at least the bank accounts of the ones peddling this garbage.
(Footnote: Jad, I did not ignore your last post about the seal. I responded twice and got an error message both times. This is only occurring when I respond to your posts; no one else. Weird.)
Ah, sorry it’s making it a pain to reply to my posts…I’m very interested to hear what you have to say about the oil seals. Not sure how to get around that…Should I start a new thread and see if that helps?
I am a high school chemistry teacher and we recently started discussing alternate fuels. We also made batteries and did electrolysis of water. During the process we ran across the HHO, Hydrogen on-demand generators.
At first I thought hydrogen (produced by water split by electrolysis as in our experiment using a 9V battery) gas was used as an alternative fuel source. Then the following newscast was aired, showing that the Hydrogen and oxygen actually provide a cleaner burning environment in the combustion chamber. http://www.wptv.com/content/specialreports/story.aspx?content_id=74b15465-2ebb-49e0-acb1-939c4bb13a28 They did an investigative report and found a 60% increase in fuel efficiency after one month as proven by a dynamometer.
My mechanic will not install the one I purchased from eBay. He installed several back in 1975 and they did increase gas mileage, but he said that the valve seals got destroyed due to the high heat. I’m trying to get information to see if anyone has this on long-term and experienced problems with the valve seals.
And better to learn it earlier rather than later in life! Hope the document can get out there far & wide and stop these meanies from takin’ our money…