<< Hydrogen being 3-times as volatile as air adds nothing to your argument. >>
I said it’s 3-times as volatile as gasoline. Do you know if this is correct? I’m not an engineer but I’m quoting an engineer.
My understanding is that energy is produced by the recombination of HHO into H2O equivalent to the energy earlier used to change H20 to HHO. This is the energy causing the more complete burn of gasoline.
That is a mistake, I had intended to type gasoline not air.
Volatility, BTW, is not a measurement of energy. Volatility is the tendency of a substance to vaporize. Hydrogen, being a gas at room temperature, is certainly more “volatile” than gasoline but that does not mean is has more energy. Alcohol, for instance, is also more volatile than gasoline but alcohol has less energy/unit volume. Anyone who tried to explain the energy boost from the hydrogen based on its “volatility” was pulling the wool over your eyes. While not technically a “lie” it certainly is a red herring.
HHO is in fact in gaseous form when it enters the cylinder. If you want to be technical, there’s no such gas as “HHO”. What you’ve really got is H2 and O2 in a 2/1 ratio entering along with the rest of the air and fuel. It doesn’t “recombine” into water vapor until it burns. The energy you get from burning it would be equivalent to the energy used to separate it in a perfect world. Unfortunately, there are many losses (friction, heat, light, etc, etc) which cause you to get less energy from burning the HHO than you used to separate it in the first place.
By MagDrive’s very own admission (from your post above) it is the water vapor present that makes a supposed better environment for combustion. As I said, water injection does in fact have its benefits (and also its own set of downsides). However, ask yourself this. If it’s truly the water vapor that makes combustion better why are you not just misting water into your engine? You’re losing energy in the process of making H2O-HHO-H20 only to wind up with water vapor in the cylinder.
Oh, and it almost goes without saying that the water vapor passes through the rest of your exhaust as steam. Your car collects water over night and steams for several minutes in the morning out of the exhaust pipe. Having steam in the exhaust is much different than steam in the cylinder. You will not pass emissions if you are cooling the combustion chambers with water injection, and the repeated heat transfer from the hot pistons to the cold water mist may shorten the life of the pistons (although that would be the least of your problems).
Let’s let the volatility of hydrogen vs. gasoline go as a red herring due to my vague understanding of “volatility”. I think this is the more pertinent statement: “My understanding is that energy is produced by the recombination of HHO into H2O equivalent to the energy earlier used to change H20 to HHO. This is the energy causing the more complete burn of gasoline.” In other words, the electrolyzing of water into HHO is not to create a fuel but to boost (by just a tiny bit on each stroke) the ignition of gasoline so that it burns more completely and efficiently.
And the hits just keep on comin’!
[REDLEADER] "[T]he valves and exhaust system should be replaced with stainless materials so as to prevent rapid deterioration due to high temp water vapor in the exhaust.
JLeather, my comment about water vapor was in response to REDLEADER’s concerns about corrosion to engine and exhaust parts.
As I said, I’m not an engineer but my understanding of the purpose of electrolyzing water to HHO is to allow the recombination of HHO into H2O to take place in the combustion chamber, the chemical action of which produces the small amount of energy to more completely ignite gasoline.
Well, the exhaust system would be fine. Many cars do come with stainless exhaust these days, just to avoid corrosion fro road salt and normal use. Constant hot water-vapor won’t rust them out any faster than they already do. In this, at least, I’m in agreement with you.
The valves, however, may need addressing. It’s not the high-temperature of the water that may damage them, it’s the comparitively low-temperature. If you subject the valve to repeated heat cycles (combustion heats the valve, water cools it slightly, over and over again) it will fatigue the metal faster leading to possible failures. Again, though, this is a far secondary issue. The pistons are the most likely item to fail first from such cycles, and the main issue at hand is if it even does in fact extend your fuel mileage.
WhyArts, I don’t mean it to seem that I have some personal vendetta against you. You keep writing what many others have also heard/read in terms if why and how this “works” (I use that term loosely) and I feel obligated to write an adverse viewpoint to provide ongoing discussion. I am, oddly enough, an engineer although most of the reasoning behind why this can’t work is grounded in High School physics and chemistry so an engineering background is mostly unnecessary.
In your last response you have posited yet a third theory, offhandedly I’ll admit. That the energy from the HHO more completely “ignites” the gasoline. This doesn’t seem particulary plausible because the gasoline and the HHO are ignited at the same instant and at the same position. While I’ll freely admit that Hydrogen propogates a flame faster, in the quantities being introduced by these HHO generators the effect would be negligible and certainly would not account for even a fraction of a mpg.
Frankly, I rather enjoy discussions like this so long as the responses remain atleast grounded in reality and reasonably amicable. I would welcome citations from some of the purveyors of these HHO generators so that I could see exactly how they claim their devices work.
JLeather, I’m not feeling personally vilified, and I appreciate your greater expertise. However, I do have the impression you’re not focusing on the difference between “water for fuel” and “HHO-enhanced gasoline”.
Google “MagDrive” and you’ll find an HHO generator manufacturer’s website with a page called “How It Works”. My impression is that the science presented is incomplete and questionable, possibly due to the fact that these guys are not the originators of the technology and just the sellers of the technology.
The “third theory” you referred to above is a more refined understanding of the thesis I first presented in these pages and am developing through conversation with you and others to explain the claims of a growing number of experimenters. A chemist might have more insight into the mechanism by which the recombination of electrolyzed HHO into H2O during the combustion of gasoline with additional hydrogen and oxygen could more completely convert that gasoline to useable energy. You can find many experiments on YouTube suggesting this is happening, but it’s true I don’t have the expertise to evaluate them. A less negative approach on your part (in which your intention is only to deny the possibility) might lead to a better understanding for me of what these folks claim is actually happening.
I apologize, I didn’t intend that as a cut. I may understand engine theory fairly well but I still depend on a mechanic to repair my car. We have been talking around each other because our language is so different. I finally realized today what you meant by pre-ignition, and the symptoms are what I have been trying to describe (evidently not well) as reasons not to do this: namely in some situations a significant portion of the combustion could occur before TDC. If that happens the engine could knock, the pistons could overheat, and “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …”.
My question about the spark plug discharge voltage still stands though. I have a reason for this question, oscilloscope wise, but will continue to defer any further comment.
Not only am I a lowly auto mechanic. I’m an even lower FAA certified aircraft mechanic and I also disagree with the premise that high octane fuel is designed for and should only be used on high compression engines for the following reasons.
Look at the compression ratios on high octane recommended forced induction cars in which an 8:1 ratio is the norm.
On many performance vehicles with forced induction it is recommended that the comp. ratio be kept low on purpose.
Even many naturally aspirated vehicles may have a recommendation to use Premium fuel.
Many of the antique motorcycles running flat track, as in the old days, run aviation gas and the highest comp. ratios you may see there is in the order of 6:1 or 6.5:1.
Aviation gas is pretty high octane stuff and many aircraft engines are in the 6 or 7 to 1 comp. ratio category.
Just a small sampling anyway and no, I’m not offended at all by the comment so no apology is necessary.
Most pre-ignition problems in modern cars (meaning DIS and ECC controlled ones) are seldom caused by the octane rating anyway. The usual suspect is a dirty or faulty EGR system followed by a faulty knock sensor circuit or possibly the excessive build-up of carbon deposits on top of the pistons (upping the comp. ratio basically and causing potential hot spots). The latter is very rare IMHO but easily solved if this is suspected by simply running a can of SeaFoam, etc. through the intake tract.
I’m a theoretician, not an engineer, so I’ll defer to JLeather if he also responds. But I took a look at the MagDrive website and I found a few flaws. On the “Test Results” page they state that “Gasoline is but only 13% efficient on average when it comes to actual power produced by the combustion process.” I’m not completely sure what they mean by this, but it is true that the average overall efficiency of a typical spark-ignition engine is on this order. But that’s not due to poor combustion; it’s due to several losses, including the actual combustion efficiency falling below the theoretical (Otto cycle) optimum of about 0.6; something called pumping loss, which occurs when the engine is running off the “sweet spot” (which it usually is); and various friction losses. Adding anything to the combustion can’t do anything about the pumping and friction losses, it can only boost the combustion efficiency closer to the theoretical limit (if that). But in the next statement, they claim “Adding an additional fuel [Hydrogen] and oxidizer [Oxygen] “aka HHO” causes the inefficient gasoline to burn at a rate of better than 95% efficiency.” Well, now I’m really confused. Even if this could somehow make the engine reach the Otto optimum (which it can’t), it would still have about 50% loss due to all the other sources it didn’t address. So something is fishy here. The only way I can see for this to give some improvement, as I’ve said in earlier posts (but not in these words), is to shorten the time of combustion and make it coincident as possible with TDC. The theoretical optimum condition in the Otto cycle is constant-volume detonation (the left-hand edge of the canonical slanted parallelogram in P-V space, if you have seen that figure) and HHO (or, as JLeather correctly points out, 2H2+O2) flashes to 2H2O much faster than gasoline combusts. So if the HHO flash speeds the gasoline detonation then it’s possible to get some improvement there. But it’s also possible to cause all sorts of other problems. And, though I haven’t looked at (i.e. modeled) this specific situation I would expect a maximum improvement of a few percent.
this doesnt work. gas prices are hitting records, of course there will be tons of things that “increase” your mileage. for one, it sounds like they are trying to say that they dry the water, which will seperate the hydrogen from the oxygen and burn it. well, where is the oxygen going to go? and another thing, when h20 dries, there are not seperate hydrogen and oxygen molecules, it is still h20 combined, its just in a vapor form.
Well, not exactly. The device is in fact producing Hydrogen (H2) and Oxygen (O2) as two compeltely separate gases from the electrolysis of the water. It is not merely producing water vapor. The H2 and O2 (or HHO or “Hydroxy” or whatever the website is calling it at the time) do not recombine into water until they are burned. Water is the byproduct of their combustion. The science behind electrolysis of water is quite proven and undisputed. Even adding the oxidizers as some of these machines do is not being called into question.
The question at hand is whether or not the H2 and O2 gases being produced and added to the engine provide any meaningful gains in economy over the energy required to produce the gases in the first place. It has been proven that you could not run the car entirely on water for any meaningful length of time (although some devices do claim to be able to do this). That would violate the 1st law of Thermodynamics. However, what this new crop of devices is claiming is that a small amount of Hydrogen (and it is a very small amount) will enhance the combustion of gasoline (which remains the primary fuel) and thereby increase mileage.
Not being a chemist, I cannot disprove this on a chemical level. However, the websites for these devices are fraught with misnomers, half-truths, and outright lies. Later I’m going to dissect a few of the MagDrive’s claims as being mostly irrelevant and misleading. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (like I said, I haven’t tried it) but I haven’t found a single site yet that offers even a decent explanation for why they claim it works.
I’m not particularly ready to fork over several hundred dollars to a site that can’t tell me why their device works, yet they claim to be improving it every few months (MagDrive is on their 10th iteration of their device, yet they offer no explanation of the science behind why it works).
Hopefully on my lunch break I have time to delve into a few of their errors.
this post (and the associated responses) is EXACTLY the reason why internet access during working hours should be prohibited!
enough with the pseudo science.
real results, with documented evidence. theoretical be damned.
JLeather, we’re on the same page now with the shift in your attitude that something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. I think even the HHO generator manufacturers don’t fully understand how their machines work, or want to protect their secrets - their focus is on taking advantage of the suddenly sticker-shocked public interest in boosting our MPGs, and not helping us do it ourselves. I became interested to save money, not spend it. I don’t want to throw away money on technology I don’t understand, which led me here to this discussion.
Experimenters do seem to reliably be getting about 10-40% better gas mileage by combining a trickle of HHO from small amounts of electrolyzed H2O with ordinary gasoline as it enters the combustion chamber. I suspect the reason is chemically-enhanced combustion of the gasoline. What would a chemist say? Could it damage the engine?
Alrighty then, cappy208. You get a gold star for being so smart.
See folks, this is why the forum title “water for fuel” is misleading and wrong. The real issue is HHO-enhanced gasoline.
[I think I’ve finally found a comprehensive and impartial assessment of the possibilities inherent in HHO-enriched gasoline.]
Hydrogen Injection
The technology of using hydrogen as a combustion enhancement in internal combustion engines has been researched and proven for many years. The benefits are factual and well documented.
Here is a synopsis of a sampling of the research that has been done:
In 1974 John Houseman and D.J/Cerini of the Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology produced a report for the Society of Automotive Engineers entitled ?On-Board Hydrogen Generator for a Partial Hydrogen Injection Internal Combustion Engine?.
In 1974 F.W. Hoehn and M.W. Dowy of the Jet Propulsion Lab, prepared a report for the 9th Inter society Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, entitled ?Feasibility Demonstration of a Road Vehicle Fueled with Hydrogen Enriched Gasoline.?
In the early eighties George Vosper P. Eng., ex-professor of Dynamics and Canadian inventor, designed and patented a device to transform internal combustion engines to run on hydrogen. He later affirms: ?A small amount of hydrogen added to the air intake of a gasoline engine would enhance the flame velocity and thus permit the engine to operate with leaner air to gasoline mixture than otherwise possible. The result, far less pollution with more power and better mileage.? In 1995, Wagner, Jamal and Wyszynski, at the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Birmingham, of University Engineering, Mechanical and Manufacturing>, demonstrated the advantages of ?Fractional addition of hydrogen to internal combustion engines by exhaust gas fuel reforming.? The process yielded benefits in improved combustion stability and reduced nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbon emissions.
Roy MacAlister, PE of the American Hydrogen Association states the ?Use of mixtures of hydrogen in small quantities and conventional fuels offers significant reductions in exhaust emissions? and that ?Using hydrogen as a combustion stimulant it is possible for other fuels to meet future requirements for lower exhaust emissions in California and an increasing number of additional states. Relatively small amounts of hydrogen can dramatically increase horsepower and reduce exhaust emissions.?
At the HYPOTHESIS Conference, University of Cassino, Italy, June 26-29, 1995, a group of scientists from the University of Birmingham, UK, presented a study about hydrogen as a fraction of the fuel. In the abstract of that study it stated: ?Hydrogen, when used as a fractional additive at extreme lean engine operation, yields benefits in improved combustion stability and reduced nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbon emissions.?
In the Spring of 1997, at an international conference held by the University of Calgary, a team of scientists representing the Department of Energy Engineering, Zhejiang University, China, presented a mathematical model for the process of formation and restraint of toxic emissions in hydrogen-gasoline mixture fueled engines. Using the theory of chemical dynamics of combustion, the group elaborated an explanation of the mechanism of forming toxic emissions in spark ignition engines. The results of their experimental investigation conclude that because of the characteristics of hydrogen, the mixture can rapidly burn in hydrogen-gasoline mixture fueled engines, thus toxic emissions are restrained. These studies and other research on hydrogen as a fuel supplement generated big efforts in trying to develop practical systems to enhance internal combustion engine performance. A few of them materialized in patented devices that didn?t?t reach the level of performance, safety or feasibility that would allow them to reach marketing stages.
California Environmental Engineering (CEE) has tested this technology and found reduction on all exhaust emissions. They subsequently stated: ?CEE feels that the result of this test verifies that this technology is a viable source for reducing emissions and fuel consumption on large diesel engines.?
The American Hydrogen Association Test Lab tested this technology and proved that: ?Emissions test results indicate that a decrease of toxic emissions was realized.? Again, zero emissions were observed on CO. Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Vehicle subjected to dynamometer loading in controlled conditions showed drastic reduction of emissions and improved horsepower.
Corrections Canada tested several systems and concluded, ?The hydrogen system is a valuable tool in helping Corrections Canada meet the overall Green Plan by: reducing vehicle emissions down to an acceptable level and meeting the stringent emissions standard set out by California and British Columbia; reducing the amount of fuel consumed by increased mileage.?
Additionally, their analysis pointed out that this solution is the most cost effective. For their research they granted the C.S.C. Environmental Award.
We also conducted extensive testing in order to prove reliability and determine safety and performance of the components and the entire system. As a result of these tests, we achieved important breakthroughs as far as the designs of the components were concerned. We have since increased the hydrogen/oxygen production significantly. This has resulted in increased effectiveness on engine performance.
The results of these tests were able to confirm the claims made about this technology: the emissions will be reduced, the horsepower will increase and the fuel consumption will be reduced.
From researching the Internet we also found the following information
To best describe how Hydrogen Enhanced Combustion works, we are providing this excerpt from a University Technical Report, written by Mr. George Vosper, P.Eng.;
…a Hydrogen Generating System (HGS) for trucks or cars has been on the market for some time. Mounted on a vehicle, it feeds small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen into the engine?s air intake. Its makers claim savings in fuel, reduced noxious and greenhouse gases and increased power. The auto industry is not devoid of hoaxes and as engineers are sceptics by training, it is no surprise that a few of them say the idea won?t work. Such opinions, from engineers can?t be dismissed without explaining why I think these Hydrogen Generating Systems do work and are not just another hoax. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a likely source of those doubts. Meaning …the law -would lead you to believe that it will certainly take more power to produce this hydrogen than can be regained by burning it in the engine. i.e. the resulting energy balance should be negative. If the aim is to create hydrogen by electrolysis to be burned as a fuel, the concept is ridiculous. On the other hand, if hydrogen, shortens the burn time of the main fuel-air mix, putting more pressure on the piston through a longer effective power stroke, and in doing so takes more work out, then this system does make sense.
Does it work? Independent studies, at different universities, using various fuels, have shown that flame speeds increase when small amounts of hydrogen are added to air-fuel mixes. A study by the California Institute of Technology, at its Jet Propulsion Lab Pasadena, in 1974 concluded:
The J.P.L. concept has unquestionably demonstrated that the addition of small quantities of gaseous hydrogen to the primary gasoline significantly reduces CO and NOx exhaust emissions while improving engine thermal efficiency.
This sounds like it was taken verbatim from one of their advertising flyer’s.
You posted several references here. Could you please name the source and publication and pier review articles.
Good eye, MikeinNH. I found the information by googling “HHO-enriched gasoline”, and didn’t realize the page was associated with the website of an HHO generator manufacturer called Hydrogen-Boost until your post.
Those who believe manufacturers can’t tell the truth about their products should disregard the information in my posting. Others should investigate the attributed sources and form their own opinions. I’m in the latter category.
Hydrogen-Boost sells the technology for $1000, by the way. From the photo of what you get, it looks like you could duplicate it all yourself for much less if your car has a carburetor rather than a fuel-injector with computerized oxygen sensor.