"Convert your car to run on tap water"! "not fake!"
Discussion
john75 said:
This can infact be done but first you would need to split the Oxygen and the Hydrogen as both are good burners.
This was done on scrapheap challenge today
Laughed my tits off when that farmer bloke said they were going to make a Hydrogen Reactor to fire a tomato 20 feet
Hats off, it worked... and looked V V cool when it was going. Ok so it didn't work for long but...
Anyone know how much hydrogen you can actually get from a gallon of water? and can you run an unmodified engine on it?
Would it be similar to an LPG conversion?
D_Mike said:
It'd be easier to adapt your car engine to run on H2 and then make it by the electrolysis of water... but as previously pointed out you need to get the electricity from somewhere...
Initial power will be the problem... if you have a running engine you also have a generator... How much power is required to split water into its elements?
I was always fascinated by this possibilty in physics lessons
FunkyNige said:Pedant time ... Splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen isn't using water as fuel ... it is making fuel out of water. If you literaly want to use water as fuel, take your heavy water and try to fuse the deuterium ...
Using water as a fuel requires nuclear techniques - fusion - which nobody has cracked yet, and if they did it'd still be a lot more complicated than bolting some magic doobrie onto an existing engine.
You don't need nuclear technology to separate Oxygen and Hydrogen from water, if you want to convert the H2 to energy you need fusion, if you just want to burn it you don't need any special technology.
Oxygen doesn't burn, it's an oxidiser (funnily enough).
KingRichard said:
It'd be easier to adapt your car engine to run on H2 and then make it by the electrolysis of water... but as previously pointed out you need to get the electricity from somewhere...
Initial power will be the problem... if you have a running engine you also have a generator... How much power is required to split water into its elements?
I was always fascinated by this possibilty in physics lessons
I'm not a chemist, so I'd assume in numpty like fashion, that it takes as much electricity to break the hydrogen oxygen bonds, as you get back when you recombine the hydrogen and oxygen by burning. Then you have the losses.
dilbert said:
It'd be easier to adapt your car engine to run on H2 and then make it by the electrolysis of water... but as previously pointed out you need to get the electricity from somewhere...
Initial power will be the problem... if you have a running engine you also have a generator... How much power is required to split water into its elements?
I was always fascinated by this possibilty in physics lessons
I'm not a chemist, so I'd assume in numpty like fashion, that it takes as much electricity to break the hydrogen oxygen bonds, as you get back when you recombine the hydrogen and oxygen by burning. Then you have the losses.
Oh yeah, I mean... Its not going to be the sort of current you'll get off an alternator is it?
Otherwise I'm sure we'd all be filling up for free... come to think of it, if the government caught on it would be taxed to high heaven and cost 90p a litre!
Who cares?
They'd probably have us drinking red water so they could do spot checks on cars
KingRichard said:
It'd be easier to adapt your car engine to run on H2 and then make it by the electrolysis of water... but as previously pointed out you need to get the electricity from somewhere...
Initial power will be the problem... if you have a running engine you also have a generator... How much power is required to split water into its elements?
I was always fascinated by this possibilty in physics lessons
I'm not a chemist, so I'd assume in numpty like fashion, that it takes as much electricity to break the hydrogen oxygen bonds, as you get back when you recombine the hydrogen and oxygen by burning. Then you have the losses.
Oh yeah, I mean... Its not going to be the sort of current you'll get off an alternator is it?
Otherwise I'm sure we'd all be filling up for free... come to think of it, if the government caught on it would be taxed to high heaven and cost 90p a litre!
Who cares?
They'd probably have us drinking red water so they could do spot checks on cars
Well, you might be right. I've heard that Dr Pepper is manufactured from Hydrazine!
>> Edited by dilbert on Monday 9th January 01:27
D_Mike said:
Also - do you get more energy out from burning the hydrogen and oxygen than you had to put in to split them?
No. In a "perfect" system, you get exactly the same amount. In a "real" system, there are various losses, so you get less - usually quite a bit less.
Using water as a fuel requires nuclear techniques - fusion - which nobody has cracked yet, and if they did it'd still be a lot more complicated than bolting some magic doobrie onto an existing engine.
I'm not going to dig out the numbers etc. now and do a calculation but I always though that modulus of the free energy for H2 + 0.5 O2 was less than the activation energy for H2O --> H2 + 0.5 O2 in an electrolytic cell.
does that make sense?
I need to go and read my books.
I need to go and read mine too because I can't quite decide whether I've got my brain cells in a twist (which happens with depressing frequency
) or there's something slightly missing from that... I do have a bell ringing regarding a minor apparent anomaly - an entropy effect I think - whereby under the right conditions the electrical energy supplied to the electrolytic cell is fractionally less than you would expect, the difference being made up by thermal energy from the environment. So you do get a bit of "free" (in a colloquial rather than a chemical sense) energy, in that it is supplied by ambient heat rather than something with an economic cost. It's only about 1% though, so it's of no practical use unless your electrolytic cell and fuel cell are near-as-bugger-it 100% efficient, and even if they were, you'd need something the size of a tanker to produce enough surplus hydrogen to run a car engine. 
I own a car that runs on hyrdogen and the hydrogen is created from tap water and the sun:-
www.horizonfuelcell.com/
It may not work on big cars yet.....
www.horizonfuelcell.com/
It may not work on big cars yet.....
ebay scam artist said:
This conversion was demonstrated on BBC's 'Tomorrow's World' program in 1986.
I don't remember seeing that, but I do remember a "run your car on water" thing that was doing the rounds about that time. It operated by feeding current down an aluminium wire, which was consumable and fed in off a MIG-welder-type wire feed thingy, and sparking it against a metal wheel underwater. It did indeed produce more hydrogen than you'd expect from electrolytic effects. You weren't supposed to notice the aluminium wire being consumed, but that was where the hydrogen was coming from - the reaction of the aluminium with the water. In effect, it gave you an aluminium-powered engine. Not really very useful... GEC Hirst Research centre tested one and confirmed it was bollox.
OK. Own up whoever placed a bid!
The downloadable zip diagram creates oxygen/hydrogen in one lot all at once in the 'reaction' chamber.
Shall I build one and bugger up the lawn mower? May be a laugh....Hang on a minute though, what charges the battery? So the next problem will be..how far will it go on one battery charge. Unless of course I use the engine to charge the battery! Oh, yes! Perpetural motion. Perhaps I should suggest it to them.
The downloadable zip diagram creates oxygen/hydrogen in one lot all at once in the 'reaction' chamber.
Shall I build one and bugger up the lawn mower? May be a laugh....Hang on a minute though, what charges the battery? So the next problem will be..how far will it go on one battery charge. Unless of course I use the engine to charge the battery! Oh, yes! Perpetural motion. Perhaps I should suggest it to them.
Probably not a genuine product but without proof you don't know for certain.
Some years ago I heard of the Griggs pump or Hydrosonic pump. Mr Griggs was a plumber who noticed that vibrating pipes were warmer than other pipes. He patented a water heater which was very simple. A metal stirer rotated inside a tank while water was pumped through the tank. It worked. He refined the design and started selling water heaters, boilers and even superheated steam generators capable of supplying industrial sites.
When he toted up the energy being put in to drive the electric motor and the energy in the steam comming out he noticed that the "pump" was more than 100% efficient. He was very excited about this and spread the word thinking that he'd made breakthrough in science.
He was rubbished by nearly every scientist he spoke to. It broke the 2nd law of thermodynamics so it MUST be nonsense. Of course they conveniently overlooked the inconvenient fact that the sacred 2nd law is based on the Helmholtz conjecture which hasn't been proven. However Griggs carried on selling his "pumps" with the data he'd got to show that they really did put more out than they took in.
Pretty soon he was being denounced by many scientists and engineers as a crank while at the same time being thanked by his customers for saving them a slice of their energy bill.
Some people were interested in his invention and, after years of study, someone made the link to cavitation (something that happens in rapidly stired fluids) and the very high pressures needed to cause very small ammounts of FUSION.
Yep. Griggs was right. His device really did work. He'd invented a very simple and very low efficiency fusion reactor, it was just good enough to turn warm water into steam and make an electric motor look a bit like a motor with a couple of batteries strapped on its side.
So the people who told him he was talking rubbish because his invention didn't tie up with their views on how the universe worked ended up being wrong for simple reason that the universe worked in the way it worked, not how folk theorised it worked.
That last bit is very important. A lot of people will tell you, even when evidence is right in front of them, that something cannot be true because it isn't what they think should be true.
The moral.
He might be right.
But I'm not going to send him my money just yet!
Some years ago I heard of the Griggs pump or Hydrosonic pump. Mr Griggs was a plumber who noticed that vibrating pipes were warmer than other pipes. He patented a water heater which was very simple. A metal stirer rotated inside a tank while water was pumped through the tank. It worked. He refined the design and started selling water heaters, boilers and even superheated steam generators capable of supplying industrial sites.
When he toted up the energy being put in to drive the electric motor and the energy in the steam comming out he noticed that the "pump" was more than 100% efficient. He was very excited about this and spread the word thinking that he'd made breakthrough in science.
He was rubbished by nearly every scientist he spoke to. It broke the 2nd law of thermodynamics so it MUST be nonsense. Of course they conveniently overlooked the inconvenient fact that the sacred 2nd law is based on the Helmholtz conjecture which hasn't been proven. However Griggs carried on selling his "pumps" with the data he'd got to show that they really did put more out than they took in.
Pretty soon he was being denounced by many scientists and engineers as a crank while at the same time being thanked by his customers for saving them a slice of their energy bill.
Some people were interested in his invention and, after years of study, someone made the link to cavitation (something that happens in rapidly stired fluids) and the very high pressures needed to cause very small ammounts of FUSION.
Yep. Griggs was right. His device really did work. He'd invented a very simple and very low efficiency fusion reactor, it was just good enough to turn warm water into steam and make an electric motor look a bit like a motor with a couple of batteries strapped on its side.
So the people who told him he was talking rubbish because his invention didn't tie up with their views on how the universe worked ended up being wrong for simple reason that the universe worked in the way it worked, not how folk theorised it worked.
That last bit is very important. A lot of people will tell you, even when evidence is right in front of them, that something cannot be true because it isn't what they think should be true.
The moral.
He might be right.
But I'm not going to send him my money just yet!
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