Post by ep191 on Jan 18, 2009 23:41:46 GMT -5
An engine extracts work from chemicals with high potential energy (gasoline, diesel, propane, natural gas, vegetable oil, hydrogen, etc) by converting them into other chemicals with lower potential energy (water and carbon dioxide) and turning the resultant heat and pressure into mechanical energy.
An engine can't run on water alone because there's no energy to be extracted by splitting it. In fact you have to put energy in to water in order to split it (hence the electrodes, this device uses electrical energy to perform electrolysis to split the water into its components).
So this device uses mechanical energy from the engine to spin an alternator to make electrical energy to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen to burn in the engine which makes water and creates the mechanical energy to spin the alternator, etc, etc, etc.
A good thought experiment is to imagine an engine running on this system alone (i.e. start the engine, then switch off the gas so it runs on electrolyzed water alone). If this actually worked you would have a perpetual motion machine, which can't exist. In fact this would be even better than a perpetual motion machine because you would have to overcome the waste that occurs every time you convert one type of energy to another (the waste heat that occurs when you move the pistons, spin the alternator, and electrolyze the water is all lost energy) and still have gobs of energy left over to move your vehicle around.
Now in the real world we would still be running gas in the engine all the time, but what the thought experiment shows is that performing the convoluted electrolysis process should result in a net loss of energy, and worse gas milage.
If this actually results in a milage increase (and that's a big if) I suspect what's really happening here has more in common with nitrous oxide injection than anything else. The atmosphere is about 20% oxygen so when your Jeep engine sucks in 4.0 liters of air it's really only getting about .8 liters of oxygen, and any more fuel than will burn with .8 liters of oxygen is wasted. Nitrous works because a nitrous oxide molecule is 33% oxygen. If your engine sucked in 4.0 liters of nothing but nitrous you would have 1.3 liters of oxygen in there, and could burn a similar amount of extra fuel per stroke, resulting in more power and efficiency. Well, water is also 33% oxygen, just like nitrous. Splitting water molecules and dumping the resultant gas into an engine should have the exact same effect as bleeding nitrous into the intake, except you're still wasting energy performing the electrolysis process on the water. I'll bet a controlled experiment where a measured amount of nitrous oxide and electrolyzed water were bled into 2 engines would show that the nitrous engine has better power and efficiency if the nitrous oxide is provided in a tank and the water is electrolyzed on-board, and the performance would be identical if both gasses were provided in tanks. Depending on how much energy is wasted in the electrolysis process it might be cheaper to just use nitrous, or do nothing at all.
In the end this all comes back around to another thread I posted about how many miles you'd have to drive in a hybrid to make up for how much extra money you spent on it (upwards of 500,000 miles). In the grand scheme of things gas really is cheap. Even if you spend a few hundred bucks on a kit like this and get a few extra MPG as a result you're going to have to drive thousands of miles to make that money back. It's just not worth it.
