Posted on 05/20/2006 10:05:50 PM PDT by Sunsong
Denny Klein thinks he has found a new commercial use for hydrogen technology.
Working in a small, two-room shop at the Airport Business Center, Klein, 63, said he has developed a gas that speeds welding and fusing times and improves automobile fuel efficiency 30 percent.
Although the technology Klein uses -- electrolysis -- has been around for decades, he said it's the form of gas that comes out of his electrolyzer and the characteristics of the gas that set his hydrogen technology apart.
Klein's gas is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Sound familiar? Yep, it's water.
Electrolysis is a process that uses an electrical charge in water to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. But coming out of Klein's gas generator, the H2O 1500 electrolyzer, it's not water, he said. Klein, president of Hydrogen Technology Applications Inc., calls it HHO, or the brand name Aquygen.
"You get a huge energy response," Klein said. "But this gas is very, very safe."
Klein -- who employs eight people, four in Florida, three who handle licensing out of Kentucky and his son, Greg, in Ohio -- is no engineer. The Ohio native attended Ohio State University and Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, for business administration.
His aptitude in hydrogen technology came from self-study. He has worked alongside engineers in whirlpool spa and suntanning businesses, and says he has six employees with doctorates on his advisory board.
Klein said he has a patent pending on the gas he has been working on for 12 years. Various models of his H2O electrolyzers are being used across the country in high school shop classes and undergoing testing to be certified for use in welding shops.
Flipping a switch on his H2O 1500, Klein picks up a hose with a metal tip, creates a spark, and instantly a blue and white glowing stream shoots out of the metal tip.
He holds the tip with his fingers to prove how cool it is to the touch, unlike such a tip when oxy-acetylene is burned for welding. But the instant he sets the flame on a charcoal briquette, it glows bright orange. Then, within seconds, he burns a hole through a brick, cuts steel and melts Tungsten.
The temperature of the flame is 259 degrees Fahrenheit. But it instantaneously rises to the melting temperature of whatever it touches, Klein said. Those temperatures can exceed 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"You can't do this with any other gas," he said.
Klein also has outfitted a 1994 Ford Escort station wagon with a smaller electrolyzer that injects his HHO into the gasoline in the car's engine. He said he has increased his mileage per gallon by 30 percent.
That also is undergoing testing from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other private motorsports companies, Klein said.
Klein said he has 19 projects in the works.
Ali T-Raissi, director of the hydrogen research and development division of the Florida Solar Energy Center, said he is not familiar with Klein's HHO or electrolyzer. But he said applying hydrogen technology in that way comes at a price.
T-Raissi said mixing the hydrogen with gasoline will require a change in the typical car engine. And creating the gas requires electricity, which comes at a cost.
"You can increase your mileage performance, but you have to ask: Am I still ahead, or am I behind?"
Klein said his formulation of hydrogen doesn't require altering an engine. And his electrolyzer cost about 70 cents an hour to operate, which he considers a bargain.
Klein said his method for introducing hydrogen into a vehicle to increase mileage is superior to hydrogen used in fuel cells.
One of the biggest challenges facing hydrogen fuel cells is storing the gas. To meet today's driving requirements, it would take a lot more hydrogen than can now be stored safely in a vehicle. Klein's HHO is made on-demand and mixed directly with the gasoline in the engine at slightly more pressure than is currently there.
He said he plans to take Hydrogen Technology, which now has private investors, public in the first half of 2006.
Then scroll down to link with words by this TV news report from FOX 26
And click on that link
IIRC, there was a thread on FR within the last year or so about the technology of mixing hydrogen into welding gas; one of the Engineers said it has been known about for a long time, and I belive it was referred to as "Brown's Gas".
I tried Googling and searching by keyword for that thread.
Does anyone else know how to find it?
Sir
Try Brown Gas instead , came up with many hits
Googling that is
Thanks!
There is definitely some kind of relationship between what this guy is doing and Brown gas, but the two gasses are supposedly distinguishable.
If you go to the Clearwater guy's website, you'll find a paper that outlines exactly what they think they have and how it differs from Brown gas.
It's beyond me, I have to say.
And when you have to ask yourself that question you're probably dealing with a scam.
Try exploring around here:
http://hytechapps.com/index.html
Dennis Lee, the traveling science showman, was demonstrating that to audiences around the country years ago. Saw his show in Butte, MT some 6 or 7 years ago. He'd put his hand in the flame, then on tungsten wire, cutting it w/brilliant white radiation. So, if it worked THEN why are you only hearing about it NOW? Another idea as to fuel efficiency : edge "lawnmowers" on boxes. Remember the old push lawnmower with curved blades? There is a guy in England who's developed a plane with fast spinning curved blades on wing-rods just like that old lawnmower. Sounds crazy, but it WORKS. It may not be a practical concept for an airplane but consider : a brick shape is 14 times the wave drag of a torpedo. How many UPS vans, semitrucks are BRICKS being inefficiently shoved through the air right now? What if you had 4 spinning edge "lawnmower" curved blades/rods on the front 4 edges of your brick, pulling off the air on the front surface(tensile stress)and 4 more on the back(compressive stress). Thus you would reverse the C-T wave drag to T-C wave THRUST, and use about 1/10th the energy you use now with ground wheel thrust(otto/diesel cycles, drive train, etc). Any aerodynamic engineers here?
As I understand it, this scheme is simply a matter of timing. Instead of storing the hydrogen, qnd burning it later, this guy is simply re-combining it with the same oxygen from which it was recently dissociated by electrolysis.
On the face of it, improved efficiency in recovering the energy used for electrolysis should result from using both reaction products, instead of storing only one for later use.
As for his other claims, nous verrons...
Putting aside practicality for a moment, this is an example of the idea I have been thinking and writing about; call it open loop, partial fuel injection. A modern IC engine is basically a real time control system for maintaining complete combustion. The injection maps are generally broad enough to handle an apparent shift in fuel demand with all other inputs held constant, and without popping an ECM code.
Putting the engineer's hat back on, this strikes me as similar to belting a motor to a generator, and expecting some benefit. If there were some controlled test data available, I would read it, but my first concern would be to find the hidden "Gotcha". I would also be concerned with possible changes to the quality of the fuel in the tank. Introducing excess raw H2 into a pressurized heated hydrocarbon stream might produce some chemical changes. There's a regulator on the fuel rail that returns unneeded fuel to the tank, so H2 gas will evolve from the fuel in the tank.
Just a few thought...
It would be really neat to read some comments made after the commenter has actually gone to the mans website and learned something about his process.
It is obvious that most of the recent comments have been made with not one whit of actual knowledge of what this inventor is actually doing.
I posted the link to the website above. I wonder if I had installed a hit counter to measure how many times the link was clicked if it would measure more than one.
There is no molecular hydrogen H2, or for that matter any molecular oxygen involved in this process at all, as you should have read.
The electrolysis process here is unique in that it does not completely disassociate the oxygen and hydrogen. Instead, apparently there is a unique compound of hydrogen and oxygen that may have been heretofore unknown with a different type of molecular bond.
As a result neither the oxygen nor the hydrogen is available to react with other substances. What happens is simply that the higher energy HHO returns to the lower latent energy state H20 with the release of heat.
All of this raises many legit and profound questions. But none of them are the questions you raise, and I'd suggest that you might find a study of what this guy is actually doing to be very interesting. You obviously have a mechanical bent and some experience. I'd like to hear what you have to say based on what this guy is actually doing.
See my post 12.
I have read the article and scanned the links. To what are you objecting in my post?
The Wiki page on Brown's gas specifically mentions that the leading theory is that monatomic Hydrogen and Oxygen are available. The rest about some higher energy form of water smells enough like snake oil to to let it go for now.
Claims of net power production using water as a combustion fuel do not agree with physics.
Just that what this guy is doing is obviously not disassociation of water in to H2 and O. Also, he is not making Brown gas.
I agree that there is a whiff of snake oil about all this. I was hoping that you could sniff it out a bit.
Clearly that can't be any net energy gain. Any claim that there is is hokum, pure and simple. I see this as a possibly useful tool in welding, metal cutting, glassblowing, etc., but I can't figure out how it has any use as a transport fuel or even an additive.
How could this possibly add to the milage of gasoline as an additive if the gasoline engine has to power the electrolysis in adition to propelling the car? This part of the story is extremely suspect.
"This unique gas is infinitely stable until it comes in contact with a select target media. Then it sublimates, causing a molecular surface exchange of certain elements, reacting with such excitation as to cause temperatures of up to 10,000° F..."
This bozo is trying to make sounds like a chemist -- by tossing aroung chemical and thermodynamic terms --with no real knowledge as to their actual meaning:
Bottom line: the guy may have a gizmo that breaks down water for welding applications -- at the cost of considerable electric power. However, he neither knows how to make scientific observations nor the intellect/knowledge to describe those observations in proper scientific terms.
IOW the charlatan is a bull$#!+ artist -- no more; no less.
See #17...
Some guy in my hometown had a mystery box that could transmit data over telephone wires as fast as fiber optics. He got millions of development dollars from big companies, including Cisco, before being exposed.
"There's one born every minute..."
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