Posted on 07/31/2008 11:54:15 AM PDT by Red Badger
The hydrogen gas systems being used by several mid-valley drivers cannot deliver any kind of efficiency, says Bob Paasch, the Boeing professor of mechanical design at Oregon State University.
“The process is a scam,” he said. “It’s wishful thinking. If it were true, every power company and auto company in the world would be using it.”
Paasch said the systems — which use water and baking soda to create hydrogen via an electrical charge from the battery and alternator — violate the second law of thermodynamics and can’t work.
“People who buy into this are wasting their money,” he said.
Paasch has conducted tests on a similar device in the past and found it did not live up to any of the claims made by the inventor, who said it would deliver 50 percent more horsepower and double the gas mileage.
The systems being used are electrolysis, according to Paasch. Hydrogen and water can be burned through this process but more energy is required to drive the cell than can be extracted from it.
Ray Warren of Millersburg and Elden Huntling of Lebanon have the systems installed in their respective gas- and diesel-powered trucks and say they have seen a significant increase in gas mileage.
“These types of systems have been proven to be frauds,” Paasch said. “It’s impossible for the process to produce more energy than it consumes.”
Nonetheless, Huntling and Warren stand by their mileage claims. Warren admitted his mileage dropped significantly after several fill-ups but says he expected it and that a simple adjustment to his computer will correct the problem.
“I stand by the system,” he said.
Huntling has seen no decreases. “All I can say is that I’ve increased the mileage on my diesel truck by 64 percent,” he said. “It runs off excess power from the alternator.”
Paasch says this can’t be.
“The alternator doesn’t produce excess power. The alternator requires more mechanical energy than the hydrogen process can produce.”
Paasch also says the system is potentially unsafe.
“You have a highly flammable gas and the possibility of electric sparks in an enclosed space,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Baking powder is just baking soda with cream of tartar added............
You can probably get a significant mileage improvement by adjusting the computer. Your car's computer is set to make you pass your emissions tests, not for max mileage
Physicists disagree amongst themselves on issues.
That is true. However, you still can't generate energy from nothing. It takes more energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis than is generated from burning the hydrogen. You also have the fact that the alternator isn't 100% efficient.
So where does this energy that is the greater sum of its parts come from? There's no catalyst that is reducing the energy required to split the water molecules. The hydrogen doesn't dramatically increase the efficiency of the combustion of the gasoline.
The processes involved are well known, such things have been tried before without such results, and there is nothing new in this process to explain why the combination of it with a gasoline motor would suddenly become more efficient.
It's a scam.
The second law of thermodynamics isn't on the cutting edge of physics. It's bedrock. It may, on some scale of time and distance be totally wrong, there are no known creditable, repeatable observations that refute it.
As a matter of law, the U.S. patent office cannot accept an application for a perpetual motion machine. The patent office was spending millions of dollars a year rejecting such applications. It is tedious and expensive to "disprove" these claims in legal sense.
People have been trying since time immemorial to find a perpetual motion machine and failing.
No, the engineer is correct - this is an unsafe contraption. These things have a very thin veneer of credibility based on the fact that they *do* create flammable fumes or gases. Not fast enough or in sufficient quantities to replace even 1% of the car's liquid fuel needs, but enough to turn its own container into bomb fragments.
I once experienced a battery explosion. A new (few months old) Sears Die-Hard with a defective internal connection arced just below the top of the case, where the positive terminal connects to the end plate. When I twisted the key to "Start", it went *BOOOOM!* and bent the corner of the hood up. Sears paid for the repair, after several threats from my attorney.
Good luck getting satisfaction from one of these scam artists if someone loses an eye or your car catches fire.
Violating the second law of thermodynamics is entirely impossible.
Always has been. Always will be.
Entirely.
The alternator works no harder than the load imposed on it and can supply no energy until a greater load is imposed on it; the electrolysis device may impose a load of from 10 to 150 amps depending on design and volume of water being worked on.
This extra wattage must come from the engine working harder which burns more fuel; when the device is turned off the alternator goes back to the base load and does only that much work and the engine burns less fuel again.
At no time is there free work being spun off into the air.
Fuel injection was perfected with the introduction of the ECM onboard computer; all earlier models were big flops for all around driving.
Karl, you are right on the money, and this prof is typical: book accurate, but missing the point.
What they are doing with these systems is to trick the computers into leaning out the long-term mixture...or, allowing other devices to trick it without making the engine ping.
Problem is, the ECMs will allow 10-20% lean adjustment before they decide that something is wrong and flag a Service Engine Soon light.
So the prof is right that you can't violate laws of thermodynamics...but that's not what you need to do to have an improvement.
Oh..but car companies CAN'T do this and optimize only for fuel economy (1) for valve reliability, and (2) because ultra-lean mixtures will fail NOx EPA requirements!
HAHA! LOL! The EPA is blocking better fuel-economy because of emissions concerns.
First all there is a difference between mileage and maximum operating effieciency. Sometimes running more fuel saves you money. That equation is still not out of balance in my estimation, but more on that later. First:
Your not overestimating the amount of energy an alternator can convert from mechanical energy.
You are underestimating how much energy the resulting Hydrogen adds to the system.
Any extra load on the alternator requires more energy/fuel to service, voltage regulator or not.
If that tiny load to produce hydrogen overrides the tiny amount of energy contained in the hydrogen you are in the red. That is the point here.
Besides I thought we were all told the advantage of this sytem was in Catalyst reactions resulting in better burning? Or was it a chemically bound supply of Oxygen? Or any other BS this scam uses to propigate.
Truth is all it does is punch a hole in your intake, fouling the sensors, causing your highly computerised diesel truck to run lean, which it can because the modern computer controlled ignition system is smart enough to adjust to keep it running. That eventually will result in a repair bill far in excess of the fuel savings.
However this eventual repair bill is anticipated by modern computers that will eventually notice the trend and start running your good ol 7.2 richer again to compensate. Good Bye mileage gains, hello maximum operating efficiency.
Want to test it? Build one for your lawn mower or string trimmer and tell me how you make out...
— lates
— jrawk
“All I can say is that I’ve increased the mileage on my diesel truck by 64 percent”
Could you imagine companies with huge truck fleets like UPS, FedEx, JBHunt, etc NOT using this if it worked?
I always believed that energy isn't created its converted, its the efficiency and the by-product of the conversion that matters.
When you draw current from it, the flow of current induces a torque on shaft which requires more fuel to keep the engine turning at the same speed. The change in (torque x rotation rate) = the change in (RMS Voltage x RMS Current).
Try an experiment. Sit in an old (1964) Volkswagen with the engine at a low idle and turn on headlights. You can audibly hear the pitch of the engine change.
Good explanation. Some people can’t understand that getting more power from an alternator requires using more power to turn it. No free lunch.
Hopefully this will put this pipe dream to rest. It's a little embarrassing that it took this long for people to recognize that the laws of thermodynamics are, you know, laws.
All I’m saying is try it...don’t sit there and say it won’t work...my son has one on his truck he get better milage.
There’s a video of a guy out there running a B&S 148CC powered pushmower at about 250-300 RPM, chug-chug-ing away; the video follows a hose from the crankcase breather port on top of the Pulsa-Jet carburetor to the ground, across the lawn, through the garage door, up the stairs and down the hall, entering a bedroom and terminating at a huge fishtank filled with water and bubbling away.
Next to the tank we see an apparatus that he describes as akin to a Tesla coil connected to the tank and wired to the house wiring; in the foreground is a shaky ammeter showing around 25-30 amps.
It may be producing an output of approximately 1/2 H.P. while drawing the equivalent of 2 H.P. from the mains of the residence.
were talking about geting better milage from your auto not producing more energy
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