Laws?...We don't need no steenking laws!.....................
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.”
Not just brush your teeth...anyone else remember [way back] those little frog-men, submarines, and battleships that you filled with baking soda and watched swimming around the bathtub?
Laws?...We don't need no steenking laws!.....................
Now if you don't mind, I'm off to the auto parts store for a couple of muffler bearings and some blinker fluid.
Being a really really old person..I often wonder about what happened to something I actually saw on BBC TV many years ago.
A guy named Ferguson (he owned the Massey Ferguson tractor company) was showing off a car he had invented. The vehicle was powered by oil or similar fluid under pressure in a tank under the hood. Two hoses led to each wheel and the fluid was forced against an enclosed fan on each wheel. Then it was returned to the holding tank..when under braking the fluid reversed the jets and stopped the car.
There was a minimum of oil loss to the tank and it was just topped up every few months.
I was just a slip of a lad at the time..but I can still see the driver aiming for a brick wall and stopping easily.
You might think that this system would have had massive publicity..but I never heard anything else about it after that news flash. I would be interested to know if anyone else has ever heard of this?
What a tremendous thing if it worked!! No more engines or gas to worry about..oil companies going tits up all over the place!!
Badgers! We don’t need no steenking badgers!
This article http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/31/energyefficiency.energy
was posted shortly after this one.
Personally I like the solutions proposed by the boys on RedStateUpdate.com.
Windmill powered cars are sponsored by the Democrats while the Republican favor autos powered from the pelts of endangered species.
And where does that energy come from? Could it perhaps be from the mechanical energy being put into it from the engine?
If the alternator really were capable of putting out more energy than is being put into it, one could connect the alternator's output to an electric motor and have the electric moter drive the alternator. Voila, instant perpetual motion!
If one could climb down to Jimminy Crickets scale of molecular viewpoints, todays engines are lacklusterly tossing clumps of logs on the fire like wasteful locomotives in an old western.
We would still be breathing wasted combustion byproducts of these "loco ~ motives" just like China is today, were it not for the little heat engines called catalytic converters clinging to our tailpipes under our a$$$es.
But, that's another story of corruption and control I'm not at liberty to reveal.
Very true.
However, we know how much energy can be gotten from burning the hydrogen and how much energy it takes to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. It takes more energy to split the molecules than you get from the hydrogen.
If there were some catalyst used to reduce the energy to split the molecules, that might help explain it, but there doesn't seem to be any catalyst in these kits.
The internal combustion engine isn't 100% efficient, but adding hydrogen to the gasoline isn't going to suddenly make it more efficient or make either burn with dramatically greater efficiency.
So where does the energy come from to increase the efficiency?
My guess? They are charging up a battery, using the battery to power they splitting of the water in to hydrogen and oxygen, but not recharging the battery. Your system is actually less efficient, but you're ignoring one of the energy sources.
I often see theoretical scientists that are looking at the hole and not the donut when it comes to applied science; they are often over-optimistic or over-pessimistic when pronouncing what MUST happen when theories move to application.
Without looking at cost, simply the engineering of the application, I would tend to take the word of regular people who are actually using something as opposed to an academic who claims what those people say they are experiencing cannot possibly happen.
I don't know if it works or not, but this idiot is full of BS.
Of course the second law of thermodynamics would apply in a waste free system. However, the alternator on your car is turning whether the battery is being drained or not. The load on the engine is lighter when the alternator is not charging the battery, but the load does not go to zero. This is lost energy. If this energy is captured by increasing the throughput of the battery, and fed back into the engine in the form of hydrogen, you have not created more energy in the system, you have simply reduced waste.
If this smartass want to shoot his mouth off, he should construct a true scientific experiment with controlled variables and present the results for peer review. Anything less is crap and he should shut up. We don't need educated idiots mucking up the water.
Or just turn the air conditioning on in any car with 4 cylinder engine and see what happens, even driving down the road you will feel the power drop and have to compensate by pushing down on the accelerator, which is why you get less gas mileage(regardless of engine size)with an air conditioner on than when it is off.
This isn’t exactly true. In fact the alternator DOES produce “excess power”. It produces MORE energy that is used in MOST vehicles to 1) power lights, radios and so forth and 2) keep the battery charged completely. (Not all cars have high duty alternators).
Point here is there IS excess energy being produced from the alternator.
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The vast majority of cars have alternators that are computer controlled/on demand types that do not run continuously as the first generation ones in the 1960’s and 1970’s did ... They have very short duty cycles and high output.
If you want to save fuel ...
1.) reduce your miles driven if possible
2.) reduce friction losses , windows closed if at more than 40 mph , tires inflated properly , light engine oil ..
3.) lean out your mixture ,, most cars are about 20% richer than they should be for max mpg (rich for emissions) ,, retune using an exhaust gas temp guage and adjusting mixture by manipulating the O2 sensors signal.
Guess it is still possible, but the mechanism would not be what this engineer thinks it is. Got to solve the given problem not the one you make up because you know how to solve it.
I don’t think you are correct. Your statement violates the law of conservation of energy.
While the watts produced by the generator may be more than the system can use or store, the watts quantity transmitted through the belt to the alternator is greater by a significant margin. A 60 % effieiency would be good, meaning that there is a 40% loss.
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