Posted on 05/23/2006 9:27:27 AM PDT by floridaobserver
Though the developer of a technology that uses water to produce a flammable gas says it provides a solution to high gas prices plaguing the nation, detractors claim the businessman's idea is a scam.
Denny Klein is president of Hydrogen Technologies Applications in Clearwater, Fla. His patented machine uses an electrical charge to separate the atoms of H2O into HHO, a gas he calls "Aquygen."
"You get a huge energy response," Klein told the Tampa Tribune. "But this gas is very, very safe."
He first used the fuel to power a welding tool, but soon tried it out in a hybrid automobile.
The flame, though on its own registers just 259 degrees Fahrenheit, heats up to the melting point of whatever substance it touches, explained Steve Lusko, project manager for Hydrogen Technologies Applications.
"For example, when you ignite our flame and touch it to steel, it will cut right through it at 1,400 degrees," Lusko told WND.
"It will melt a hole right through a brick at 4,500 degrees. … It reacts to whatever it touches."
So, Lusko says, the gas has the ability to bond to whatever fuel it is mixed with, like gasoline in a hybrid car.
"Upon combustion, you get a dramatic increase in energy BTUs," he said, "and you get an equally dramatic decrease in emission pollution, because the burn is so highly efficient, what would have come out of the tailpipe as an emission ends up getting burned up and used."
An "electrolyzer" in Klein's 1994 Ford Escort uses electricity from the alternator to initiate the electrolysis process to make the HHO gas out of water, explained Lusko. That gas is then pumped to the manifold and into the gas tank.
"The gas then bonds with the gasoline in the gas tank," Lusko said, "and then upon combustion, that's when you get the reaction, giving you higher gas mileage and cleaner emissions."
Why not run a car with exclusively HHO gas?
"We have combustion engines here that have run completely on our Aquygen," Lusko said, "but it would be a matter of engineering."
Lusko says in tests the mileage of the hybrid vehicle has improved anywhere from 25 to 53 percent.
:)
I see no real indications that the government *is* spending any money at all on this nonsense.
There's just the con man's claims that he is "in negotiation" with some companies. Which can mean anything from "I'm making this up, who's gonna check", to "I keep calling them and negotiating with their secretaries to see if I can get them to pass on my invitation to their bosses."
"Can metal be welded to glass?"
That is a very good question.
I have dealt with metal piping (for various nasty chemicals) that had a glass lining bonded to the ID, but I don't know if it was really "welded" so much as hardened in place.
I've often thought that anyone aspiring to a PhD in any subject should have to pass math up through differential equations, just to prove that they are smart enough for the title "Doctor".
That would sure clean out the ranks of mush science experts running around.
I nominate this as perhaps the best insight offered so far in this thread... the reason that junk mail outfits are eager to buy mailing lists of idiots who respond to "Publisher's Clearing House" style Sweepstakes is that such people have a disproportionately high positive response rate to OTHER junk-mail offers, like magazine subscriptions. The best target for a scam is someone whose already bought into someone else's...... they have already demonstrated the requisite lack of intellectual skepticism coupled with the highly desireable (from the standpoint of the scammer) attributes of gullibility and willingness to invest his money in scientifically baseless horseshit.
It has been said that lotteries are "a tax on people who can't do math". These kinds of "free energy" scams are a tax on people who didn't learn basic science.
What we need to do is go in league with these guys, re-write their gibberish so that at first glance it may sound plausible to guys like us, then sit back while they do their stuff, take our cut and disappear before it all blows up (or fizzles out in this case). That's a recipe for wealth if I ever saw one.
Don't think I haven't been tempted. After decades of trying to rescue endless hordes of folks from getting snookered by scammers, politicians, propagandists, etc., and seeing how little headway I've made, it's sometimes tempting to conclude that some people just *want* to be bamboozled, and start giving them what they want. Telling people the lies they want to hear is a lot easier than actually working for a living, and it pays better. Plus as an old saying goes, "a fool and his money were lucky to have been together in the first place".
But alas, I'm too honest for my own good.
That is a very good question.
Some companies offer specialized connectors for transitioning between metal and glass tubing. The glass is "welded" to the metal somehow. I have never needed such a thing, so I don't really know how they do it. Those connectors are bloody expensive though.
LOL, now that'd be cool. I once got a letter published in my university's newspaper, complaining that if we engineers were required to take a certain number of upper-level "social science" & humanities electives to graduate, then the education and communications majors ought to at least have to take statics or thermodynamics.
I had similar experiences playing around with calcium carbide and water as a kid. (This was shortly after WWII, and I got the carbide from my dad's welding trailer -- where he used it in his acetylene generator...)
Reminds me of how the welders I worked with "cleared the line" on a "big inch" gas pipeline through the NM desert:
They would squirt oxy-acetylene from their cutting torches into the upwind end of a 200' or so section of pipe. Then they would stand aside, shout "Fire in the hole!" and light 'er off.
The "WHOOMP" and the fireball on the ignition end was quite impressive. So was the scatter of smoking rattlesnakes, jackrabbits and kangaroo rats that went sailing across the desert on the downwind end of the pipe!
I wouldn't want to be anywhere near even a small FAE detonation!
I don't see any evidence that HHO was created and collected. How do they know this was made? Did they do spectroscopy on it? Do they have predicted ab initio type calculations for it's structure and spectral properties? In all honesty, I think HHO may actually be a physcially possible species, but it's likely some type of unstable intermediate species that would rapidly, on the picosecond time scale, rearrange or dissociate into something else. After all, I've been to presentations on the formation of H3. But these types of chemicals aren't something you can accumulate and store. Frankly, the guy is full of BS on his water car project.
That is my thinking, too. So even though I didn't need to, I did take the classes and learned a lot. Really helped when I to more physics courses. And I'm a chemist!
No, I saw Dennis Lee demonstrate this flame. Put it on his hand and you feel the warmth but doesn't burn your hand. Immediately he put it on a tungsten wire, it got white hot and cut right thru it. There's something here alright, but exactly what is it? Some sort of feedback mechanism? Don't be too quick to criticize, you might end up looking foolish.
"The piece on CNN.com says some big boys ARE interested in the tech."
Yeah, probably the Justice Department.
"There's something here alright, but exactly what is it?"
Non-combusted oxygen. Some of the o2 burns with the gas; the extra o2 burns the metal and is ignited by the existing flame.
It's an old trick. Didn't you make a smoldering toothpick explode in 7th grade chemistry by adding 02?
LOL! We have a winner 8-)
http://hytechapps.com/index.html
Check the scientific paper that goes with this. The guy who wrote it can only postulate on what's happening, and yes, there are a lot of GCMS charts included.
I cannot help but wonder if it's not related to something on another weird site:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
Truth outs. So all we really have to do is pop popcorn and enjoy the show.
I'm with you, timer. There is something here that warrants further scientific investigation. I understand the desire to yell "scam", but I want what is being observed to be explained first.
(Good link in that other thread on Blacklight Power. I'm anti-quantum theory myself, [flame on, I'm sure] so I might find this guy's research papers interesting.)
There have been rumors/myths about someone inventing a vehicle that runs on water for decades. Most of these end with the inventor either being bought off or even killed by big oil.
It all depends on the carbon content.
I just can't seem to get my mind around that centigrade stuff, must be my Americocentric upbringing.
Non-combusted oxygen. Some of the o2 burns with the gas; the extra o2 burns the metal and is ignited by the existing flame. It's an old trick. Didn't you make a smoldering toothpick explode in 7th grade chemistry by adding 02?
Additionally, your hand (being mostly water) has a specific heat of close to 4.184 J/gK, while tungsten has a specific heat of 0.13 J/gK. This means that when the flame is placed on a piece of tunsten, it will heat up 32.2 times faster than the same-sized portion of skin would.
But wait, there's more! Also note that "timer" mentioned that it was a tungsten *wire*. This has a very small volume, and as a result it will heat up far faster than a larger chunk of tungsten would, much less a large chunk of your hand. The reason, in short, is that the energy of the flame has more volume to spread through in the larger sample, and the temperature change is thus smaller, whereas in the thin wire it has nowhere else to "go" but in the one spot being torched. If your finger is ten times the diameter of the wire, for example (and it's probably a lot larger), it has 10x10 = 100 times as much volume as the wire, and compounded with the 32.2 difference in specific heat of flesh versus tungsten, this means that the tunsten wire will heat up 3220 times faster than the finger when the torch is applied to it. And that's just a finger -- these demonstrations are usually done against a larger portion of the hand than just a single finger.
So it's little wonder that the wire quickly reaches the melting point while the hand doesn't suffer any immediate damage.
Add to that fact that in these demonstrations the flame isn't just focused on the hand in one spot for any length of time -- as you can see in the CNN video linked above, it's *waved* over a large swatc of hand, and not allowed to spend any length of time in one spot (unlike the "metal welding" demonstration). You can do the same trick with a candle flame -- keep your hand moving steadily over it, and you won't get burned.
Finally, there's the oxidation factor that MeanWestTexan points out. Tungsten readily oxidizes, and needs to be protected from oxygen, especially at high temperatures. As the webelements.com entry for Tungsten points out, "The metal oxidises in air and must be protected at elevated temperatures." Once the "welding" flame hits it and elevates its temperature, it'll rapidly combine with any excess oxygen and literally burn up. The same is not true of your hand -- skin is specifically configured *not* to be harmed by exposure to oxygen, for obvious reasons.
Finally, a mixture of H2 and O2, which is most likely what's being used in that demo, burns a cooler than, say, an acetylene torch or an arc welder, *and* has much lower heat density, both of which will yet again reduce the risk of the "waving it over my hand" trick, while still providing enough energy (and free oxygen) to toast the tungsten wire.
So all in all, there's nothing mysterious about being able to wave a flame over your hand without damage and yet being able to use the same flame to crisp a tunsten wire.
Sometimes, watching these reporters be impressed by ordinary chemistry and physics, I am reminded of the way that explorers used to awe primitive tribes by showing them Bic lighters in operation. "Heap big magic!"
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