Re: Can you really run a Car off of Water or is it a Scam

Alan Morgan wrote:
Bryan Olson wrote:
george wrote:
'Water' powered cars do not work.
It's a scam.
Hydrogen works in engines but the fuel itself is highly explosive.
Cracking water for hydrogen is time consuming and very expensive

What makes "cracking water for hydrogen" expensive is the energy. The cracking consumes at least as much energy as burning the hydrogen produces.

True but, to be fair, batteries aren't a positive source of energy. When
we talk about battery powered cars we really mean "cars that run off of
the mains power but use batteries as storage".

They're more often called "electric" cars.

If you had a car that you
filled with water, plugged into the mains and night (during which time the
hydrogen was cracked out), and then ran during the day by burning hydrogen
then you'd have something that might be called a water powered car.

Water is the analog of a *dead* battery, or at least an un-charged battery. Water is the *low* energy state.

"Hydrogen powered" might be a reasonable description of the night-charged system Alan Morgan describes above, but the scheme behind the O.P. of this thread is very different: the engine burns the hydrogen with the oxygen as soon as they are produced.

http://future-hydro-car.blogspot.com

That said, water powered cars are a scam.

This guy might not be a scammer; he could just be an idiot. Or, possibly, he's on a deeper level, fooling me. Though call. "Water power" is not his first failure; he reported trying for a year or so to make motors powered by permanent magnets, always one improvement short of closing the loop.

Considering his water-powered engines, in some cases, he computes a reasonable approximation of the electric energy he used to produce a certain volume of his gas mixture. In the rare case that he tries to compute efficiency, he gets a reasonable but disappointing figure:

I took a measurement earlier and I produced, uh, 520 milliliters
in 84 seconds, at 8.9 amps I think; 13 1/2 volts. It was 120
Watts, which gave me about 3.1 ml per minute per Watt. That is
just under 50% efficient, by Faraday.

He dropped a factor: It's 3.1 milliliters per Watt *minute*, not per Watt. A typo is no big deal, as long as we understand the reality. He says he produced 520 milliliters of gas in 84 seconds, with an input power of 120 Watts over that 84 seconds. That's 10080 Watt seconds, or, equivalently 10080 Joules in input electric power.

He collects the hydrogen and oxygen together into one container, yielding a mixture of H_2 and O_2. There should be twice as many hydrogen molecules as oxygen molecules, and if I recall my partial-pressure rules correctly, that means the volume of pure hydrogen would be about 2/3 of the volume of his mixture (using the ideal gas approximation).

Thus he produced roughly 347 cubic centimeters of hydrogen. How much energy is that? That depends, but we can get a a reasonable approximation by assuming "standard temperature and pressure." At standard temperature and pressure, the potential chemical energy of hydrogen (combined with oxygen) is about 13,000 Joules per liter.

Thus the chemical energy in burning the 347 cc's of hydrogen (with oxygen) is about 4510 Joules. Producing the hydrogen (and oxygen) from water took about 10080 Joules. That's about 45% efficiency, so his claim of "just under 50% efficient" for this one step, is, well, reasonable. On the other hand, we could get far better efficiency by putting that initial energy into an electric motor.

45% efficiency in producing hydrogen by electrolysis is nothing special: Google it up -- yeah, sure, we knew that. It might make sense in some contexts, such as where electricity is particularly cheep and hydrogen can be efficiently transported to where the energy is needed. Nevertheless, the idea behind this thread is just stupid, stupid, stupid, regardless of what Mike E. Fullerton has gotten into his head.


--
--Bryan
.

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