The engine's response to HHO injection

[wateronfire]

Hi, I thought I'd post a comment since I saw you're not yet a true believer!

In regards to this technology, it will most definitely create enough hydrogen to power a car although you'd need to produce about 300L per hour to run it successfully if my calculations are correct.

From a 12v battery running it in an 2005 Alfa Spider JTS we're producing approximately 30L per hour on a very tiny HHO generator and it's only drawing about 20-25 amps.

For a fact, it takes a car anywhere from 400-750 amps just to start a car and the alternator will definitely replace that 20-25 amps as you drive or if the car's sitting at idle which is probably less than a car stereo draws at high volume.

As I mentioned, this was from a very tiny generator that only holds approximately 200mL of water (though it has a reserve bottle that acts as a bubbler to stop flashback (which is always a danger when dealing with very light and highly flammable gases.

I have had this discussion about "it takes more to produce than it powers" argument with many "learned" people including chemistry majors and scientists and usually they're the hardest to convince simply because a book says so. Their argument is usually "it doesn't work because it's not what I learned in school!" and that's the whole grounding to it. I've also heard a saying "Contrary to popular belief" which I don't think there's many scientists with open enough minds to uphold.

Time for some new ideas in my opinion. I don't hold much stock in scientists "rock solid" theories, especially when they still haven't figured out how bees can fly yet with modern "laws" of physics. (Their wing span and the speed they buzz their wings shouldn't allow them to get off the ground) Go figure, huh? FACT: Bees can fly!

FACT 2: HHO does work and increases the burn rate of the existing fossil fuel, firstly cleaning the exhaust emissions and secondly allowing the car to burn less fuel simply by supplementing some of the fuel with hydrogen.

IMHO, it doesn't mean it's gospel simply because someone wrote it. I've read a lot of crap fiction books in my life and until fairly recently (in relative terms) the world was flat according to the majority of the world.

Browns gas (HHO), invented by a man who ended up settling in Australia named Yull Brown (I'm a proud Australian so I had to throw that in) discovered it approximately 80 years ago so it's not exactly new technology from the research I've done so far.

Anyway, my best results are approximately 60L per hour with the small generator simply by increasing the amperage.

With a sizable generator you could very easily create enough to power a car although you'd need to ceramic coat the internals of the engine to stop the vehicle from cooking itself, much like they do with the space shuttle hull.

Anyway, just thought I'd put in my 2c about it and don't think I'm having a go at you or your friend at all. This is just my opinion and you're very welcome to yours but don't listen to your mate! Keep on with the research and you'll find that it is true!

Cheers and have a good one!

Regards,


WaterOnFire

Originally Posted by Nightwish

Hello all, I am new to this...BUT very excited about HHO...

First a little baout myself...

I am a 38 yr old published writer and am very interested in some of the great inventions and inventors...

I was in championship truck and tractor pulling for 10 yrs. I would like to think i know a lot about motors and have extensive experience with alcohol powered 600+ cu in mountain motors.

I believe in HHO technology but have been told by some that the process is impossible with an Alt like on a car. Here's what one of my friends said:

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Don, it in fact does cost more to produce than the energy you get from it. The stuff I found shows that if you do the electrical conversion to produced hydrogen btu's, then you wind up with about a 33% loss.

I also found that it takes about 50 kw-hr of electricity to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen.

Now, Power = E x I

Using a 12 volt system, it would require 4167 amps of electricity to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen in one hour. How many automobile electricial systems have you ever seen that can handle 4167 amps?

AND........

Nightwish, it takes 50kw of power for 1 hour to produce the hydrogen equivalent of 1 gallon of gas. That means that in a 12 volt system, the current would have to be 4167 amps. The amount of hydrogen released is directly proportial to the current. So, if you were running on, say, 20 amps in your car, you could produce enough hydrogen to equal the energy of 1/250 gallon of gas in one hour.

But, you have to remember, that your engine is now working harder to produce that 20 amps. You don't get amps from nowhere. And it actually takes more gasoline to produce that 20 amps for an hour than the 1/250th gallons of fuel you would save.

-------------------------------

OK, so can someone tell me about how this works...

How much water would a normal car use if its creating a fair abmount of Hydrogen?

How much current...Amps does it take to create this HHO gas and why does everyone say it defies physics?

How much would you have to put in the motor, to get near 40% more MPG? Would that take a BIG Alt,....and more AMPS?

Thanks in advance !!!!!!!

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

Well, some of the problem with scientists and engineers, is that they are like the bee, specialised. Get something that falls between disciplines and they can't explain it. Automotive engineers fall into the trap of treating certain things like the physical and chemical characteristics of fuel, as constants, because all they ever worry about is regular gasoline. Aerodynamicists couldn't explain the bee for example, because they were used to dealing with lift in a certain way. That by the way has been solved, it's the vacuum between the wings as they are wrenched apart at the top of the stroke that makes it's lift. To get anywhere with explaining how HHO works fully, you'd have to lock a physicist a chemist and an automotive engineer into a room for a while. ... and it would be quite a while, they'd be arguing semantics for ages. A physicist looks at thermodynamics differently from a chemist or engineer. An engineers belief system is based on the fact that his tools are simple and infallible, he gets upset if you start re-explaining his mathematical wrenches, chemists are little closer to the bare bones of the theory, but still tend to treat it like a holy relic. Physicists should know more about where it all comes from and what the implicit assumptions are and therefore how they might be changed by unusual circumstances. But, the physicists don't know enough about engines, unless they start from first principles, and are likely to regard them as an uninteresting solved phenomenon and trust the engineers reckoning of what's going on, that's what engineers are for right? So you'd need to sit them all together and continually prod them with "Where does that come from?" and "What assumptions are implicit in this?" and generally knock their heads together to get them thinking rather than mechanically going through the motions of their booklearning.

[R.I.D.E.]

My car burns a gallon of fuel to travel 58 miles. 300 liters of HHO gas contains 12.5% (by atomic weight) of hydrogen FUEL. You have 75 liters of gas that if condensed into a liquid would be less than 1/800th of 75 liters of liquid hydrogen.

The equivalent of 75/800th a liter of liquid hydrogen fuel.

Thats .09375 liter of liquid hydrogen fuel, you claim can replace slightly more than 1 GALLON of liquid gasoline.

That means your mileage would be 2474 miles per gallon of liquid hydrogen produced, compared to my 58 MPG on gasoline.

I did not convert liters to gallons, so I know my figures are off a little.

58MPG is 100KM on 4.04 liters. Its very close, only off by a couple of percentage points.

Your generator would need 12.5 gallons of water per hour, to produce 1 gallon of liquid equivalent hydrogen fuel.

It also assumes you can generate 5 times (300 liters per hour) the volume of gas you claim at 1 liter per minute (60 liters per hour).

What a miracle, all I need to do is carry 1 gallon of liquid hydrogen in my car to travel 2774 miles. Thats one trip across the United States from coast to coast on a gallon of liquid hydrogen fuel.

Of course that is assuming MY calculations are correct.

regards
gary

[R.I.D.E.]

Lesson 2;

At 58 MPH my car is running at 2000 RPM. Assuming effective induction is about 50% of atmospheric density (throttle restriction), the engine is consuming 1/2 of .75 liters of fuel and air mix per revolution.

.375 liter X 2000 RPM=750 liters per minute.

750 X 60=45000 liters per hour to get 58 MPG.

You are saying you can replace that volume of fuel air mix with 300 liters per hour of HHO.

Now you also must realize that your HHO mix is 87.5% pure oxygen, while the atmosphere is 20%, so in your defense lets say your HHO mix contains 5 times the oxidizer of the atmosphere.

For the benefit of the doubt lets say your 300 liters is actually the equivalent of 1200 liters considering the oxygen density of your oxygen portion of the mix.

That's still only 3% of the fuel and oxygen required to get 58 MPG, in a very efficient car.

At 300 liters per hour, God only knows how much energy you would need to electrolize that amount of HHO, but I would guess about 20 horsepower minimum.

regards
gary

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

I think there's something happening on the microscopic scale which helps explain what's going on with hydrogen enhanced combustion. The best way I can think of explaining it is to refer to the Brownian motion of pollen grains, this is a classic demonstration, that should have been covered in any high school science course.

Now gasoline molecules are quite large, and bouncing around in the combustion space, they tend to space themselves fairly evenly, the number of molecules per unit volume is fairly constant. For combustion to proceed, they have to be close enough to each other for a chain reaction to occur. The thermal energy of one molecule reacting has to reach another molecule to excite that one. They are probably only just a tad above their vaporisation temperature and are bumbling around quite slowly. Introduce a small amount of H2 however, and you have lots of very small molecules with higher velocity careening all round the combustion chamber bouncing off the big gasoline molecules. When one of these lights up, it's probably gonna bounce off a dozen gasoline molecules before it's part is done, plus any other H2 molecules it encounters, this may be in the same space of time as a large bumbling gasoline molecule would only light off two others. Thus the presence of the H2 has a significant effect on the speed of the reaction. In the time where the gasoline molecule is just finished reacting and is ready to transfer thermal energy to another molecule, and slowly bumbling towards one, it is meanwhile having carbon dioxide and nitrogen molecules careening off it (it's a big target) which are absorbing it's thermal energy and damping the reaction. Also it's slow speed of movement means that every time it bumps off a chamber wall, it transfers a large part of it's thermal energy to the wall of the chamber, so it may not excite any other molecules after it has done that. The higher speed hydrogen molecules however, go zipping off the walls like high energy rubber balls, energy barely diminished, smacking into the large target gasoline molecules, which absorb their energy somewhat more like sandbags than do the more rigid walls. The gasoline molecules also have a high likelihood of condensing against the walls whereas the H2 does not. Now the reaction products from the gasoline have a higher proportion of CO2, which compared to H2O is also a relatively ponderous molecule. So those also have less success in transferring thermal energy rapidly to unreacted molecules.

It's also somewhat like gunpowder, fine grains will make a lot of pressure and burn fast, large grains will make a lot of heat and burn slow.

You can also think of it like this...
You have a single match and start off with 12 candles, each candle can light 2 other candles (yeah it's an arbitrary rule but bear with) Say the match lasts 12 seconds, and candles can light other candles at the rate of one every 2 seconds. (Yeah another one, but it is slightly more tricky to light a candle with another than with a match, coz you have to tilt it careful in order not to swamp either wick) If you space the candles 20ft apart and it takes 2 seconds to move between them, you get 4 candles lit off your match in 12 seconds (3secs total each) which will result in a total of about 127 candles burning by the time you're done... whereas if you shorten the time between each lit candle to 1 second, here represented by moving them close together on a table top, so you can touch a match to each in quick succession, then you end up with 4095 candles burning when your match goes out. (I'm not quite happy with those figures, brain can't math this early, but suffice to say, 1st sitch = small number, 2nd sitch = exponentially larger number) We also may observe that in addition to not lighting the candles as rapidly, we have wasted the heat energy of the match in the first situation as compared to the second situation, it basically "did nothing" all the time it wasn't lighting candles. The heat was lost to the environment.

So, we might interpret H2 as our "high speed" match, and gasoline on it's own as the candles and the regular low speed match. However with H2 we have more than one match, and it would continue lighting other "candles" at the rate of 1 a second (i.e. faster) than the candles took to light each other. The candles would light other matches too, quickly, which kinda fits in terms of the analogy as touching a matchhead into a candle flame will light it more quickly than carefully touching wicks and trying not to drown either of them.

It does not take much imagination to see that even relatively few "matches" speeds up the lighting of the candles significantly.

This would also explain why the lean limit with a H2 and gasoline mixture has been observed by MIT to extend to 26:1 ... even though the gasoline molecules are much further apart, the H2 whizzing around can bounce off enough to keep the reaction going, whereas the larger gasoline molecules and then their mostly larger reaction products would not cover enough ground soon enough to be able to transfer enough energy to sustain the reaction.


Anyhoo, that's just another attempt at creating a mental picture of what is going on.

Road Warrior.

[R.I.D.E.]

Road Warrior, without exception I enjoy reading your posts, which are more in a debate methodology that a confrontationalist tone.

I understand the principle of enhancement of combustion especially after your excellent analogy and explanation.

As a counterpoint consider Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition, which has been tested and proven to increase combustion efficiency by 25%. Emissions with HCCI are reduced to the point where catalysts are no longer necessary. Efficiency is comparable to diesel engines with BSFC map peaks of 41-50% depending on the size of the engine (bigger is better due to heat transfer characteristics).

Beyond 50% you have to deal with the basic energy loss characteristics of the IC engine, heat transfer, reciprocation losses, pumping losses, accessory drive losses, etc, etc.

HHO actually has enough explosive force to actually run an engine that was configured to operate without compression, so it is rational to assume the enhancement under small percentages of throttle opening would be even greater that under WOT conditions.

One thing you can not dispute, that is the fact that there is a measureable amount of energy to perform a measureable amount of work. These are known quantities and are the reason why the HHO advocates choose to ignore engineers that simple state the facts that, if understood by the reader, would not be subject to so much dispute.

Even if HHo was capable of achieving true HCCI (and I doubt it is that simple), you still do not have more than 28% increase in efficiency total, assuming the perfect state of energy conversion.

Beyond that your limiting factor is not in the fuel. It is in the basic design of the engine itself.

My engine design has the potential to pass the threshold of 60% energy conversion efficiency, and one configuration is actually specifically designed to have no compression or significant pumping losses, because combustion pressures created with a perfect mix of HHO can produce power without compression and the assciated energy losses that are called "pumping losses".

In other words I have an engine design for HHO alone, because there is no real need for compression, due to the energetic combustion properties of HHO compared to gasoline.

Another point to consider is the fact that if you injected pure oxygen into an engine the combustion would also become much more energetic that with the 20% oxygen content of the atmosphere.

To assume a perfect recombination of hydrogen and oxygen in the milliseconds of a combustion event also seems like a stretch of what I would consider to be factual. Once recombination occurs, which is when the heat is actually generated then heat transfer to the cylinder walls would be comparable to a non HHO engine.

I just don't see enough added energy, even with much higher concentrations of HHO to affect the total BTU content of the energy supply, and this is the reason why combustion enhancement, as well as a steam pressure boost would be the only possible reason for HHO to make a significant difference.

That doesn't make me right or wrong, it jsut make me very skeptical of the claims when they are worded like "Run your car on water" which is pure BS.

Yes it is possible to build an engine that would run on water, but it will not be configured the same as a normal vehicle engine designed to run with compression on gasoline.

One of our tricks we played on people in the body shop when I was much younger was to mix some acetylene and oxygen in a paper cup and light it off. The resulting explosion was very powerful, and was achieved without any compression whatsoever.

It is my opinion that a HHO engine would be configured much like a non compressing pump with the HHO injected into the smallest (TDC) volume of the pump and ignited. Much the same as the attempts to produce and engine that ran on gunpowder.

regards
gary

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

I can't pick fault with any of that really.

As you point out H2 needs very little compression, and it can take up a large volume in the combustion chamber, which is why if we were building an engine for H2 it would probably be of large displacement and very low compression. and hence why they are messing with pressurised direct injection for hydrogen, to get it into the chamber at higher pressure without detonating. They're hitting practical limits at about 50% efficiency with that.

However, what I think we're missing is where a gasoline engine is most efficient, and where it's 30-35% peak efficiency numbers happen. Which is at near full load, near full thottle somewhere near the torque peak. This is why an extreme pulse and glide technique can get 70mpg out of a 35mpg car, and why of course you designed your motor to accelerate and store momentum. Our peak efficiency numbers happen nowhere near the state of steady highway cruise "optimum mpg" speed. We're getting 35mpg but at that point, it's only at 16% of so efficiency. This is partly because our motor is at least twice the size it needs to be for going this speed. So our motor is "too big" for maximum efficiency on gasoline at this point, and it's in high vacuum, meaning low effective compression ratio. Bad for gasoline, but as you partially observe and is known, good conditions for hydrogen. So we don't have to really magically find extra BTUs, we just have to put the BTUs we're using to work pushing on the piston instead of heating the coolant. That's how it can be possible to see "extreme" increases in efficiency, not because you've gone markedly higher than the practical 30% efficiency of a gasoline engine, but because 3x 16% is easy. If you were a heavy hypermiler, doing P+G to the max, I doubt you'd see much of an increase with HHO, maybe 20%. So your typical in service gasoline motor, "too big" for gasoline efficiency on the highway, kinda gets shrunk down to size towards more "perfect" when you can get some HHO in there, in terms of where it's peak efficiency is.

[R.I.D.E.]

Excellent counterpoint.

I would still like to see a controlled experiment where a given load was applied, in the normal range of inefficiency incurred when steady speeds and low throttle positions produce poor efficiency (say 40 mph cruise).

It's just too easy to perform such an experiment with separate hydrogen and oxygen sources and regulated volumes.

Then you would have credible evidence to support the hypothesis of enhanced combustion characteristics.

Maybe I have grown too cynical in my old age, but with absolute proof so easily produced, I tend to think the reason is the proof just doesn't exist.

I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong, because we would all benefit from credible data.

regards
gary

[GasSavers_Ven]

you guys sure know how to make a guy feel smarter and dumber at the same time!!

[Jay2TheRescue]

[Rant]

All I really want to see is someone take a normal, average vehicle like a Taurus or an Accord and enter it into the garage. Get a couple of months worth of good gaslog data entered, do some simple mods like grille block, air dam extension, and learn to drive it right, then experiment with HHO so everyone here can truly see what's going on and how it relates to a normal vehicle.

The science debates are fun, but in the end nothing beats a true, long term test where the rubber meets the road. So far we've been bombarded with people telling us that they installed HHO on their vehicle, and then made a 20 mile highway trip where their mileage was increased by 20 - 30%, and then we never hear from them again. I guess the MIB and the black unmarked helicopters chased them down and made sure this information never got released to the public. As it is right now, truly working HHO systems are like Chupacabra, grey aliens, Bigfoot, Yeti, and Elvis sightings. (I wonder if Elvis is running HHO in his Cadillac?)

We need to cut through the rumor, fuzzy logic, and political agendas. Just show us a vehicle with a charted "before HHO mileage", then install HHO and show us what you get afterwards. Its just that simple. I am trying to keep an open mind about HHO, and if someone can show that it actually works then I'll start building one next week.

I'm sure that there are many others on this forum that feel the same way I do.

-Jay

[/Rant]