Some years ago I asked what happened with Gunnerman and his fuel. No one had any ideas, and there was even some doubt that it would work. I’ve managed to turn up some information on it, but I’ve no idea if there’s enough information in the patent (scroll down the linked page) to tell if it could work. There’s some fairly recent patents by Gunnerman on the page, so it looks like he might still be pursuing the idea. What with gas being $35,000/gal., I’d think that if he really pushed the idea (assuming that it works), he’d be rolling in the dough pretty darn quickly.
Water/Oil or water/fuel emulsions are not really new, and they are being used (or were…) quite a bit in the form of Orimulsion, which was about 25-30% water and the balance being bitumen and emulsifier. I went to Venezuela to work with the producer of it in the early 2000’s, and I even got a gallon as a gift (which de-emulsified within a year at room temperature…so much for your long-term storage claims, guys :rolleyes: ). Wartsila Diesel developed IC engines that could run off of Orimulsion, but there was just no market for it. NOx is controlled very easily with a catalyst, and the truth is, the largest barrier to any proprietary fuel working is the fact that it’s single-source. I worked with so many power plants and utilities that were gung-ho about Orimulsion, until they learned only one company in the world produced it. Then they weren’t interested any more. And as we see from the Orimulsion case, when they decided to stop producing it, it screwed people like New Brunswick Power royally. I will bet that no proprietary fuel is going to fly in the US unless it has an outrageous economic advantage.
However, as to the nickel breaking down the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then having it recombine it…I don’t believe it, within the scope of this specific invention. I don’t care what the article says, I am unaware of how just a catalyst with no extra energy input will do what they say it does. It sounds like so many things like “the platinum gas saver”, only worse.
That’s not to say you can’t run an engine on 50% water - if the other 50% has enough energy, why not? However, that doesn’t mean it’s efficient. How does the engine “run hotter” and not melt? It’s like they’re saying “it can run hotter and cooler at the same time.” And I thought the goal of water injection with turbos was to act as a crude anti-knock method, but I may be drunk.
Another thing they’re totally neglecting is latent heat losses, which are actually fairly significant (my guess is they’d be about 4,500 Btu lost per gallon of the 50/50 mixture just from the water alone)