Take a gander at the video file you can stream at this site:
Some guy claims that he’s essentially invented hydrogen power, the implication being that fossil fuels will soon be a thing of the past. It was reported on a local Fox affilliate. Yeah, I know it’s Fox but even so somebody is obviously going through a lot of trouble to make this thing look legit. He even has a so-called partially-water powered car.
I’d be interested to know what dopers have to say about this.
Yeah, well, it may be just me, but I take any website with the word ‘antigravity’ in its name with a grain of salt – maybe an entire oceanful.
The wonderful thing about living in a universe with consistent physical laws, is I don’t need to look at this guy’s streaming… video. You can get energy from burning hydrogen, but you need to get the hydrogen from somewhere. You can get hydrogen from water, but you have to use energy to do so. You can even do both, but the energy source you use to get the hydrogen will have to be something other than the energy you’re getting out of it. You could, for instance, burn coal to produce electricity, use the electricity to produce hydrogen, and then burn the hydrogen to power a car. That’s actually not all that far-fetched an idea, since we have lots of coal, but it’s not a practical automobile fuel as-is. But that’s also not a new idea, so this guy can’t be claiming to be the one to “invent” it.
If, on the other hand, he’s claiming that he’s closing the loop, using the hydrogen to produce the energy to produce the hydrogen, then I know, without even seeing his presentation, that he’s lying. Such a loop would violate physical law, and in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics. If he’s claiming that he not only closed the loop, but also gets power out of it, then he’s just violating even more physical laws.
I don’t know how much trouble it would be to make this “look legit”, but I do know that it would be a heck of a lot more trouble to violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful commentary he dryly remarked.
Maybe it’s some secret skeptic organization trying to do a case study on our news media’s scientific illiteracy.
I saw Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) drink the water that resulted as emissions from a Honda FCX…a hydrogen-powered car.
They’re (Honga) not claiming anything about completely removing the need for fossil fuels, though…mainly concerned with emissions.
259F will burn you, despite what it says in the article. That’s just above the temperature of boiling water.
I followed some of the links which ended up with a reference to “Brown’s Gas”. They seemed unsure if this was a combination of mon-atomic H and O (that’s where the H-H-O term comes from) or a "novel form of water; i.e., a gaseous form of water that is not steam. I’m not sure why it would be hard to tell what a gas is made from. Then there was the blurb below which clearly indicates the degree to which this is just a bunch of whack-jobs:
Chronos, you should read the primary website it’s not a magic fuel source. It appears that all they’re doing is electrolyzing water into atomic H and O then using the resulting gas mix as a cutting torch fuel or as an additive to gasoline that improves fuel economy.
It could still very easily be a pie in the sky technology scam, but they’re not claiming to violate physical laws.
Well, they’re claiming they’ve made a gas they define as H-H-O. You’d need two single-bonds from a single hydrogen atom to get that. Or, no. Wait. You’d need one single-bond and a double bond to get that. It’s been a few years since my last chemistry class, but I’m pretty sure that qualifies for violating physical laws.
I can forgive them being chemistry ignorant. People have done pretty amazing things chemically without knowing a damn thing about describing molecular structure, or even knowing that atoms exist.
That said, a number of the claims are dubious and I don’t quite know what to think about them. They claim varying BTUs in the gas, which is impossible, but that doesn’t mean that the flame doesn’t burn at different heats depending on what you point it at.
It’s the “burns through a process of molecular sublimation” that looks weird to me. I cannot even imagine what that means.
But in the end, it’s just hydrogen. Hydrogen is a good fuel. But, as others have said, you have to look where it came from.
Having read through that website, I think I now have exactly as much information about their alleged system as I had before I read it. Did you notice that, despite all of the very well-done design of their site, there was no actual content?
H-H-O is a mix of two mon-atomic Hydrogen molecules to one mon-atomic Oxegyn molecule. One of the cites claims that energy is lost in standard electrolysis when hydrogen and oxygen form H2 and O2 molecules.
“Monatomic” usually means a gas in which atoms are not bound to one another, like argon. The normal forms of gaseous oxygen and hydrogen, O[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub], are diatomic. If their claim is that they’ve got a big bottle of monatomic hydrogen, I say it’s bunk. Any time you’ve got a couple lone hydrogen atoms near each other, they will bond, whether you want them to or not.
Yes, but this is magic gas that doesn’t follow the normal PVT laws either.
Oh, so that’s why. It all makes perfect sense now. :smack:
I’m not saying that this technology isn’t crap, I’m saying they’re not peddling the same old free energy nonsense, which was your reason for not looking at the website. Their claims are pretty pedestrian, and I don’t think they violate any laws of thermodynamics, even if their explanations are outlandish.
I saw two claims. One was for using their gas in a blowtorch. I can see how an H O mix of gas can be an effective torch fuel, though I’d have to see it in person to believe it works the way they claim. Maybe the oxygen is promoting a reaction with the metals, causing the flame to burn differently depending on the metal. It’s not striking me as a claim that it’s some sort of super fuel.
The second claim was to route the gas into the combustion chamber of your gasoline engine, improving the efficiency. Again, you put H and O into a combustion chamber, I can see how it would combust. Will it improve efficiency? Probably not, but they’re not claiming to replace gasoline, or run the car entirely on water, they even mention that you need a bigger alternator to run the system.
Furthermore:
Biology doesn’t want you to know about birth control.
History doesn’t want you to know the real story of Christopher Columbus.
Algebra doesn’t want you to know how to apply its formulae to real-life situations.
Wood shop doesn’t want you to graduate with ten fingers.
Regardless of whether they are violating physical law or not, their claims are vastly inflated. No matter how you slice it, you wind up with less energy from burning the hydrogen and oxygen than you used to get it in the first place. There’s no way around this. It would be more efficient to just use whatever energy source they used to generate the hydrogen to drive the vehicle directly.
Brown’s gas, the so-called HHO gas, is ok for welding and brazing, but oxy-acet, oxy-propane and oxy-MAPP gas mixtures are all superior. Hydrogen just doesn’t have the energy density of those other mixtures.
Actually, I said that it was either free energy nonsense, or it was nothing new, either of which is sufficient to make it uninteresting. As it is, it looks like it’s a little of each, since their claims of improved efficiency of internal combustion engines are also, I think, sufficient to violate the laws of thermodynamics. And then you’ve got the conspiracy-theory silliness (science doesn’t want you to know), which, while not the same as claims of perpetual motion, generally merit about the same amount of attention.