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HHo gas

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 7:19 pm
by trf_ssei
Hey Ive been doing some reserch and have found a cheap way to save gas through the use of electrolisis basicly extracting hydrogen and oxygen out of water and using vacum pressure to draw it in to the engine and to use less gas. im thinkin of makin one and i was just wondering if anyone has one or is familiar with the concept?

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 6:26 pm
by Icebound
You want to go to YouTube, and search out all of the postings by one: ZeroFossilFuel.

He has over 100 posts on the subject and a complete start-to-finish tutorial on building a cell. You want to go through all of them.

Last time I looked, there still was no concrete numbers on fuel savings that might be obtained. However, this guy appears very credible, if only because he does not appear to be "selling" anything, and is pretty much "up front" about what his research and experimentation has discovered...

There are other HHO enthusiasts on YouTube. Some of them might be credible... a lot of them are selling. You may find other credible stuff there, but ZeroFossilFuel seems to be the most so.

...

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 10:58 pm
by freneticburn
Maybe I just don't understand it correctly but wouldn't hydrogen cars basically be bombs on wheels? :???: Wouldn't a single car accident take out a city block?

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 11:06 pm
by Wes
also check out "stan meyer" on youtube.

and fb, uhmm, gasoline is flamable too. but the "cell" would primarily be water. one should also put a bubbler to prevent flashback.

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:29 am
by freneticburn
Wes wrote:also check out "stan meyer" on youtube.

and fb, uhmm, gasoline is flamable too. but the "cell" would primarily be water. one should also put a bubbler to prevent flashback.
I know gas is flammable too :P . I just always thought hydrogen was pretty unstable stuff and that simply air could ignite it. Admittedly I don't know a *dang* thing about hydrogen cars :sad:

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:36 am
by bonnevillain
it produces hydrogen constantly, more or less as needed. not stored up in a giant tank like gasoline.

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 3:37 pm
by Icebound
..

1.Electric Hybrid:
Use the leftover power from internal combustion to run an electric generator to charge a big bank of batteries.

2. HHO Hybrid:
Use the leftover power from internal combustion to run an electric generator to electrolyze an electrolyte into hydrogen and oxygen (HHO).

That's the easy part. (As I said before, you can find DIY plans or even buy ready-made HHO cells.)

The trick is.... once I have a big bank of charged batteries.... or my HHO gas.... how do I get either of them to turn my wheels?

Unfortunately for the HHO crowd, the battery-electric crowd have 100 years of evolution and refinement behind them.

HHO is going to have to meet battery-electric on at least 3 fronts:

1. Safety:
... although HHO is used up as soon as it is generated, there IS a finite amount of the highly explosive mix at any one instant.... and while it is probably not enough to take out a whole block, as freneticburn may worry.... it is certainly substantial enough to damage the vehicle itself.
Can the design of the cells minimize the threat of explosion to negligible?
Can they release the gas safely in an accident, for example?

2. Efficiency:
...there are lots of claims out there of 50% fuel-use reduction (mostly by the sellers of cells), and there claims of 10% in actual installations, and there are claims of even negative efficiency. The apparent ad-hoc nature of the experimentation is not producing very reliable efficiency information. It is also well known, for example, that we can't really use the existing power-plant unmodified... because the computer causes an over-rich condition when the HHO is introduced... so we have to tweak that, at the very least.
How much tweaking (and how expensive the tweaking)? Even in a best-case scenario, does the fuel-reduction efficiency match battery-electric?

3. Reliability:
...we all know how much maintenance we put into batteries.... basically zero.
Will an HHO cell approach that? Well, at the very least, we have to replenish the electrolyte, and probably clean the cell periodically.
Will the corrosive electrolyte require periodic rebuilding or replacement of the plates and the electrical connections?

SO... keep up the experimentation!!
The good news is that the internet helps developers share information, so that should help....

Intuitively, it looks promising. Let's hope that promise and implementation meet soon.

..

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:07 pm
by clm2112
freneticburn wrote:Maybe I just don't understand it correctly but wouldn't hydrogen cars basically be bombs on wheels? :???: Wouldn't a single car accident take out a city block?
No, we are talking about very small quantities of hydrogen being produced within a fuel cell and burned immediately.

The big problem with Hydrogen vehicles is the yield. Most of the "make hydrogen in the car from water" schemes violate the laws of conservation of energy in a system. It takes twice as much energy to produce the hydrogen gas to burn than what it will yield when the gas is converted back into power by the engine. Without a cheap supply of hydrogen, the equation doesn't work out. Yes, NASA made some permeable membrane hydrogen fuel cells for space craft. But the goal was to convert the fuel into electricity and they needed to use a fuel that they were carrying compressed in tanks (the cost to put the fuel in the tanks wasn't a concern, so long as it was light, would function in zero-g, and at very low tempuratures....and it couldn't be atomic power, though they would use on on some of the unmanned probes.)

Liquid fuels are still the best portable fuel supply for a vehicle.

Just a side note towards the maintenance of batteries mentioned above. The batteries being used in some electric cars have even more maintenance and cost than the lead-acid batteries we are all familiar with. The Tesla for example is using Lithium-ion batteries to achieve the power density that makes the cars work. Those batteries, by the designers own admission, represent fully a 3rd of the vehicles cost and will have to be replaced after as few as three years use. So, you are looking at a $30,000 hit every three years or so to bring the battery pack back up to it's original range and performance. Lead acid batteries are cheaper, but don't pack enough power in the same size and weight...so less range.

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 11:23 pm
by GonneVille
The "HHO" gas is HIGHLY unstable. As in, the least little bit of energy applied to it can cause it to combust VIOLENTLY. Think about it, when you burn hydrogen, you get water. When you electrolyze water, you get a near-perfect fuel air mixture of two H2 molecules to one O2 molecule. This mix is far easier to ignite than gasoline. So your device would consist of a jar filled with a highly unstable, explosive gas, with electrical wires stuck in it. Yeah, that's a good idea...

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:02 am
by Roadtech195
Hydrogen powered cars are not a promising solution to gas powered vehicles. If the world starts powering cars with water what are we going to drink in 50 years?

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:28 am
by freneticburn
Roadtech195 wrote:If the world starts powering cars with water what are we going to drink in 50 years?
Our own urine :???: . Haven't you seen Waterworld?! :P

Re: HHo gas

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:01 am
by Roadtech195
:laughing3: