Cheeper Way To Run Your Car?

[grahaml1500]

Just perusing the internet today and stumbled upon this garbage. Well worth a read if its possible;

http://www.water-4-fuel.com/

[sanjsanj]

if it works that well, surely it would be extremely popular all over the world by now?

[MadBaz]

Came across something similar posted on RAC forum, most of them fell for it, I had to politely point out it was a load of b0110x.

[stevie m]

Well i don't believe it :D People actually fall for this. If it was true he wouldn't need to sell it over the net.

[El Dingo]

The linked site talks a load of 8ollox.

 

However, techniques for water injection into petrol engines are almost as old as petrol engines. Do a Google search and you'll be surprised. :D

[MrT]

To put it simply the energy needed to extract hydrogen from water is greater than the energy you get back when you burn the hydrogen. Another manifestation of perpetual motion.

[machia]

I'm not saying it works because I don't know, but isn't the point being made that the internal combustion engine is not 100% efficient at converting fuel to power and that the modification enables recovery of some of the lost potential of the fuel already being used.

[sepulchrave]

No.

 

The only reason to use water injection (usually water mixed with methanol in fact) is to enable you to run a higher effective compression ratio and more ignition advance because the water systems charge cooling and quench effect delays the onset of detonation, it is almost exclusively used on tuned high output forced induction engines like Mitsu Evo, Scooby etc.

 

The premise of this particular scam is that the knock sensors found in all modern engines will allow the ECU to advance the ignition further than normal (like putting super unleaded in) thereby increasing torque slightly for a given RPM allowing you to back off the throttle fractionally more at lean cruise giving you theoretically very slightly more MPG under ideal conditions. It might work better on turbo cars. Unfortunately this system is so rudimentary I doubt it would make any difference at all.

 

Here is a proper high performance system for you to compare and contrast:

 

http://www.aquamist.co.uk/

 

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For my simple long life, planet, fuel and money saving plan simply send

Edited January 5, 2009 by sepulchrave

[seatkid]

I believe there was a chap that figured out a way to run a car on sea water. He gave up on it though as he could only get a little under 5 mpg.

[machia]

@sepulchrave

 

Thanks for your explanation.

 

I'm going to sound like I'm supporting this system, which I am not. I'm just as curious and sceptical as everyone else. The premise is not that water is injected but gas (hydrogen and oxygen) derived from electrolysis of water. Could injecting small quantities of highly flammable gas make a difference to performance?

[Bigjeeze]

One way of looking at this so called cheap technology is to ask - if it works why isn't it being used?

 

NickPV being a Physics teacher could perhaps explain to us how this might actually work ( the electrolysis element) because I don't think it does. If I remember my schoolboy science the only way you can easily get Hydrogen is to use Hydrochloric acid and chuck in some chalk or marble (Calcium Carbonate) and that somewhere along the line it gives off Hydrogen (Of course I might have that totally wrong!!) (Well it was 30 plus years a go)

[sparky Paul]

It certainly is possible to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, simply pass a DC current through tap water and you will find hydrogen is produced at the negative electrode. However, as has been said earlier, the amount of energy required to do this is less than that recovered by combustion.

 

There are a number of issues with burning hydrogen, one of which is that the waste product is water, which is not very engine friendly. Another problem is that the gas produced in most of these devices is actually a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, often termed HHO or 'hydroxy', which is highly volatile...

 

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gfk8jXVUF34

Edited January 8, 2009 by sparky Paul