Hey guys . . .

I had a physics professor in college who used to say "When in doubt, do the math. And, as a physicist I am always in doubt . . ."

So let's sling some numbers in memory of my physics professor, Clyde Baker.

In order for these gizmos to work to the degree claimed, hydrogen needs to be produced in sufficient volumes to take the place of gasoline.

Now there is plenty of research out there about running cars completely on hydrogen, so lets borrow some 'facts' and see what the numbers say.
http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/watercar/h20car2.htm
http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/fuelcells/pdfs/fcm03r0.pdf

Consider a theoretical 1000cc single cylinder engine. Lets call it an outboard motor setup, where there is constant load and single throttle setting to make the calculations easy.

If we charge this theoretical 1000cc cylinder with gasoline and air so that we would have say 983cc of air and 17cc of gasoline vapor, we can do a comparison.
If we run with this throttle setting at 2000 rpm for 1 hour we would use:
17000 cc/per minute (One such charge every other stroke)
or 17 liters of gasoline vapor/per mintue
at 75:01 vaporization rate that is .22 liters of liquid gasoline per minute or
13.6 liters per hour. Roughly 3.6 gallons per hour . . .
All in all a pretty thirsty little boat!

The source for this data
http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/fuelcells/pdfs/fcm03r0.pdf
suggests that to run the same engine entirely on hydrogen we would need a 300cc charge of hydrogen per stroke (leaving only 700cc of room for air) so the engine will not be as powerful as it was on gasoline.
So with the same throttle setting at 2000 rpm for 1 hour would use:
300,000cc/per minute (One such charge every other stroke)
or 300 liters of hydrogen gas/per minute
18,000 liters of hyrdrogen gas per hour.

When I ran these numbers this morning over coffee, I thought 'jumpin jerry cans, Batman. How much water would it take to harvest that much hydrogen gas?'

Some research on the web found a source
http://www.eagle-research.com/browngas/whatisbg/whatis2.html
that indicates that 1 liter of water will produce 983 liters of gas. Now the one exam question I did get right in Chemistry was the stoichiometric relationship between hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water (2).
Using this relationship, if one liter of water produces 983 liters of gas -- then 625 liters of it is hydrogen.

So if we take this result back to our bass boat we can estimate that we need:
18,000/625.333 or 28.78 liters of water per hour. Rouhgly 7.6 gallons of water.

Now bear with me through one last set of calculations and you'll see where I am headed.

If we are to increase gas mileage in our bass boat by 40% we need to cut down the amount of gasoline consumed by 6.8cc per powerstroke:
Again with a throttle setting for 2000 rpm that gives us
10200 cc/per minute
or 10.2 liters of vapor/per mintue
at 75:01 vaporization rate that is .136 liters of liquid gasoline per minute or
8.16 liters per hour. Bringing fuel consumption down to roughly 2.27 gallons per hour . . .

But we need to replace the gasoline with hydrogen at 40% of the volume of hydrogen that would used to run the engine entirely on hydrogen (300*40=120):
So with the same throttle setting at 2000 rpm for 1 hour we would use:
120,000cc/per minute (One such charge every other stroke)
or 120 liters of hydrogen gas/per minute
roughly 7,200 liters of hyrdrogen gas per hour.

But to produce this much hydrogen we need about 3 gallons of water:
7,200/625.333 or 11.51 liters . . .

. . .and we need to convert it to hydrogen over the course of 1 hour.

This is where the doubt sets in for me.

First because the articles I've read talk about a gizmo built out of chunk of 4" PVC pipe, 3 or 4 inches tall. This holds 2 liters at most.
They also talk about hooking it up to a 12 volt DC system in a car at 12 or 15 amps -- 144 to 180 Watts.


Well another source I found today suggests that it takes some 79 Kilo Watts to produce 1000 cu feet of hydrogen -- which is roughly 28 liters:
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/garrett.htm

If we take this back to our 1000cc bass boat, we need to produce 7200 liters of hydrogen to improve gasoline economy by 40%. But to do this the guys keelynet suggest that we need more than 20,000 Kilo Watts of electricity to do the job.

A PVC pipe with a 2 liters of water plus some battery acid and 15 amps of DC just doesn't seem to add up . . .

Even if one argues that the gizmo is in fact producing Brown's Gas
http://www.eagle-research.com/browngas/whatisbg/whatis2.html
and that the gizmo is harvesting the pure oxygen as well: http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/001.1/
there's just doesn't seem to be enough of the stuff to make even 40% difference let alone the greater claims. The volumes of hydrogen required are just to large when the engine is a 4 liter I6 or 5.7 liter V8 . . .

BTW this is why cars with hydrogen burning engines are just not around . . . the engineers haven't figured out how to produce or carry around enough of the stuff:
http://www.tipmagazine.com/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-1/p20.html
I don't know about you, but given a choice between carrying 8 liters of gasoline (2+ gallons) versus a 90 liter bottle of hydrogen compressed at 2200 psi . . .
think about that, to carry the equivalent of 15 gallons of gas you would need 7 such hydrogen cylinders . . .
filler up with with hi-test please!

stock49

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