Water burning engines...

[jimkim]

I've seen the hydrogen injection kits in the hot rod mags and other Industry mags so I know they are available. The thing I'm mulling over now is maybe a dual fuel vehicle using ethanol and diesel in the same engine at the same time. I was wondering if you ran it really lean with the ethanol and started the combustion process using it then injected the bio-diesel with an electronic high pressure injector if it would yield more usable torque and higher mileage. I was thinking you could build this kit using a stock gasoline engines' ignition to trigger the injectors. It might make a good kit for existing gasoline powered vehicles. Just a thought.

[Windwalker]

Jim Kim, I think your basic idea will work. If you pursue this, let me know how its going. I was referring to the hydrogen project.
Your other idea on the ethanol-diesel is interesting tool

[jimkim]

Windwalker I've been trying to get the funding for that first idea since I was in high school. I came up with the idea in the ninth grade. Every few years since about '88 I hear how someone has built the thing. The last time I heard it was Honda. It was supposed to be for sale in the US in 2006 but I haven't seen it. I heard that on an industry program on the speed channel. The unit was supposed to produce electricity for an entire house and the byproduct was hydrogen which you would use in your vehicle. The new thing seems plausible. I think it would make a heck of a truck engine. I think it would fix the cold start problems with the big diesels. I'm just a tinkerer but these things keep me up at night.

[TXplt]

Honda was building a hydrogen-fuel cell type of car. I think this is where you'll probably seel alot of development (hopefully) in the future. You can have a fuel cell powered-battery-electric type of car. This will get the max bang per buck, because you can regenerate some of the energy lost in braking back into the battery (or whatever energy storage device) before it becomes heat. Electric motors are very efficient (greater than 95% in some cases) as well. Our major problem with heat engines (i.e. the ones we got now) is we typically throw away 2/3 of the generated heat vice get useful work out of them. There's no way to get around this--the 2nd law of thermo limits us. If you could use waste heat from a cogeneration plant at your house to produce hydrogen, you could conceivably power your car or anything else out of it. You might be able to use the exhaust heat from a generator to make hydrogen, and use whatever heat's left for water and home heating. This would be a pretty efficient setup, but would also be expensive (maybe worth it). It would also require some type of primary fossil fuel (natural gas or maybe coal) for the generator.

We might be able to catch a break on this via nuclear reactors--After (or during) using heat to make power, we could recoup some of it on a large scale to make hydrogen to power cars via a high temperature chemical reaction. This has the potential to get "something for nothing" if we can use some of the waste heat after making power to do something useful.

HFCIT Hydrogen Production: High-Temperature Water Splitting

Even for coal plants, there's technology available right now that takes the SO2 and NOx from the flue (i.e. most of the "bad" pollutants from coal) and creates nitric and sulfuric acid (I know--a company I invested a couple of $ in to do this went bankrupt due to mismanagement and lack of interest by the energy community). If you wanted to get real efficient, you could use the sulfur-iodine cycle to produce hydrogen at new coal plants too.

For home use, the hardest thing is getting the energy to start with--a 990W solar array costs about 9 grand--this really isn't that much power. DOE anticipates this potentially dropping to $3/watt at some point. That's why wind turbines have been more popular than solar, at least in windy places.

[jimkim]

check this site out. Honda Worldwide | November 14, 2005 "Home Hydrogen Refueling Technology Advances with the Introduction of Honda's Experimental Home Energy Station" This is what they said would be on the market by now.

[TXplt]

^^ Thanks for the link--looks promising. Looks like the cogeneration on a smaller scale--produce electric power and use the waste thermal energy to help produce hydrogen for a fuel cell car. The prime energy source is natural gas, which is clean burning (although creates as much CO2 as anything else, but I don't think this to be a pollutant personally). Think I'd buy one if it was $ feasable. We do have alot of natural gas in this country. This would help. Maybe now that oil's up the market will launch stuff like this.

[SuckLead]

Originally Posted by Zephri

hmm water burning engine, what happens when the world gets short on water? probably much worse than being short on oil, we need this stuff to survive ya know!

I was thinking the same thing. With the amount of drivers plus the amount of people who need water to survive... I know a lot of the Southern states are already hurting enough for water.

[TXplt]

^^Water's split to make the Hydrogen, then recombined with Oxygen to make water again. No net change.

In fact, burning fossil fuels (hydrocarbons of any sort, gasoline, coal, natural gas, carbohydrates, even you living and breathing) creates not only CO2 but actually creates water as well. Alot of clean, fresh water as a matter of fact.

[jimkim]

If anything we would have more rain. The water vapor would probably form clouds and there would be an increase in rain.

[TXplt]

Yeah, this is psychologically why the global warming folks have gone after CO2. It's hard to argue with a source of fresh water for the world. Burning fossil fuels provides this. If you look at the old German airships, some would (I've read) condense and capture the water exiting the engines and use it for ballast. Since Oxygen was heavier than the hydrocarbons it replaced, the net effect was that the extra weight could help manage buoyancy. They could dump what they didn't need overboard. Quite brilliant actually.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by TXplt

Yeah, this is psychologically why the global warming folks have gone after CO2. It's hard to argue with a source of fresh water for the world. Burning fossil fuels provides this. If you look at the old German airships, some would (I've read) condense and capture the water exiting the engines and use it for ballast. Since Oxygen was heavier than the hydrocarbons it replaced, the net effect was that the extra weight could help manage buoyancy. They could dump what they didn't need overboard. Quite brilliant actually.

Interesting tidbit, TXplt. Does it bother your conscience any to know my wife is going to be mad at you for burying my honey-do list a little deeper, because I'm going to be checking that out, and probably sidetracking into dirigibles and blimps, and German history, and WWI and...?

[TXplt]

^^My wife's already mad at me for the ED Comment LOL ......You gotta know I have no conscience--I still own some Oil stock

At least you know the water part's true--read about it as a kid, and the then number was enough H20 to fill a pretty big canal from NY to LA just from cars.

For the psychology bit I think you can look to Britain to Maggie actually (read an article on this but lost the link). Trying to get folks over to nuclear power (which is a good thing, I believe) but maybe the wrong way to go about it--another conspriacy theory for ya.

While you're at it, here's another TI link for what it's worth.

A New Metric to Detect CO2 Greenhouse Effect*&!@#% Applied To Some New Mexico Weather Data

The airship thing I read (from what I remember was) from Barry Schiff in AOPA pilot and I thought it pretty ingenious. You're effectively taking oxygen from the surroundings (with a molecular weight of 16) and using it to replace the carbon leaving in the fuel (with a molecular weight of 12) and thus, ideally, gain weight in the form of water which can later be dumped as desired for ballast. As long as this is more than the unburned HC and uncaptured H2O the ship actually gains some weight (in a perfect world) as it burns fuel. I don't know if it was a winnner in practice so that they didn't need to dump much hydrogen on the way over, but it sounds plausable.

Good luck

Cheers.

[Texan]

Originally Posted by ArkansasHunter

Was the inventer murdered ? I watched another video after this one that said he was killed, but it didn't say. This country needs to jump on this and have a massage change over to it.
You can store enough hydrogen to get moving and a generator can provide the energy.

Was talking about this this past weekend and one of my riding buddies said the same thing...he was poisoned in 1998. Guess he got the system working efficiently in a dune buggy and ........ Makes you wonder.

Source

o~\o

[TXplt]

^^^

It's not possible to run a car (or anything else) on just water -- you put more energy in to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you get back.

[soonerborn]

I wish people would wake up. Good job for all you who pointed out the obvious, it will ALWAYS take more energy to split H20 than you get when you combust them. Its Thermodynamics 101, a very basic law.

Furthermore this guy is crazy thinking he invented this, its been widely used as a metal cutter in factories for at least 20 if not 30 years now. Its possible he refined the electrolysis portion somehow but he by no means "invented" either the cutter or the process of electrolysis.

So get it right, the fact that everyones not filling up their cars with water has nothing to do with BIG OIL and everything to do with the fact that its not an energy source.

I mean seriously, do you honestly think for a second that any energy company is setting on some revolutionary energy source or process? Why? When they could simply patent it and sell it to you and make more money than they could with oil.

[Windwalker]

They want all your money. They will sell you high priced oil until it is gone then sell you their new patented device.

[soonerborn]

I am going to treat that last remark as sarcasm.

[jimkim]

Are you talking about his device or are you talking about the Honda refueling station?

[TXplt]

The Honda station shows promise because it generates electricity, uses the waste heat (I'm assuming) via a chemical reaction along with the natural gas to create hydrogen as well as heat water and heat the home. Alot of a nice energy source (natural gas) is kinda wasted because it's pretty clean, and we just burn it for heat in our homes. This could be an efficient use of natural gas in the home--at least you're doing something with heat that would otherwise be wasted from your car's engine/the grid power plants. The test would be if the capital and MX costs along with the natural gas cost offset the costs of what you'd otherwise spend on your gasoline, electricity, and natural gas. The other nice thing is that, when you have XS generator capacity, most utilities are required to buy back your power. All comes down to how cheap natrual gas is where you are. At least we have alot of this.

There's no "scam" in the Honda thing, just efficient use of energy and heat.

[ArkansasHunter]

I've been reading alot from the link Texan posted "Source" I see hope in the future which could be tomarrow.

Interesting tidbit about one storey is the tax revenue our state and federal goverment would loose if we used water instead of gas.