How? Unless you are talking heavy water this is pure fantasy. Water has no extractable energy to run on.
It says it generates power by extractig hydrogen from water, but it takes more energy to do this then you can get back out of teh water- laws of thermodynaimcs cannot be casually suspended.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:50, Sat 02 July 2011.

I'm not a physicist.  Here is the original inventor back in the early 80s.  After he signed a contract with the Pentagon, he was murdered the next day by poison.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSS1ZMdt3FQ

That's not quite true.  Non-pure water has a lot of random stuff floating around in it, including free-floating hydrogen.  I really doubt, however, that there's enough free-floating hydrogen in a liter of water to make a huge difference, though.

Even if you did it woudl still take more energy to extract it than you could get from it.

Looked at the older footage- this is funny. It talks about a fuel cell but you can clearly hear an internal combustion engine in the video. Seriously just because someone posts a video on youtube doesn't make it legit.

Hmm, learning about Ions in chemistry these couple weeks.  Don't know quite enough to comment on it though.

H₂0, while composed of two very highly flammable gases, together are not flammable (and have one of if not the highest calorie-costs for changing its temperature).

Using it as a fuel would be very inefficient size-wise; I could see hydrogen car, but even if they could make facilities small enough to break the compounds inside the engine, it would still be really inefficient compared to the benefits of economies of scale.

But then again, I'm not a Chemist nor do I have any special knowledge regarding the mechanics, so this isn't really any more than skeptical opinion.

This is a hoax and an old one at that. Water is indeed one of the most stable molecules you'll find. Yes, separating the hydrogen from the oxygen does 'free ions' (those ions are hydrogen and oxygen respectively), but the process of separating them takes energy. So if you get 1 joule of energy, you spent at least 1 to get them apart, and thanks to inefficiencies, probably 2. Notice the video never mentions what it uses to remove those hydrogen atoms. They don't just come apart. Something needs to be done. At minimum, that implies it takes a secondary source.

You'll actually see this very often when people are showing off their tremendous 'energy from water' technology; there's almost always a car battery or power plug nearby. As an observer, your question should be 'what happens if I unplug it'? If it's generating power, the thing should continue to work fine without a battery or power plug once it's started. If the inventor can't run the generator without, that's a sign that there's chicanery afoot.

Some other hoaxes you might be interested in; magnets to 'align' molecules in fuel, tablets you put in the gas tank to increase efficiency, special filters, rubber balloons to inject more whatever, hydrogen injection systems. These have all been marketed and sold to unfortunate rubes. They don't work. At best, they do nothing (magnets). At worst, they will permanently ruin your engine (injecting hydrogen).

Here are a link:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...salt-water-fuel1.htm

actually hydrogen is an extreemly effecient means of energy storage, if you get 1 joule of energy out you probably only had to put 1.01 Joules in.
But yes the amount in will always exceed the ammount out.

That depends on how you're getting it out. If you have a big facility, sure. If you have a small device in the back of a car ... I'm not so sure. You're taking battery power, running it through electrolyzation, then collection, storage, and pumping it around for burning. Plus every weight added subtracts from fuel efficiency too, since you're moving more mass.

Even hydrogen as an actual fuel source has hit some roadblocks owing to inefficiencies caused by the atom's inherit properties. It needs to be compressed, so when you're fueling up, you need to be able to maintain that compression. It's not just a gas pump. It rises in air, so you can't carry it around in a jerry can. The containment adds weight, and that containment has to be included all the way from the fuel tank to the ignition chamber. Plus our limited experience with hydrogen means we can't burn it as efficiently as gasoline or diesel. All our technology like vaporizers, spark plug types and so on doesn't really apply, so there's an efficiency gap as the technology matures.

From what it looks like, it burns the Hydrogen like it is normal gasoline.  So an Internal Combustion engine would burn it.  Then the alternator keeps the power flowing.  The battery is used int he beginning to provide the separation process before the engine is started.  It might be inefficient, but at least I wouldn't need 64 bucks to fill up my entire tank for a week.

Using the same reasoning that you have brought up Katisara, what would happen if I were to take the battery out of your car and then asked you to start it?

While you can use an internal combustion engine to burn hydrogen, you can't use the same sort of engine you use to burn gasoline. Gasoline is a liquid, heavier than air, not stored under compression, and requires a different fuel/air mix. If you think you can replace one with the other, I have an experiment for you. Find a way to hold a glass that can alternatively hold water or helium. Of course, the answer is you can't. If you hold the glass upright, the helium floats out. if you hold it upside down, the water falls out. You need different machines to burn hydrogen to account for those physical traits.



You're right. It would cost infinity dollars a week. For every point of energy you put in, you're getting .8 out.

Think about it like this. An engine takes stored energy (gasoline, diesel, electricity), then converts it into mechanical motion. So if you have say 10 'points' of energy in your gas tank, you lose a little to other things but it converts to 8 points-worth of movement.

The hydrogen car idea costs 11 points to separate the hydrogen and oxygen (from where? Battery, I guess.) From that you get 10 points of energy in hydrogen. You burn 6 points to move the car forward, lose 2 points to inefficiency, then put those remaining 2 points around to splitting hydrogen which gets you 1 point of energy and ... it dies.

That's the point. If you are putting in more energy then you're getting out, that is inefficient. It's also unworkable. That energy you're getting from burning the hydrogen is the *exact same* amount of energy you'd have to spend to split it, except that you're losing energy to things like heat, and ultimately your goal i to actually have some energy left over to move the car. But you can't -- all your energy goes back into separating more hydrogen. There's none left over.



Ah, that's not what I asked. I said *once it is started*. I'm willing to accept you need a jump to start any hydrogen machine. That's a given. If you were to run out the battery *while the car was already running* my car would continue to run as long as they're fuel in the tank. It generates its own electricity from the burning of diesel. And this is why people need jumps to START their car, but never to keep it running (your car won't die on the road from the battery dying, it just won't start again).

I do happen to be back yard mechanic.  This is true that a few items would need to be changed out in order to get this to work.  Lets do a quick run down of how a Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Works.  When the engine is running, fuel and air is sucked into the engine due to a vacuum being created when the piston lowers.  Normally Air would mix with the fuel through a corroborator.  At normal atmospherics conditions you are still inefficient so to boost this air we would force air into the engine using a turbo charger or a supercharger.   Regardless of these different efficiency means.  Heat is always a bi-product of energy not being used.

From the engine alone, only about 18% of the potential fuel energy is harnessed.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml

Now, an alternator from a Dodge Ram produces 136 amps.  This is stock but you can get more powerful ones and normally do if you are going to put a sound system into it.  In the video shown, 55 amps were needed to split the hydrogen from the water.  A compressor would not be hard to rig up either.  This compressor would pressurize the system.  With the Hydrogen hooked up to the fuel rail, which normally hold the pressure of fuel at about 40 PSI but these all differ on make model, and other requirements.

Using electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen then converting it to power via fuel cell has 98% effeciency
burning it in an internal combustion engine ha s a maximum of 36% efficiency- 45% if it uses diesel ignition.
What that means spoonk is that if you use 10 W to seperate the hydrogen from teh water then burn teh hydrogen in an Ic engine, you will only get  3.6 W of power out of the IC engine. Water is not fuel. Ever. Even with electrolysis it is effectively a storage medium, not a source of energy.
And yes, it can be hard to store, which makes it a difficult medium for storage *transport* even if it is effecient.
And while you may be a back yard mechanic I am an engineer.

Yeah, generally what I consider "Free Energy" isn't really free.  You're losing energy in the system, but if you can make it so that the energy you're harnessing to perform the procedure is "Free to you", or of a nature that is less useful/valuable than the energy you're obtaining, that's all that matters.

Solar-powered Hydrogen separation, for example, isn't going to produce more energy than it takes in.  But you can do a lot more with the stored hydrogen (port it to another device unconnected to the solar generator or sell it to someone else, for example) than you can the solar energy, which is going to be released as heat whether your use it or not.

To be fair, though, that's not what he said.  Hydrogen is an excellent energy storage medium, since it converts into energy at a very good rate.  Certainly better than fossil fuels.

Now, you're kinda right that getting it out is a problem.  We can mass-produce hydrogen quite easily; even on a small scale, you can do it with stuff around your house.  We used to do it in my middle school science class.  The problem is as you say: we have to get it to the car, and since it's a gas very similar to helium, you can't just fill a can with it.  It'd be like trying to fill your tank with helium balloons.

Spoonk: the biggest problem is that in order to use hydrogen as our primary fuel, we'd have to change everything over.  Every car, every gas station, everything.  There isn't any real way to convert a gas-powered engine to hydrogen, you'd have to replace the engine.  By the time you've gone that far, you'll need to replace most of the cars innards as well, since the engine won't be the same size or shape.  At this point, you may as well build a new car from scratch, since you've had to change just about everything except the chassis.

I'm done debating this.  I'm the only nut here who thinks that this is not impossible.  So, I'm just going to drop it like with every thing else I bring up.  I brought it up and that is all I really wanted to do.

It'd probably be a slow process, to be sure; but most gas stations take into account a secondary fuel (usually Diesel, since it's what Tractor Trailers use).

If hydrogen fuel is a better cost-per-mile, it'd be worth it investing the capital into revamping our infrastructure in respects to the Trucking industry; cheaper fuel means cheaper goods.

It would take some government effort through regulation and/or construction, though, for the reason that even if it is cheaper in theory, in practice it may be impractical if only a few gas stations decide to supply hydrogen fuel.

More effecient does not mean cheaper. To begin with to create hydrogen you have to get the initial power from somewhere. Currently most power in the US comes from teh burning of fossil fuels, so any fossil fuel used in power generation could be used more effeciently i running automobiles than hydrogen because it would be, in esssence, skipping steps. Even coal can be put through a fuel cell- interestingly when it is processed thsi ay one of the byproducts of teh initial stages is a fuel which can be used in transportation, and cheaply if our power infrastructure were to convert our current steam driven generators to using coal fuel cells, as well as reducing the consumption of coal.
Hydrogen really becomes usefull when the power grid is being run by hydro-electric, wind, solar and nuclear power.

Silveroak is correct. It's easier to consider hydrogen as 'energy storage' than 'energy source' (unless you're running a RAM scoop in space or something).

As for the ease of upgrading ... I'm dubious on that. Diesel in fact preceded gasoline by several decades, is a fully mature technology used around the world, with consumption at the same exponential level of gasoline, using the same technology for storage and pumping, and I STILL have trouble finding diesel in most areas. Hydrogen shares none of those traits.

I'm apart of the "Climate Change, my ass" group.  When I come upon articles that support that fact I like to point it out.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-dat...rmism-192334971.html

I don't subscribe to the "global warming" crisis myself, but climate change is a fact.  It's just part of the cycles of Planet Earth.

I guess my question is where is that line drawn between 'alarmist' and non-alarmist models? The word itself is highly charged, even saying 'than some of the most dire predictons' would have been as accurate and less inflamatory, as the word 'alarmist' paints those who used teh model as having an agenda and being wide eyed fanatics as opposed to simply having guessed wrong on their models- and at least the question of indirect heat trapping was raised by these mistakes. It seems to me that the 'anti-alarmist' rhetoric about attempting to secure conformity of thought and compliance to the norm which, as a matter of social or political pressure is anathama to real science.

Great, they raised the Debt Ceiling.  Cutting it awfully close, but at least I only have to worry about whether the VA check is going to be late, rather than it not coming at all.

As a head's up, I'll be at GenCon for the next week, so I probably won't be hangign around here. Try not to kill one another!!

So it does not inturupt the flow of the conversation in the global warming thread I am posting this here- glossing over the libel spouted by GMC does not resolve my objections, and if an apology is not forthcoming, or if alternately some administrative action is not taken in response to his litterally criminal behavior, I will be departing what is rapidly becoming a hive of scum and litteral villainry for more civilized partners in conversation. This is not a matter of hyperbole, GMCs comments broke the law and are injurious, and if those who claim to eb keeping conversation civil on this forum cannot offer anything beyond 'now settle down kids' and there is no appology forthcoming then I see no point in continuing here.