I have been reading a lot about a booster system for gas powered cars.
Basically it uses electrolysis to break down hydrogen and then feeds it
into the carburetor thus improving gas mileage. Has anyone done this?
If you have, how much water do you use, to go say a hundred miles?

Sure, just like the guy who invented the car that runs on water. He
developed paranoid schizophrenia.

Just put in a 100W alternator, generate hydrogen from water, and use that
to
run the car instead of gasoline.

"Guardenman" <m.frisch@charter.net> wrote in message
news:3FD75D05.E8CCA456@charter.net...
I have been reading a lot about a booster system for gas powered cars.
Basically it uses electrolysis to break down hydrogen and then feeds it
into the carburetor thus improving gas mileage. Has anyone done this?
If you have, how much water do you use, to go say a hundred miles?

I have been reading a lot about a booster system for gas powered cars.
Basically it uses electrolysis to break down hydrogen and then feeds it
into the carburetor thus improving gas mileage. Has anyone done this?
If you have, how much water do you use, to go say a hundred miles?

"Eric Gisin" <ericgisin@graffiti.net> wrote in message
news:br82qn02c33@enews1.newsguy.com...
Sure, just like the guy who invented the car that runs on water. He
developed paranoid schizophrenia.

Just put in a 100W alternator, generate hydrogen from water, and use that
to
run the car instead of gasoline.

"Guardenman" <m.frisch@charter.net> wrote in message
news:3FD75D05.E8CCA456@charter.net...
I have been reading a lot about a booster system for gas powered cars.
Basically it uses electrolysis to break down hydrogen and then feeds it
into the carburetor thus improving gas mileage. Has anyone done this?
If you have, how much water do you use, to go say a hundred miles?

This very scheme was patented back about 1934.
However while it seems to work for a while, and with the car at an idle, the
scheme is really a perpetual motion gambit! The special carburetor used
battery power to break down some hydrogen from the water put in the tank.
And after about half a minute you could start the car. While it set idling
there was enough power to keep it running a time on the battery. But when
you drove it, the power from the generator was used to break down the water,
leaving little (read none) for recharging the battery. After a short time,
the energy used to power the car (partially from the battery) would be
greater than the amount the generator could provide! The process stopped!
But they sold a lot of farmers these carburetors and left in gas powered
cars before they were found out!

Back then gasoline was $0.10 a gallon!

Now as a way to save gas? How much energy is required to break down the
water? And how much would it save? given that gas was being burned to
generate the energy to break down the water!

Roger Gt wrote:

"Eric Gisin" <ericgisin@graffiti.net> wrote in message
news:br82qn02c33@enews1.newsguy.com...

Sure, just like the guy who invented the car that runs on water. He
developed paranoid schizophrenia.

Just put in a 100W alternator, generate hydrogen from water, and use that

to

run the car instead of gasoline.

"Guardenman" <m.frisch@charter.net> wrote in message
news:3FD75D05.E8CCA456@charter.net...

I have been reading a lot about a booster system for gas powered cars.
Basically it uses electrolysis to break down hydrogen and then feeds it
into the carburetor thus improving gas mileage. Has anyone done this?
If you have, how much water do you use, to go say a hundred miles?

This very scheme was patented back about 1934.
However while it seems to work for a while, and with the car at an idle, the
scheme is really a perpetual motion gambit! The special carburetor used
battery power to break down some hydrogen from the water put in the tank.
And after about half a minute you could start the car. While it set idling
there was enough power to keep it running a time on the battery. But when
you drove it, the power from the generator was used to break down the water,
leaving little (read none) for recharging the battery. After a short time,
the energy used to power the car (partially from the battery) would be
greater than the amount the generator could provide! The process stopped!
But they sold a lot of farmers these carburetors and left in gas powered
cars before they were found out!

Back then gasoline was $0.10 a gallon!

Now as a way to save gas? How much energy is required to break down the
water? And how much would it save? given that gas was being burned to
generate the energy to break down the water!



No body is talking about doing away with the gasoline. Everything I have
read says, this system just uses the alternator to produce some
hydrogen, that increases mileage. I understand that you can't do away
with power using some perpetual motion pipe dream. But a normal car
alternator does produce more power, than the car uses to run. There is
no reason, this additional power, couldn't be used to run a electrolysis
device. I have read about people tripling there gas mileage doing this.
That seems far fetched to me. But i could see how it would improve gas
mileage.

If it won't make enough hydrogen to power itself, it won't make enought
hydrogen to increase your gas mileage.

In fact, you gas mileage should decrease.

With a car you have a closed system, you put in gas, you get out work,
expressed as miles per gallon. If you use some of this energy to
generate electricity, to hydrolyze water, to generate hydrogen, to burn
in the motor, and have energy losses in each step, how will you increase
your gas mileage.

In article <news:93qCb.5353$kY5.2031@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com
Say not the Struggle nought Availeth <nospam@nospam.net> writes:
If it won't make enough hydrogen to power itself, it won't make enought
hydrogen to increase your gas mileage.

In fact, you gas mileage should decrease.

(It will, on average.)

With a car you have a closed system, you put in gas, you get out work,
expressed as miles per gallon. If you use some of this energy to
generate electricity, to hydrolyze water, to generate hydrogen, to burn
in the motor, and have energy losses in each step, how will you increase
your gas mileage.

The potential answer -- which turns out to be false -- is "by
increasing the overall average efficiency of the steps, so that
any loss involved in the [rapid] electrolysis is made up for by
increased efficiency in later steps". (Note that sufficiently
slow electrolysis is endothermic, but is too slow to be useful.)

That is, one megajoule of gasoline contains enough energy to move
the car some distance D. (The distance D here is 1.00 Arbitrary
Units. ) But the engine and drivetrain and so on are only (say)
25% efficient, so the car moves D=0.25. If the hydrogen somehow
magically increased the engine-and-drivetrain efficiency to 95%,
and you used 20% of the 1 MJ of energy in the gasoline to produce
the hydrogen involved, then the car would now go 0.8 MJ worth of
.95D distance instead of 1.0 MJ worth of 0.25D distance. 0.8 times
0.95 is 0.76, so the car would move 0.76 D's (miles, kilometers,
yards, parsecs, nanometers, whatever) instead of 0.25 D's.

Alas, it does not work. I suspect the efficiency does not increase
one bit, but even if it were to increase from 25% to 30% (and still
using the 20%-goes-to-make-the-hydrogen rule), we would have the
car move 0.25 x 1.0 without it, vs 0.30 x 0.8 with it. This works
out to 0.25 vs 0.24 -- i.e., the car no longer goes quite as far.

Different deltas of efficiency vs different amounts of energy used
to make the hydrogen give different results, of course. But if
anyone claims they have numbers that work out better than unmodified,
I recommend a skeptical stance. :-)

(What *does* work -- and extremely well -- is to use a hybrid
gas/electric system. If I were buying a car today I would be
looking very closely at the Prius. It reportedly "feels" a lot
like a Camry, which, while generic, is a perfectly good car; and
it gets stupendous mileage. The price is not what I would consider
outrageous, either.)
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Wind River Systems
Salt Lake City, UT, USA (40°39.22'N, 111°50.29'W) +1 801 277 2603
email: forget about it http://web.torek.net/torek/index.html
Reading email is like searching for food in the garbage, thanks to spammers.

It makes far more sense to somehow recover the 75% of heat
and do useful work with that,

Anyone come up with a stirling engine to use (eg) the exhaust
heat and couple this into the crankshaft or through some differential
into the drive shaft (rear wheel assumed),

Does anyone know approximately how much energy is currently being wasted
through the catalytic converter by heat losses?

An electric-hybrid might make this even easier since the stirling
could drive another generator used with the main unit to charge
the battery/supply wheel motors.

Since the catalytic converter is used to 'burn' unburned exhaust
for pollution control, it gets very hot. Might this be an ideal
source for a second heat engine (suitably insulate the converter
to maximize the heat recovered)? I don't know if hybrids
*have* converters, but if they do this might be worth looking
into. Does anyone know approximately how much energy
is currently being wasted through the catalytic converter by heat
losses?

Could enough be recovered to justify the capital costs of the
stirling-generator?

and reduction of NO2 into N2 + O2 was also endothermic

"Peter_purple" <purple@203.0.178.192> wrote in message
news:3FDB217D.70E7186B@203.0.178.192...
It makes far more sense to somehow recover the 75% of heat
and do useful work with that,

Anyone come up with a stirling engine to use (eg) the exhaust
heat and couple this into the crankshaft or through some differential
into the drive shaft (rear wheel assumed),


An electric-hybrid might make this even easier since the stirling could
drive another generator used with the main unit to charge the battery/supply
wheel motors.

Since the catalytic converter is used to 'burn' unburned exhaust for
pollution control, it gets very hot. Might this be an ideal source for a
second heat engine (suitably insulate the converter to maximize the heat
recovered)? I don't know if hybrids *have* converters, but if they do this
might be worth looking into. Does anyone know approximately how much energy
is currently being wasted through the catalytic converter by heat losses?
Could enough be recovered to justify the capital costs of the
stirling-generator?

daestrom

no.

Last time I looked, the reduction of SO2 into S + O2 was endothermic
and reduction of NO2 into N2 + O2 was also endothermic, the heat
of the cat is mostly from the exhaust gas heat, some o that is
used to reduce SO2 and NO2 the cat does produce a little heat from
burning leftover HC but not nearly as much as it needs, so I wouldnt
want to cool the cat to take that heat away to produce power, leave
the cat alone to do its job and get the heat from down the line,