Water 4 Gas

[politas]

In this case, based on what's being described, it's probably best to start the investigation by examining whether the addition of H2g + O2g to an engine will improve efficiency. If the result is 0% improvement, then we've made a lot of progress toward debunking the claim in the eyes of most people who would be on the fence. If the result is x% improvement, then we can compare that to the energy expended electrolyzing water to see if there's any net benefit. (Based on the experiments I've cited above that showed no benefit, I doubt it would come to that)

The addition of H2 and O2 gas to an engine can improve the engine efficiency, by a small amount. However, you need quite substantial quantities of gas to achieve this efficiency. In order to create this gas on-board, you need to draw more current from the (inefficient) alternator than you are normally drawing, to power an inefficient hydrolysis process.

Detailed mathematical calculations, giving fairly optimistic estimates, can be found here. Summary: You use more fuel with the device than without.

 

[politas]

...OctaFuel's team of advisors were not sure the product had been tested thoroughly enough in-house, but the feedback seemed positive, with reports of between 20 per cent and 25 per cent fuel savings, so the decision was made to proceed with a public trial," he said.

But later installations in a number of customers' vehicles and the Waikato Times trials "showed that on-demand hydrogen technology is a fraud".

Mr Fresnel said the company would continue exploring hydrogen as a primary fuel for motor vehicles, including reforming of methane from rubbish dumps to hydrogen gas, which can be used to fuel cars."

---

Alright "Waikato Times", what 'deficiencies' did the system cause?

Did the device manage to break even, in over all engine output?

All that is said was that it is a fraud...

Which is what EVERYONE here is also saying, with NO test results to back up that claim.

What I am suggesting is that without actual 'controlled test results', we should all with hold judgement.

Did you miss the fact that the company mentioned in the article, "OctaFuel", was created entirely in order to manufacture and distribute these exact systems?

OctaFuel was going to be a seller of "HHO" devices, or "HHO-hybrid" vehicles/mods. And it was them, not the Waikato Times, who are now saying it's a fraud. The people who set up an entire company in order to make money out of it.

You don't find that compelling? You want to see their exact test results? Why not email them and ask? They're clearly done some testing. Go ask them. Not us.

 

[Sherman Bay]

Right, but to a credophile who thinks his buddies have accidentally discovered something new, hope springs eternal that there's some unknown factor. History is filled with "it doesn't work in theory," but the theory needs to be updated because of the facts on the ground are that it works.

OK. Bring us some facts and we'll talk. Until then, it's all just hot air.

What I'm trying to do is design a definitive test to falsify the hypothesis that has such popular face validity. We can only do that by dissecting the claim and approaching it as it is presented.

I admire your zeal, but you're going at this bass-ackwards. No one has proved that the claims are real yet. You don't have to disprove what hasn't yet been proven!

And it would be easy to do as per many suggestions in this thread. Double-blind testing of randomly altered vehicles. Dynamometer tests. Simply measure the input and the output. With such a simple way of verifying claims, the fact that it hasn't been done is strongly suggestive of fraud or self-delusion.

 

[Cuddles]

Lithium Ion are quite expensive and have roughly 3 times the energy storage of compressed air, kJ/kg. This ignores any improvements in compressed air, such as the combustion/expansion solution they're pursuing right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_vehicle

Care to provide a cite for that 3? As the figures provided by Snow, and linked to in that article, say, that may be true if you ignore the container. Given that the whole point is that the container is big and heavy, that's really not very helpful.

As for their extreme weight that makes them impossible to move:

To start with, no-one has said that. It's also interesting that you quote the bits you think support you, but miss out parts of the same articles that say things like:

Compressed air vehicles likely will be less robust than typical vehicles of today. Which poses a danger to users of compressed air vehicles sharing the road with larger, heavier and more rigid vehicles.

The key to attaining acceptable range with an air car is to reduce the power required to drive the car, so far as is practical. This pushes the design towards low weight. In a collision the occupants of a heavy vehicle will, on average, suffer fewer and less serious injuries than the occupants of a lighter vehicle.[8] An accident in a 2000 lb (900 kg) vehicle will on average cause about 50% more injuries to its occupants than a 3000 lb (1350 kg) vehicle.[9] Air cars may use low rolling resistance tires, which typically offer less grip than normal tires.

Amazing. If you remove lots of useful parts of a car, it's lighter. That's not a point in favour of air powered cars, it's a point in favour of making lighter cars. Except that it's not, because then you're in a very light deathtrap rather than a heavier car.

Here are some other bits you apparently missed:

Compressed air has a low energy density.

Early tests have demonstrated the limited storage capacity of the tanks; the only published test of a vehicle running on compressed air alone was limited to a range of 7.22 km.

A 2005 study demonstrated that cars running on lithium-ion batteries out-perform both compressed air and fuel cell vehicles more than three-fold at same speeds.

MDI has recently claimed that an air car will be able to travel 140km in urban driving

Amazing. Compressed air is three times worse than current batteries and has a maximum range of 7km, with even optimisitic manufacturers only claiming potential ranges of 140km. Yeah, looks like my comments about it being well behind and only having limited range were way off.

 

[blutoski]

OK. Bring us some facts and we'll talk. Until then, it's all just hot air.I admire your zeal, but you're going at this bass-ackwards. No one has proved that the claims are real yet. You don't have to disprove what hasn't yet been proven!

Nobody has to do anything. You don't have to type replies in JREF Forum. But people like us are motivated by some kind of personal goal. Joe Nickell, James Randi, Mythbusters, and other skeptics invest time and money debunking the demonstrably impossible because there's a glimmer of hope that it might reduce consumer fraud - which would be personally gratifying - and maybe we also find it entertaining.

My primary concern was that there seemed to be a disconnect between what the original poster was asking and what we were providing. He knows that the gases don't have enough energy to be combusted as a fuel, so why have we been chiding him for a mistake he didn't actually make? When skeptics talk past the issues it just fuels a stereotype.

And it would be easy to do as per many suggestions in this thread. Double-blind testing of randomly altered vehicles. Dynamometer tests. Simply measure the input and the output. With such a simple way of verifying claims, the fact that it hasn't been done is strongly suggestive of fraud or self-delusion.

Obviously. But be mindful that this doesn't usually have had an effect on claimants or laypersons, so if nothing else, we can say that it looks like doing such an experiment would make further inroads toward the goal of killing this urban legend.




My primary concern that motivated my postings in the thread was that quite a few skeptics posting didn't appear to understand the nature of the claim, so were focusing their counterargument on something the original poster was not actually claiming. It's just bad practice, and again, it fuels a stereotype.

 

[TMiguel]

My impression is that the theory is different: that the H2g and O2g are not acting as additional fuel, but as a fuel additive to improve engine efficiency.

How?

Analogy: consider the vehicle is diverting energy to operate the air mix. The small amount of energy diverted to the air intake's logic circuit pays off in terms of fuel efficiency.

You made a mess out of cycle efficiency and burn ratios.
You are not getting more then 0,01% out of a better burn of fuel. It doesn’t really matter if the fuel/air mixture is done in the explosion chamber or in the intake (definitively you don’t want do it in the air intake for very good reasons) it is all going to get burned in the same place.
The burning ration is controlled you a good proportion of combustible vs carburant (I’m not sure this is the exact English word, it’s the class of combustion product the oxygen is in). In a car you have to take a pay for your fuel, the oxygen you collect it in the air for free; so adding even more fuel you are putting less oxygen, and consequentially you are literally throwing out fuel trough your exhaust.

I suggested this earlier, based on my above interpretation of the claim. The unique claim is that adding H2g + O2g enhances engine performance, which is independent of any claims about the source, and can be tested very easily and relatively cheaply, in controlled conditions that would convince any skeptic and start the path to patents and wealth.

Engine performance is improved by minimizing the loss of heat (noise included) while keeping the car working, now (here is the interesting part) more efficiency equals less power. Now to go around this you need an impressing amount of work, and involves changing the working condition and consequentially a new design of a stronger (and more expensive) engine, and even that can only go up to a certain point because you can never have more efficiency then a Carnot engine (hypothetical technologically perfect engine) and even that is out of technological reach.

Right, but to a credophile who thinks his buddies have accidentally discovered something new, hope springs eternal that there's some unknown factor. History is filled with "it doesn't work in theory," but the theory needs to be updated because of the facts on the ground are that it works.

Problem is, there is no room for a unknown factor, the devices that they are using have been studied to death, this subject has been studied to death. If we are wrong on this, then we are wrong on the planes ability to fly, we are wrong on the ability of planets to move around the sun, we are wrong on almost every single aspect of our technology, and guess what? Nothing so far has let us down on such aspect.

Oh, there's no doubt in my mind that it's fraud. But since it's obvious nobody cares what skeptics think, that's not going to actually have an effect on how people waste their hard-earned cash.

What I'm trying to do is design a definitive test to falsify the hypothesis that has such popular face validity. We can only do that by dissecting the claim and approaching it as it is presented.

Same with the JREF MDC: let them spell out the claim, then test it. Don't armchair dismiss - that just makes them think we are cynics or lazy or blindly authoritarian. Plus: designing a test can help a lost credophile understand that skeptics are truly persuaded by evidence more than opinion, even our own.

Here is the general misconception of the general public about science, a claim can be dismiss if it is internal inconsistent or doesn’t have any theoretical construct. After you have a theoretical construct, you proceed to the lab and test if you theoretical construct does or does not hold whit experiment. If you add the fact that it is inconsistent whit already established knowledge, your word isn’t going to hold it.
We do not have to deal whit experiments dismissing some one else’s claims if they don’t have any theoretical background.
Hypothesis and explanations are experimented, not facts or claims of facts.

 

[King of the Americas]

And we have not seen such test results to confirm the claims FOR the device.

Given that those claims are so unbelievable to a physics major, and would require overturning the bulk of science, not to mention winning the Nobel Prize, making a gajillion dollars and the world a better place, don't you think the the absence of such test results is a VERY significant piece of information? Doesn't that lack speak volumes? Doesn't that make your BS detector point skyward?

From a technical standpoint, to repeat what many others have said in a slightly different manner, a car, once fueled and running might be considered a closed system. It converts fuel into work at X% efficiency, which can never be greater than 100%. If you inject something to make the engine run faster or produce higher torque, which is entirely possible, you have to get that something from inside the closed system. But, and here's the catch, to get a 10% improvement, you might have to expend 20% of the fuel! Whatever the improvement, you have to use more than you gain to get it.

The only way this will work is if you inject something like hydrogen from outside the closed system. Then your 10% improvement isn't being a burden on the closed system's fuel. But now you have changed the parameters and you lose again.

Take a physics course, Dude (KOTA). It might open your eyes.

Indeed, which is why I mentioned possibly applying a small solar panel to provide the 3 amps needed to drive the device...

But I also quaried whether or not you could get the same increase, by wiring said panel directly into the car's electrical system, so that there was less drag on the car's alternator.

I dropped a physics course, and interestingly enough I am considering adding it to my course load in the Spring.

 

[blutoski]

How?

No idea. I'm not the one making the claim. My impression from the claimant is that this is an hypothesis attempting to explain the reported efficiency gains. If these gains turned out to be true, the next logical procedure would be to alter conditions to isolate a mechanism.

My point was that there is face validity to those who are not engineers.

You made a mess out of cycle efficiency and burn ratios.
You are not getting more then 0,01% out of a better burn of fuel. It doesn’t really matter if the fuel/air mixture is done in the explosion chamber or in the intake (definitively you don’t want do it in the air intake for very good reasons) it is all going to get burned in the same place.
The burning ration is controlled you a good proportion of combustible vs carburant (I’m not sure this is the exact English word, it’s the class of combustion product the oxygen is in). In a car you have to take a pay for your fuel, the oxygen you collect it in the air for free; so adding even more fuel you are putting less oxygen, and consequentially you are literally throwing out fuel trough your exhaust.

It's an analogy. I was attempting to convey that the mechanism proposed was not combustion, but improvement in engine efficiency. The carbuerator was not actually part of the hypothesis. It was part of the analogy.

Engine performance is improved by minimizing the loss of heat (noise included) while keeping the car working, now (here is the interesting part) more efficiency equals less power. Now to go around this you need an impressing amount of work, and involves changing the working condition and consequentially a new design of a stronger (and more expensive) engine, and even that can only go up to a certain point because you can never have more efficiency then a Carnot engine (hypothetical technologically perfect engine) and even that is out of technological reach.

I'm sure you're right. So what?

Problem is, there is no room for a unknown factor, the devices that they are using have been studied to death, this subject has been studied to death. If we are wrong on this, then we are wrong on the planes ability to fly, we are wrong on the ability of planets to move around the sun, we are wrong on almost every single aspect of our technology, and guess what? Nothing so far has let us down on such aspect.

Hard to compare. In any case, laypersons are not quite so convinced by authoritative dismissal if it doesn't come with citations. Which is what the poster requsted and for many days did not receive.

Here is the general misconception of the general public about science, a claim can be dismiss if it is internal inconsistent or doesn’t have any theoretical construct. After you have a theoretical construct, you proceed to the lab and test if you theoretical construct does or does not hold whit experiment. If you add the fact that it is inconsistent whit already established knowledge, your word isn’t going to hold it.
We do not have to deal whit experiments dismissing some one else’s claims if they don’t have any theoretical background.
Hypothesis and explanations are experimented, not facts or claims of facts.

I am in complete agreement that there is widespread public misconception about science, but after decades of antiquackery efforts, I have learned that when intelligent people ask for us (I am a scientist by profession) to substantiate our high-level dismissals, the effort involved in actually providing good references pays off.

The urban myth of the cottage genius is alive and well, and appear to be supported by anecdotes of success. In the absence of actual rigid testing showing otherwise, the optomist will continue to consider these as weak support for every halfbaked crackpot theory imaginable.

Like I said: we don't have to do anything. Let them waste their money. Let them die. Why not? But some skeptics look toward solutions, and if we can back up our sweeping statements with some accessible test data, it goes a long way.

 

[TMiguel]

No idea. I'm not the one making the claim. My impression from the claimant is that this is an hypothesis attempting to explain the reported efficiency gains. If these gains turned out to be true, the next logical procedure would be to alter conditions to isolate a mechanism.

My point was that there is face validity to those who are not engineers.







It's an analogy. I was attempting to convey that the mechanism proposed was not combustion, but improvement in engine efficiency. The carbuerator was not actually part of the hypothesis. It was part of the analogy.







I'm sure you're right. So what?







Hard to compare. In any case, laypersons are not quite so convinced by authoritative dismissal if it doesn't come with citations. Which is what the poster requsted and for many days did not receive.






I am in complete agreement that there is widespread public misconception about science, but after decades of antiquackery efforts, I have learned that when intelligent people ask for us (I am a scientist by profession) to substantiate our high-level dismissals, the effort involved in actually providing good references pays off.

The urban myth of the cottage genius is alive and well, and appear to be supported by anecdotes of success. In the absence of actual rigid testing showing otherwise, the optomist will continue to consider these as weak support for every halfbaked crackpot theory imaginable.

Like I said: we don't have to do anything. Let them waste their money. Let them die. Why not? But some skeptics look toward solutions, and if we can back up our sweeping statements with some accessible test data, it goes a long way.

Sorry I kind had the wrong feeling about your opinion on the subject.

 

[Sherman Bay]

But be mindful that this doesn't usually have had an effect on claimants or laypersons, so if nothing else, we can say that it looks like doing such an experiment would make further inroads toward the goal of killing this urban legend.

Sorry, friend, I don't think your efforts, while noble, will have much impact on believers. How many times has Randi shown dowsing to be a bunch of bull? Have the dowsing rod sellers gone away?

The same people who don't see the need for good tests to verify the truth of water4gas claims won't be much moved by your negative evidence either. It's a futile, bang-your-head against the wall tactic.

Not that you should stop trying.

 

[blutoski]

Sorry, friend, I don't think your efforts, while noble, will have much impact on believers. How many times has Randi shown dowsing to be a bunch of bull? Have the dowsing rod sellers gone away?

The same people who don't see the need for good tests to verify the truth of water4gas claims won't be much moved by your negative evidence either. It's a futile, bang-your-head against the wall tactic.

Not that you should stop trying.

Educational efforts are not directed at believers.

Effort is directed at the undecided, most of whom respond to a good argument.

 

[quarky]

There may be a placebo effect in the effort to believe in fuel savings.

If you needed to 'proove' something bogus, you might inadvertently do things that will actually improve mileage...like keeping tire pressure high; driving slower; accelerating gentler; keeping the engine tuned better; etc.

sometimes, for some people, it takes a woo-belief to activate other, rational efforts.
and, if that's what it takes, then its good...as long as you don't have to pay.
Homeopathy is similar. Take the magic pill; inadvertently start doing more healthful things to proove that the magic pill is real.

Problem is, sugar pills are cheap; hydrogen hydroxide systems probably aren't.

 

[TMiguel]

There may be a placebo effect in the effort to believe in fuel savings.

If you needed to 'proove' something bogus, you might inadvertently do things that will actually improve mileage...like keeping tire pressure high; driving slower; accelerating gentler; keeping the engine tuned better; etc.

sometimes, for some people, it takes a woo-belief to activate other, rational efforts.
and, if that's what it takes, then its good...as long as you don't have to pay.
Homeopathy is similar. Take the magic pill; inadvertently start doing more healthful things to proove that the magic pill is real.

Problem is, sugar pills are cheap; hydrogen hydroxide systems probably aren't.

But here is the thing, sugar pills are cheap, homeopathic remedies are not (although they are made of the same thing). An at some point or another it will inevitably lead some believers to discard real medical care that could save their lives for a bogus remedy that will not help them at all.

 

[quarky]

I'm not promoting homeopathy. I'm more interested in how things work.

some people need a trick; a catalyst...however bizarre it might be...to engage their attention and will; to alter their behaviour.

compared to do nothing, and still ignoring science, which many choose to do, such bogus symbolic gestures can be beneficial.

(weddings are like that, in a way)

 

[Toke]

I wonder how complicated it would be to install a milagemeter on the instrument panel of a modern car.
The onboard computer should have all the neccecary data.

That might make people drive more sensible.

 

[tesscaline]

I wonder how complicated it would be to install a milagemeter on the instrument panel of a modern car.
The onboard computer should have all the neccecary data.

That might make people drive more sensible.

Some cars have these already (my dad's BMW has one, for example), and in all honesty it doesn't make a difference at all. He still drives exactly the same way he's driven for the past 35 years.

It is my belief that trying to force people into being more ecologically conscious is futile. Either they care, or they don't. The only thing you can do about the people that don't care is hit them in their pocket books -- i.e. make it so expensive to be wasteful that they HAVE to stop -- and hope for the best. But by the same token, that tactic can punish those who are actually trying to be economical in their resource usage but are blocked from economizing further due to technologic and/or financial restrictions.

So. Force car manufacturers to make more eco-conscious cars (we're already doing that). Make those cars more available to the section of the population that needs them (you know, regular people who can't afford a BMW or a Mercedes). Offer rebate programs to trade in old gas guzzling cars.

But don't expect that something as trivial as a mileage meter in a car is going to make a difference to anyone other than those people who are already taking great lengths to use less gasoline.

 

[TMiguel]

I wonder how complicated it would be to install a milagemeter on the instrument panel of a modern car.
The onboard computer should have all the neccecary data.

That might make people drive more sensible.

I personally have driven a “Skoda” that had from factory a instantaneous fuel consumption meter of the car. Seeing what kind of drive works better could help allot.

 

[Toke]

I have seen the ones with a read and a green light.

Do they come with actual milage?

 

[tesscaline]

I have seen the ones with a read and a green light.

Do they come with actual milage?

Yes.

 

[arthwollipot]

My Toyota Prius is currently running an average of 5.1 l/100km since I last filled it.