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Water4gas

Tricky

Briefly immortal
Tricky
Joined
Nov 24, 2001
Messages
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The Group W Bench
Greeting forumites,

I got an e-mail from a friend asking about something called "Water4Gas", some sooper-seekrit technique that adds a dose of hyrolyzed water to the fuel system to improve gas mileage.

Now it is quite obvious to me that this is a scam. There are no links to scientific articles. There is no way to contact the "people" who gave testimonials. The physics and chemistry of the whole thing is simply ludicrous.

But I'm finding that I can't seem to find any good science websites that debunk this. Every link I find is some woo site or sister site that, at the very worst, calls it "interesting".

So I was wondering if any of you had heard of this and knew of a good place to point my friend for the straight story.

Thanks
 
Whenever gas prices jump, inventors suddenly create these "run your car on water" devices.

The local bi-weekly newspaper did an article on a local inventor that came up with such a device. The articles not archived on their site; I saw a copy posted on the wall at work.
 
Sounds to me like a conspiracy of engine mechanics to increase their business. How many cars are likely to be damaged by putting water in them?


;)
 
There are some good responses to similar subjects on these sites...
(I can't post links yet)
cr4 dot globalspec dot com
physicsforums dot com
 
Isn't this simply water injection? Works great if you have a high compression supercharged motor (cools intake ports, increase octane, allows for higher compression w/out pre-ignition). I don't think it has any effect in a typical low compression normally aspirated street motor.
 
It probably is possible to improve the engine efficiency. I don't think it is even theoretically possible to triple the efficiency as some of the claims suggest.

If you dig into the link you will see that this is another Brown's/Rhodes gas system. The gas is generated by electrolysis of water so there will be considerable losses in converting the water into hydrogen and oxygen gas and further inefficiency in powering the internal combustion engine. The possibility of an overall efficiency gain still exists if the gasses act as a catalysts to more completely burn the gasoline during the power stroke of the engine.

I think the original patents have long ago expired so someone by now should have run detailed experiments to determine the power output of a standard engine with various mixes of "hydrolyzed water" gasoline and air and at different RPMs. If there was a mix the dramatically improved actual gas milage the auto manufacturers would have already added it (and charged the consumer many times the actual cost). Also, there is the possibility of damaging the engine which should be carefully studied.
 
I'm guessing this is the same folks who were on Coast 2 Coast AM the other night (though they gave the address as HHOwater4gas.com - is there someone on that website named Ari?). The impression I got was that you used mason jars to covert water to hydrogen through electrolysis and then injected the hydrogen into the fuel stream. They had testimonials and a number of people call in who happened to have used their system or a similar one.

The whole show smelled of BS, and I wrote down the URL, but haven't gotten around to checking it out for debunkage.

There supposedly is another website (warning - I might have written the URL down wrong so you'll probably want to Google it instead of entering it directly) goemt.net which IIRC had more of the technical discussion of "water4gas".
 
This link taken from the google page on engine efficiency has some pertinent information: <link>
 
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