Sigh. Hydrogen injection filtering to motorcycles
Click above for more shots of the Derby City Kawasaki ZX-10R
Yes, it is in fact possible to generate hydrogen using electrolysis from water. No, it's not currently possible to get enough of it to run a vehicle in real-time with a positive gain of energy. Despite the fact that the best electrolysis systems are only about 70 percent efficient, people are jumping on the hydrogen bandwagon in an effort to improve their fuel mileage, and the systems are starting to move from four-wheeled cars to two-wheeled motorcycles. The first such instance of this was on CMT's Chopper Challenge and now we see a 2008 Kawasaki ZX-10R that's been retrofitted with just such a system.
We can't be sure if the hydrogen for the Kawi is generated on-demand or if it's compressed off the bike, but there's no way that the bike still makes 170-horsepower without a major internal rework of the engine. Hydrogen injection can theoretically improve the combustion of the fuel in the engine but the combustion chamber shape, compression ratio and spark timing need to be optimized to take advantage. Simply adding hydrogen injection without the other changes will not generally have a significant impact on efficiency and will likely reduce the power. The bike will only emit pure water if running solely on hydrogen. If it's mixed with the gasoline, it will still emit CO2 based on the amount of gasoline used. Then there is the issue of on-board hydrogen generation, which consumes energy from the engine and only returns at best 70-percent of the energy put in. In other words, it doesn't work like the builders claim it does.
Gallery: Derby City Customs Kawasaki
[Source: K&N Filters via Faster and Faster]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Erik 7:06PM (11/05/2008)
And it's ugly.
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gorr 9:48PM (11/05/2008)
This is working 100% i know. Some backyard inventor in philipine is doing so since 1968, so general car guys , about 99.8% of them , are just poor plain ignorants polluting and taxed car drivers and chatters. The difficulty is the Tuning of this gadjet called a water electrolyser. Efficasity is not 70%, it's believe it or not , yes it's approx 2500% efficient. I mean it make 250x more power then the electricity used to separate the water molecule.
First it's not the electricity put in water that make the power, it's the water molecule that make the power when it have been separated before by electricity. Like any other fuel the quantity
of it used in an engine make the power. So if you have one pound of water, you have one pound of fuel where 11% is hydrogen gas and 89% is oxygen. The electricity needed to separate one pound of water that is liquid to one pound of fuel that is gaseous is very few compare to the energy that it will produce. Why? because you use the molecule not the electricity. Water electrolisis done by shell in their stations in los angeles and washinton are very inneficient but the method of the backyard inventor in the philipine is efficient. He use electricity to separate the water molecule and shell use the electricity to say it don't work..
The problem is to tune the water electrolyser to the engine, a very difficult task because it's very different then the tuning of gasoline injection to an engine. Even actual car manufacturers have difficulty to tune the gasoline and diesel engine to please e.p.a , europeen commission, consumers that want to go fast while having good consumptions while not destroy the engine before well after the garanty and sold to numerous different customer that drive differently from each others on different roads and differents temperature on differents climate conditions, etc.
If you ever saw a u.f.o it must be one power by water because you can recirculate the exhaust back to the separator where it can be re-use again and again. I remember the first planet long time ago where at first it was the only phenomena happening there. After a long while algae appeared, then grass and fishs, so on.
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Chris M 3:39AM (11/08/2008)
First off, "2500%" would be 25x more, not "250x more" - basic math. But where did that "2500%" figure come from? From Stan Meyers, a scam artist who made up that figure to compensate for the poor efficiency of a standard IC engine, so he could pretend to run his "water car" on nothing but hydrogen made from water by his electrolysis cell. Of course, his "water car" really ran on a hidden fuel tank, the electrolyzer bubbling merrily away was just there to deceive the dupes, who paid good money for Meyers wonderful device, which Meyers refused to deliver. It was that stiffing of his customers that got Meyers arrested and convicted of fraud. That "backyard inventor in philipine" is pulling the same type of scam that Meyers did, and is using the same sort of tricks.
Sorry, but the laws governing the basic operation of the universe haven't been repealed, it still takes more energy to electrolyze water than can ever be recovered by burning it in an internal combustion engine - about 12 times more energy. Electrolysis of water has been known for over 2 centuries, that hydrogen can fuel an internal combustion engine has been known for over a century, if this perpetual energy scheme could work it would have been used long ago.
The "11% is hydrogen gas and 89% is oxygen" part is also wrong. By volume, water electrolysis gas is 2/3 H2 and 1/3 O2, or 66.66% hydrogen and 33.33% oxygen. By weight, it is approx. 5% hydrogen and 95% oxygen.
Finally, since you don't know what that "unidentified flying object" is, it is rather presumptuous to assume to know what is powering that whatsit.
Ford Forest 10:52PM (11/05/2008)
Jeremy, I believe that you are either totally ignorant about the benefits of generating hydrogen from water or you are a plant working for the oil industry.
My Ford Aerostar went from 16 MPG average when I got it to 17 MPG with new Michelin tires installed, to 21 MPG with magnets attached to the fuel lines(after about 6 months worth of experimenting, testing and documenting to get it right) to 29.4 MPG(I call it 30 although I haven't quite got there yet) with hydrogen generated from electrolosis of water and water induction.
If the efficiency was only 70 percent as you claim, why did the mileage go up so drastically? It should have gone down according to your math. The hardest thing was to get the computer to stop en-richening the mixture but I did it with several months of experimenting and now my Aerostar not only gets 30 MPG average fuel mileage, the exhaust is so clean that it does not register on the test machines used by the state during inspection.
Stumbling onto this simple process of generating hydrogen from water(all over the internet now a days) and then spending the time it took to fine tune the process for my vehicle is by far the greatest find I have ever made. My vans' engine has about 30% more power, is much smoother and quieter and runs extremely clean.
Hydrogen has almost three times the energy of gasoline and causes the fuel mix to burn far more completely increasing the power and decreasing the emissions. The oil stays cleaner for much longer now as well. Positive benefits all around. I have come to believe that we have all been duped by the oil companies who have spent billions to keep us in the dark about this and one of the ways they covered up leaks is to use plants to debunk the "myth" of over-unity.
Are you one of those plants or are you just ignorant of the facts? Water is the fuel of the future and because of the internet, the "secret" is out and it can't be contained anymore. And for the record, you can run a vehicles engine on water alone, search on "Stan Meyers" and you will find the story of a man who has patented the process, was subsequently poisoned and eventualy his proven patents were placed on the internet for all to use freely by his brother. There is also some video footage of his dune buggy which he drove cross country on 21 gallons of water.
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jake 12:04AM (11/06/2008)
Right...since the "secret is out," get one of the mainstream automakers to make a car with the system for the rest of us. Since they aren't doing so well and are scrambling to design more fuel efficient cars, they will love this idea if it works. Heck I'm sure one of the Autobloggreen writers here would love to review one of those cars if they make it.
I mean it isn't like the "oil men" came and murdered every one of you, like people claim they did to the others who discovered this technology.
Rick 1:54AM (11/06/2008)
I wouldn't believe a word of what you say Forest - except having a name like Forest means I have no choice but accept everything at face value. Thats what I got out of the movie.
Scatter 3:17AM (11/06/2008)
hehe magnets
Chris M 2:57AM (11/08/2008)
The problem is that there are so many things that can affect fuel economy, including the weather, traffic conditions, road conditions, driving techniques, speed, cargo weight, tire pressure, etc. Without careful testing to neutralize other factors, it is easy to be mislead. Adding a useless gadget might appear to improve fuel economy when the improvement is actually caused by something else instead.
In the Forest case, seasonal changes in the weather, traffic changes, and a change in driving habits could be enough to explain the increase from 16 mpg to 21 mpg - that is well within normal variation in milage. Sorry, but careful testing has shown fuel line magnets to be totally useless except for filling some hucksters wallet.
As for the electrolyzer, it produces a large quantity of a very low density gas that displaces air when fed into the air intake. That means less air to burn the fuel, so he had to adjust the engine to inject less fuel, thus improved the fuel economy. However, the injected "browns gas" has less energy than the fuel and air it displaced, so the power and performance is decreased. He claims a "30% increase in power", but is that from actual testing, or a wild guess, or just self promotion?
Because lighter-than-air hydrogen has such low density, it has 3 times the energy of gasoline by weight, but by volume, a liter of gasoline has 3,170 times the energy of a liter of uncompressed hydrogen! A liter of gasoline packs 34.2 megajoules, but a liter of uncompressed hydrogen is a mere 0.01079 megajoules. A liter of uncompressed "browns gas" (2/3 H2, 1/3 O2) is just 0.007193 megajoules.
Sorry, water isn't a fuel at all, it takes a lot more energy to "unburn" the water and make hydrogen from it than can be recovered by burning it in an internal combustion engine.
As for Stan Meyers, he was convicted of fraud in a court of law, his supposed "water car" ran on a hidden fuel tank, and he died of natural causes, not poison. Those who claim Meyers was poisoned have not examined the body, have not done any toxicology tests, and have not one iota of proof of their wild claims.
stevefazek 12:44AM (11/06/2008)
Gorr please tell me you dont breed please
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Ben 11:51AM (11/06/2008)
Hydrogen injection really _can_ work... just not for the reasons people keep describing. (Gorr and Forest are obvious plants.)
If electrolyzed H2 is generated when the engine is producing excess power, stored in a tank, and then burned when the driver asks for more power, then the effect is exactly like a gas-electric hybrid. It's just an Oxygen-Hydrogen battery instead of a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. In both cases, efficiency is improved due to smoothing out the power requirements.
Electrolysis is typically somewhat less efficient than retrieving stored energy from a battery, but it also has some potential advantages. The weight of water you need to carry around is much smaller than the weight of a NiMH battery, and while the system requires a substantial alternator to drive electrolysis, it doesn't require a 50-horsepower electric motor to assist the engine (all torque is still generated by the engine.
Anyway, just think of it like a hybrid. The scam artists are scam artists, but the idea is sound.
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Serge 2:43PM (11/06/2008)
Ben, many things are possible in principle. In practice, however, you have to consider efficiencies:
1. Battery charging efficiency is around 90%, producing hydrogen from electrolysis is at best around 50% (with platinum used as catalyst).
2. Compressing hydrogen for storage results in additional 30-40% loss.
3. Battery powering electric motors is 90% efficient. Hydrogen burned in ICE engine as at best 25%.
Current electric hybrids are able to recycle some of the energy wasted by non-hybrid cars due to inherent efficiencies of all-electric power-train. Hydrogen is not even close.
Ben 3:17PM (11/06/2008)
I'm sure you're right. The proof, I think, is Honda's FCX Clarity, which stores energy from regenerative braking and so is essentially a hybrid. Even though the Clarity is powered by hydrogen, they still chose to add a lithium-ion battery for storage rather than attempt to build a hydrogen-battery through electrolysis.
Nonetheless, I think you are a bit too pessimistic. The 40% of input energy spent compressing the hydrogen is recovered in a piston engine. In fact, that effect is so significant that it's the entire basis of the Scuderi Air Hybrid design. The efficiency of electrolysis is going up, with new catalysts claiming extraordinary gains (a friend of mine is doing a PhD on a new nanoparticle catalyst in development).
Of course, there's a big gap between "doesn't violate conservation of energy" and "is likely to be a cost-effective design". The mechanical unfamiliarity of these alternative engines makes them spectacularly unattractive to conservative companies whose principle aims are durability and cost.
JamesWB 8:59AM (11/07/2008)
Ben, what do you mean by "generated when the engine is producing excess power"? You know that electrolyzing water would add an extra drain on the engine thus increasing fuel consumption right?
Chris M 1:54AM (11/08/2008)
Serge already covered the efficiency issue, I'll cover the storage issue. Hydrogen is extremely bulky, so storing "surplus power" via electrolyzed hydrogen/oxygen is problematic - a full gallon of that gas is the equivalent of just a droplet of gasoline. Regular NiMH batteries, or even old fashioned lead acid, take up much less space for the energy stored. Compression can reduce the volume, but that also takes up energy, and a mixed hydrogen/oxygen electrolysis gas can't be compressed much without it igniting.
But that is all somewhat moot, as none of these "onboard electrolysis" units are designed to store the resultant gas, they are all designed to use the the gas soon after production. So, no, it isn't some exotic new type of "hybrid".
Serge 10:21AM (11/06/2008)
What's really annoying about these true believers is that they make wild claims, but make no attempts to demonstrate their "break-throughs". Right, because majority of mileage improvements they observe are on old run down clunkers that are tuned to run lean and with hyper-milling techniques applied to record ground breaking mileage.
Where do we buy your secret ebook again?
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Joeviocoe 1:57PM (11/13/2008)
Same old conversation about HHO.
One guy talks about the high energy density of hydrogen "pound for pound".
Another claims Autobloggreen of all places is a "plant" for the oil companies.
Yet another re-spouts the hundreds of the same overblown anecdotal claims that cannot be verified.
Bottomline people:
On board HHO generators produce about 1 or 2 (at best 4) liters of uncompressed HHO per minute. And you need 3400 liters of hydrogen to equal 1 (thats ONE) liter of gasoline. There is NO WAY NEAR ENOUGH hydrogen to make a bit of difference.
All the so-called claims of higher mileage are either intentionally fraudulent to sell ebooks or kits, or produced by a placebo effect of driving more conservatively.
Now here is the kicker, if you make the adjustments to your engine as the they say you should to get good results, you WILL lean out your mixture which WILL give you better MPG. However, the savings in fuel each year will be offset by the engine repair bills when you meltdown your internal parts.
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