Is HHO (on-board hydrogen generation) just a game to these people?
All right, if you want to hear people who will give you full-throated approval of hydrogen-on-demand (HHO) systems, head on down to the HHO Games & Exposition that starts this Tuesday and continues until Friday in Palmetto, Florida. The Games' website lists all of the great inventors and HHO supporters who will be on hand to show off their "hydrogen-powered devices for cars, trucks, boats, campers, motorcycles and generators." You'll notice, I hope, that one of the main aims of the website seems to be listing all of the media exposure that the Games will bring to HHO. So, as a public service to any journalists thinking of going into the Kool-Aid pit, remember that Coast To Coast AM is skeptical of HHO (and those guys have about as open a mind as anyone with a radio show can have). Also, as we've explained before, on board hydrogen generators just won't work (we're not kidding). That said, if any readers happen to be nearby and want to send in some pictures and reports, feel free. We like comedy.
[Source: HHO Games & Exposition]
PRESS RELEASE:
A 'WATERSHED MOMENT' IN AUTOMOTIVE HISTORY AS HYDROGEN-POWERED CARS GATHER IN FLORIDA
BRADENTON, Fla. – Think the $4 gas crisis is over? Get ready for the revenge of American motorists.
Inventors from across the U.S. of hydrogen-powered devices for cars, trucks, boats, campers, motorcycles and generators that can save thousands of dollars a year in gas and diesel costs are gathering for the non-profit HHO Games & Exposition on Tues., Nov. 11. The event is from 8am-5pm at the 57,000 sq.ft, 2,000-seat Mosaic Arena at the Manatee County Fairgrounds, at 1402 14th Ave. W. in Palmetto, Fla.
The Games offer the public a four-day round of seminars and the world's first large-scale display of water-powered vehicles.
"The Games are a national Veterans Day effort to reduce dependence on foreign fuel and save U.S. soldiers who fight and die to secure the nation's oil lifeline to the Middle East," organizer Joe Shea said. "We hope to reduce hunger and suffering tied to the high cost of fuel."
"Thousands of construction jobs have been lost, and three local banks in the country have collapsed in the region's housing meltdown, he said. With hydrogen a national cottage industry can be created to quickly convert gas-guzzlers to gas-savers with hydrogen kits.
The event would mark a significant transition in public acceptance of hybrid fuels. The attraction is the low-cost, low-tech nature of the kits, substantial gas savings and rapid engine-performance improvement. They are safe because no gas is stored in the kits, which only produce hydrogen on demand for instant use with gas or diesel fuel.
"We believe this is a watershed moment in automotive history," said Shea, editor of the online American Reporter.
Inventors and thousands of the simply curious will attend seminars by people like ZeroFossilFuels, a Connecticut man, or Nevada-based SmartScarecrow, who have independently produced hundreds of the more than 17,300 videos on YouTube showing a year-long process of building, testing, installing and using HHO kits the size of a small blender. With that vast cross-pollination of ideas, innovations occur almost daily.
The kits produce hydrogen gas, or HHO, from electrolysis of water that is burned with gasoline or diesel in any kind of combustion engine from lawnmowers to 18-wheelers. HHO kits can produce savings of 25% to 70% on fuel costs and quickly improve overall performance. A study funded by the U.S. Dept. of Transportation says a limited survey of large trucks found trucks saved diesel fuel and reduced emissions with the kits. Just one mile per gallon costs truckers an average of $15,000 a year.
Mark Stefan, owner of the 14-bay Lauck Motors in Atlanta, the largest independent Mercedes and BMW repair facility in Atlanta, will have a kit installed at the Games on his gold 2004 Mercedes 3.2-liter E320. At 55,000 mileS, the car now gets about 24mpg; Stefan hopes to improve that by 20-35%, and then add an HHO installation bay at the Atlanta garage.
Ralph Gugar and George Papp of MileaseSeekersHHO, a Cincinatti-based HHO dealership, will use an industrial-grade Dwyer Variable Area Flow Meter at the Games to test actual output of hydrogen gas from kits from half a liter to 10 liters per minute.
Israeli-American Ozzie Freedom of Los Angeles-based Water4Gas is leading a caravan of HHO-powered vehicles from California across the America, with stops in 10 cities, before his arrival at the HHO Games on Veterans Day.
Prof. Cliff Ricketts of Middle Tennesse State University in Murfreesboro, the world land speed record-holder for a hydrogen -powered car, is flying in to co-host a 6-hour seminar on Nov. 14 with Zero FossilFuels, who is driving to the HHO Games from Connecticut in a water-powered Honda.
Joe Shea is organizer of the HHO Games. Contact him at (941)753-1136 (work), 941-932-6247 (cell), or via email at mailto:joe@hhogames.com. The Games' Website is http://hhogames.com. Admission is $2 with a can of food for local food banks. Veterans and disabled people and children under 12 are free.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gorr 4:58PM (11/08/2008)
These are amators just knowing 10% of the subject of water powered devises with an on-board water electrolyser. The difficulty is adapting this water electrolyser to a working engine. First it take an efficient water electrolyser like few have done, s mayer, d dingel and hypowerfuel from canada. Then you have to compress a little quantity of it because you will be unnable to inject the correct quantity of the gas at any given rpm and load applied to the engine. You have to inject water mist because hydrogen internal combustion engine need it to expand something inside the cylinder which no one in these wannabe gang do. Consult the h.a.w site from japan to learn this. Hydrogen explode then quickly retrack instead of expanding. So they have to work on their carburation problems which they didn't do at all, any of them. Even s mayer and d dingell and the rest have big carburation or hydrogen injection problems. Their prototype engine are working but barrely working.
Reply
jake 5:12PM (11/08/2008)
I love how they bring up the systems in the big rigs as an example of "HHO" working. They don't mention however the claimed savings were by the company was 5-20% and not 20-30% fuel savings these HHO kits claim. The independent steady state dyno (basically the only way to prevent a placebo effect and control for the vast amounts of variables when measuring fuel economy) and fuel economy savings was shown to be ~5.5% in tests done by the Cummins Alberta facility. They also don't mention there's no such thing as "HHO" and that the hydrogen injection systems for trucks don't make any reference to HHO.
Also I've heard the reason they supposed work on the diesel rigs is because they don't burn fuel as completely, while in gas passenger vehicles 98% is combusted. The couple $1k kit can easily be offset by truckers because of the sheer amount of miles they travel &, as they mention, even a 1mpg boost is a lot for a trucker. However, it seems for normal gasoline cars, the gains would be less, not more. Thus it may not be economically sensible to buy such a kit even it does improve fuel economy by some small amount.
Reply
Chris M 6:01PM (11/08/2008)
Any improvement in fuel economy is due to adjustments causing reduced power output, and a lot of wishful thinking.
Of course, a dynamometer can detect that reduction in power, and even detect the load caused by the electrolysis cell. That's why the measured fuel economy actually declined 5%.
Of course, none of that stops the hucksters intent on making a buck, and the devoted faithful suckers that buy into it dismiss any facts that don't agree with their dreams. We've seen plenty of examples here on ABG.
Smith 1:13AM (11/09/2008)
"ANY claim of fueling a car with water, and having the water converted to Hydrogen quickly enough to power a passenger vehicle is pure B.S. The bottom line is simple physics. It takes electrical energy to break the Hydrogen-Oxygen bond in water and release the free gases... and that takes time. "
"It will always take more energy to get the Hydrogen out of water than you will get from it. So, if you see videos of a guy pouring water in his car and claims it is powering it... it's pure B.S. There has to be a completely separate energy source to extract the Hydrogen from water before you can use it as fuel."
"It is not possible to create sufficient amounts Hydrogen gas from water (on board the vehicle) fast enough to idle the smallest passenger vehicle. If you're towing a nuclear reactor behind the car, along with a motor home-sized Hydrogen generator, you might have sufficient power and volume to accomplish the task, but that kind of defeats the purpose behind the conversion.
Hydrogen gas can be produced from any source of electricity be it Solar, Wind Turbines, Water Turbines, or even common 'household current'. It's obviously most desirable to produce Hydrogen from 'green' energy sources such as Solar or Wind so there is no reoccurring electrical cost to power your Hydrogen Generator. It does however take a substantial amount of time to produce sufficient Hydrogen to fill even a small tank."
http://switch2hydrogen.com/h2.htm
Reply
Geoff 2:27AM (11/09/2008)
I don't know why everyone is so hard on this type of hydrogen (more appropriately water/HHO) use. I don't use HHO and I don't feel that H2 through fuel cells will every be an option, at least with what we are working with and the H2 industry that has been pushed by the Feds has been a waste. However, perhaps with the waste energy that a car produces, the stainless steel, the baking soda water/something else that I can't remember, it could lower the energy required for electrolyzing enough HHO to be used as a fuel additive. Again I will repeat this, as a Fuel additive or supplement and not a complete fuel source. Not to be all angry with this, but don't discredit a technology because you don't understand, do your research see what people are doing and how the chemistry might work, then post something that doesn't involve saying that one would need to drag around a nuclear reactor. I will also say again that I do not use this technology I only think there might be something to it.
Knee jerk reactions lead to injuries, so keep an open mind and do a little warming up.
Reply
why not the LS2LS7? 3:55AM (11/09/2008)
HHO is quackery. It doesn't refer to on-board hydrogen generation, it refers to an alleged form of water where "the bond angle between the hydrogens is changed" or where allegedly the O is on an end, with a hydrogen bonded to a hydrogen to an oxygen. Systems supposedly convert H2O into this and thus it becomes possible to burn water and thus come up with free energy.
But it isn't science, it's a ridiculous joke. Don't give these chumps credence.
Reply
why not the LS2LS7? 3:58AM (11/09/2008)
See here for example.
HHO is not hydrogen gas.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=123863
gorr 3:09PM (11/09/2008)
The energy is not created by electricity, it's created by the hho gas exploding in the engine. Hho gas don't mind how much electricity it take before to separated it. The separation of the water molecule happen with a catalyst reaction made in water by electric pulsation. The energy come from matter exploding or burning in an ice engine, then hho, gasoline,ethanol, methanol, nitro-methane, diesel, natural gas, propane are matter that can burn in an ice because it burn fast contrary to wood, paper, coal, nuclear, nitro-glecerin, plastic, rubber that cannot serve as fuel in ice because of their burning and injection caracteristics.
If these people don't talk abouth storing some pressurized hho gas and how they monitor the injection of this gas in a working ice engine then don't go there to talk about inneficient electrolysers plugged to uncontroled hybrid gasoline/hho engine without basic injection, ignition timing and torque curve vs rpm, etc. They don't know how to tune an engine.
Reply
Mike_Johnston 1:12PM (11/10/2008)
I'm glad that people are finally starting to realize that these "Ho Ho Ho" things are junk. There is no such thing as Brown's Gas. What these on board electrolyzers produce is hydrogen, water and water vapor. In the water vapor are traces of the electrolyte used in the electrolysis cell. This could be baking soda, lye or sulfuric acid and this electrolyte/water4 vapor goes into the engine of the car along with the H2 and O2 gases. The results over time are less than pretty.
Reply
Serge 1:19PM (11/10/2008)
HHO (on-board hydrogen generation) is not a game, it's a joke. A bad one at that.
Reply
Andy W 1:52PM (11/11/2008)
This is not Water4Gas:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=JFanxHomels
There's another video that shows the box's innards if you care to find it. One example of what's out there...
Andy
Reply
Tony perez 2:27PM (12/03/2008)
I went to H2o 2 HHo my F150 went from 15 to 26 miles per gal
i recommend this unit to any one that wants to save gas it works! you can go to www.h2opowered.us or call them at 1-800-214-7331 despise all the bad mouth going around do nock it until you tray it ! just a word of advise to every one
Reply
Attila The Hun 9:16PM (1/06/2009)
Do the math. It will take approximately 15 Liters of Hydrogen gas per minute to idle a 200 CID (~3.5 L) motor at 600 rpm. using the best generation rate of a "Baking Soda electrolysis cell" of 1/4 Liter per minute at 3 amps, it would require about 60 electrolysis cells drawing a total of 180 amps at 12 volts.
We are going to need better electrolytes to increase the generation rate at a given electrical power consumption.
The Germans used hydrogen gas to propel the Hindenburg, but they didn't generate hydrogen on demand and the motors were designed to run at a 'fixed' RPM.
Back in 1935, a man in Dallas drove his car 'at an idle' for about an hour using a single-stage "Electrolysis Carburetor". He used 25% sulfuric acid and 75% water. see US patent #2,006,676, issued on 2 July, 1935 to Charles H Garrett.
I don't have the specs on his 1935 Chevrolet engine, but it was probably in the 175 to 200 cubic inch range (~1.8 L), in-line 6 cylinder.
Using a small single stage 'cell' for a 'hydrogen boost' gives you a small percent of 'supercharge' which will add a little power and some measure of fuel savings. This is what most of the so called "HHO" rigs are claiming. It would probably be a bit more accurate to call it H2? In any event it is a mixture of two gases, primarily hydrogen.
Attila The Hun
Retired Nuclear Engineer
Reply
Chris M 11:45PM (1/06/2009)
The Hindenberg and other zeppelins used hydrogen as a lifting gas, not as a fuel. They were powered by diesel engines running on diesel fuel.
I suspect your calculations may be a bit off. A 3.5 liter engine idling at 600 rpm would be using about 2,100 liters of air/fuel mixture each minute.
Attila The Hun 11:50PM (1/08/2009)
This formula shows Mass Air Flow at any given RPM.
Carburetor Formula (Cubic Feet per Minute) = (displacement in cubic inches * RPM) / 3456 (times intake efficiency of 75 – 100 %) .
A stock motor runs about 75 to 80%. The constant 3456 is a unit conversion factor go account for cubic inches to cubic feet, and an intake stroke every other revolution.
A 3.5 liter engine (~215 Cubic inches at ~60 cubic inches per Liter) running in the power-range of about 2000 – 3000 RPM would require a carburetor rated at 135 Cubic Feet per minute of Mass AIR Flow. Gasoline fuel is introduced at a rate of 14:1 (1 part fuel, 14 parts air). I have seen calculations that say hydrogen is approximately 3X more powerful than gasoline, so it should take far less hydrogen to develop the same power. This would be approximately 42 parts AIR to 1 part Hydrogen.
If you are ingesting 135 Cubic feet per minute of Air, then you would need approximately 3.2 Cubic feet of Hydrogen per minute (or 9.6 cubic feet of gasoline vapor) for each 1000 RPM.
A 3.5 Liter motor at 600 RPM intakes 1050 Liters of Air fuel mixture, because in a 4 Cycle motor, each cylinder ‘intakes’ every other stroke. For each revolution of the engine, only half of the cylinders are sucking air, and the other half are on the downward stroke of the Power Cycle. Your figures would be correct for a 3.5 liter 2 Stroke engine.
I have read several papers on Hydrogen dirigibles. Some of them did use diesel and others used the hydrogen gas. There was an extensive article on how the air-ship mechanics had to retard the spark (change the timing toward Top Dead Center (TDC) in order to run the engines on Hydrogen gas, that were designed for gasoline. I don’t remember the name of the book as it was many years ago when I was doing my initial Hydrogen powered car research.
The Hydrogen Car Run-Off of Southern California in 1978 was limited to one entry per local university. Each of the entrants used standard vehicle gasoline engines and had to retard the spark to keep them from pre-detonation. USC entered a Cushman Eagle scooter (Meter Maid scooter) with a large liquid hydrogen Dewar mounted on the rear deck. UCLA entered a Gremlin with the back seat removed and filled with pressurized hydrogen tanks. Cal Tech, my school, entered a Step-Van powered by a hydrogen generator fed with magnesium-hydride pellets. None of the entries were completely practical as there were safety factors and high costs involved.