HHO, Does it work?

[SSGDirk]

We have another thread about an electric GT, we got a little off subject discusing HHO and I thought it would be better to start a new thread than to clog up someone elses thread.

For those of you that don't know what HHO is, it is water broken down to it's basic elements throught the process of electrolysis. The gas is then sent into your intake and burned with gas to "Improve your gas milage". At least that is the claims.
Here is a link to a few videos about HHO:

YouTube - water fuel, HHO gas, tell everyone, save the world

YouTube - #114 ICE mods for 100% HHO, Phase 1, part 2 of 2


One of the Tacom people over here in Iraq (yeah I'm deployed) runs it in his car back home and has claimed a 10 MPG increase in his car back home he went from 22 MPG to 32MPG. Me personally I haven't had a chance to try it, but the research I have had concludes that it is very possible to get an increase.

Now in the other thread, where this all got started people made claims, I would like to adress some of them.

First off people have said that you are increasing the electrical load on the altinator which will cause extra drag on the motor. An example given is when you use car A to jumpstart car B, car A motor dies down during the cranking of car B. Now this has nothing to do with the electrical load on an altinator. You have to understand how an altinator works. An altinator consists of a shaft with magnets all the way around them. It is then floated in a casing with wires rapped around the case. as the magnets pass over the wires it causes the electrons in the wire to move thus creating energy. Motors work on the same principle, but are completely different because how they create an electrical field. Since in an altinator it doesn't really create an electrical field there is no more resistance wether you draw 3 amps or 60 amps out of a generator. If you dispute this, go talk to a physics professor, maybe he can explain it easier. The reason car A dies down is the load from jumping car B is excessive and it lowers the power going to the coil in car A causing car A to bog down.

Second things people have said is adding water fto fuel doesn't help the burn or increase horsepower. And your right adding water to gas doesn't help, at least not significantly. But HHO isn't about adding water to gas. It is about splitting water into it's basic elements and burning them. Air we breath is made up of roughly 21% oxygen, if you increase the amount in PPM that goes into your automobile you get more HP. If you add more fuel to the engine you get more HP and it also requires less Gasoline to run as you are supplying hydrogen in its place.

Look, does it work, or not? Hell I don't know. I do know there must be something to it, the Army just signed a deal for a guy to make a Water/ Diesel powered HMMWV. If there was no truth behind the application of HHO the Army wouldn't be making a new Hummer. Will it replace fossil fuels? Not for years, but if I can get a few extra miles out of my tank of gas I'm up for trying. What do you think?

[GTJIM]

Originally Posted by SSGDirk Now in the other thread, where this all got started people made claims, I would like to adress some of them. First off people have said that you are increasing the electrical load on the altinator which will cause extra drag on the motor. An example given is when you use car A to jumpstart car B, car A motor dies down during the cranking of car B. Now this has nothing to do with the electrical load on an altinator. You have to understand how an altinator works. An altinator consists of a shaft with magnets all the way around them. It is then floated in a casing with wires rapped around the case. as the magnets pass over the wires it causes the electrons in the wire to move thus creating energy. Motors work on the same principle, but are completely different because how they create an electrical field. Since in an altinator it doesn't really create an electrical field there is no more resistance wether you draw 3 amps or 60 amps out of a generator. If you dispute this, go talk to a physics professor, maybe he can explain it easier. The reason car A dies down is the load from jumping car B is excessive and it lowers the power going to the coil in car A causing car A to bog down.

On the contrary - an alternator merely converts energy ('power') from the motor into electrical energy. This power is transfered to the alternator by the fan belt. 12 volts X 60 Amps = 720 Watts (about 1 horsepower which = 746 watts). The motor uses nearer 2 full horsepower due to the heat produced by drive losses in the belt and heat from the conversion process inside the alternator. Since the motor is only around 25% efficient and the alternator around 50% the motor needs to burn 2 x 2HP x 4 = about 16 HP worth of petrol to produce 1 HP of electrical energy!

Due to the losses in the electrolosis process you are lucky to get 1/2 a HP worth of HHO for the use of 16 HP worth of petrol to make the necessary electricity ...

A fundamental LAW of Phyics is that energy can be neither created nor destroyed - merely changed from one form of 'power' (or heat) to another.

Originally Posted by SSGDIRK Second things people have said is adding water fto fuel doesn't help the burn or increase horsepower. And your right adding water to gas doesn't help, at least not significantly. But HHO isn't about adding water to gas. It is about splitting water into it's basic elements and burning them. Air we breath is made up of roughly 21% oxygen, if you increase the amount in PPM that goes into your automobile you get more HP. If you add more fuel to the engine you get more HP and it also requires less Gasoline to run as you are supplying hydrogen in its place.

Buring the 'HHO' does produce 'power' in addition to the buring of petrol as the mixture has both fuel (HH - hydrogen) and oxidiser (O - oxygen) but that process is also only around 25% efficient in producing power ... so we are down to about 1/8th of a horse power produced from 16 HP of petrol burnt.

Yes - you require less gasoline to run the motor - but far more to make the HHO.

Originally Posted by SSGDIRK Look, does it work, or not? Hell I don't know. I do know there must be something to it, the Army just signed a deal for a guy to make a Water/ Diesel powered HMMWV. If there was no truth behind the application of HHO the Army wouldn't be making a new Hummer. Will it replace fossil fuels? Not for years, but if I can get a few extra miles out of my tank of gas I'm up for trying. What do you think?

The Army is alway willing to spend large amounts of Tax Payer's money ...

[SSGDirk]

GTJim,
I suck at the quote thing. On the first one you missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that the production of energy doesn't take away from horse power. I'm saying that it doesn't use any additional HP if you take a 60 amp generator and use all 60 amps or if you only use 10 amps. The engine is still turning the generator just the same. Most engines use around 1-2 amps to stay running. Once you start adding ECU, lights, radio, and whatever else the usage then climbs. A stock altinator on a OPEL GT is what 45 Amps? And with that there is very little of it even being used. HHO Generators run on 2-3 amps.

You see your whole second paragraph doesn't really say much. If you lose the same amount of HP just running an altinator, even if you don't use all the power being poduced. Why not run a HHO system and get added performance and gas mileage out of your car.

Oh and your finaly statement. You see I am a Motor Sergeant and very few people see the way the Army wastes money like I do. I know exactly what the Army pays for every type of vehicle or part for a vehicle. A HMMWV orginally came out in what 1984 (thats the oldest one I've seen). The Army is trying to save money buy modifying an exsisting outdated vehicle instead of updating the whole line. Trying to save you money.

[oldopelguy]

All right, I'm going to explain this one more time. Increasing electrical load on an alternator, or any generator for that matter, does indeed increase the amount of power required to turn it. Here's how:

An increase as load in most cases is seen as an additional load in parallel witht he existing circuits being supplied by the alternator. (When you close the switch to supply power to something that connects your load from the (+) to the (-) in parallel with the existing circuits.) This decreases the total resistive load on the system, and allows more current to flow from the power supply.

This additional current now flows through both the stator windings of the alternator and through the supply wire from the alternator to the fuse box. This length of wire has some resistance, mostly the 1/2 mile or so wound up inside the alternator, and as the current is increased the voltage drop though that wire goes up. Supply voltage being fixed at this time that increase in voltage loss through the wire is seen as a drop in voltage at the fuse box, and also at every load.

Now if you have a late model GM car there is actually an additional wire running from the alternator to the computer to tell the computer exactly how much electrical load is on the system. In all other cases the voltage regulator senses the drop in voltage now being supplied to the fuse box and the voltage regulator boosts the field current (the amount of power supplied to the electromagnets within the alterantor that built the initial magnetic field) to increase the magnetic field and increase the output voltage back to where it belongs.

So now you have an additional current being supplied to the field on the alternator to increase voltage, and at the same time there is an increase in current on the load side of the alternator. That increase in load current also creates an increase in the load's magnetic field within the alternator (called Counter Electromotive Force, or CEMF) which is in direction polorly opposite the magnetic field established by the field windings.

This means both electro magnetics got stronger, and since the oppose each other the amount of force required to push them past each other with every portion of engine revolution must increase. That force through a rotation is commonly called torque, and that torque over a set amout of time is what we call Hp.

Whoever is telling you that the amount of Hp required to turn an alternator unloaded is the same as loaded is absolutely wrong. This is what I have done for a living for the last 15 years, I'm pretty confident in what I say.

Since I also am intimately familiar with the machines used by the Navy onboard submarines to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for breathing air, I can tell you without a doubt as well that 3 amps at 12V, or 36 watts, run through any electrolysis cell won't produce enough "HHO" for anything useful. The ones onboard the sub drew closer to 60A at 440V (3-phase), thich is in the order of tens of thousands of watts. The 1500hp diesel onboard the submarine could have used up the entire oxygen output from a month of continous use of that machine in under a minute. Even a 100hp car engine would use oxygen and hydrogen at a rate 100 times faster than the machine could produce, and it's over a hundred times the capacity of anything you could make at home.

And all that is dependant on you somehow getting the hydrogen and the oxygen into the combustion chamber without them re-combining into water vapor. That chemical reaction is very energetic and will happen in fractions of a second after the two gasses are mixed. Free hydrogen simply does not exist in any measurable amount in the atmosphere because it is immediately combined with the surplus oxygen into water. Were this not the case we would be harvesting hydrogen from giant wind machines to run fuel cell cars, but we instead have to split water or natural gas to get it because those are the places where it is stable.

[hrcollinsjr]

Originally Posted by oldopelguy Whoever is telling you that the amount of Hp required to turn an alternator unloaded is the same as loaded is absolutely wrong.

One example someone has previously used was jump starting another vehicle. I installed a GOOD set of headlights in a pickup years ago and noticed that when it was idling and I switched it from low beam to high beam that the idle speed changed. Could definitely see better at night with those babies.

After Stephen's answer I'm beginning to wonder if hydrogen powered vehicles isn't just a novel idea but will never be practical. I worked some on a hydrogen powered vehicle that ran at the Salt Flats back in '92 and helped out some as a sounding board a few times over the next couple of years on the project.

The only way I see that it can work is if the Hydrogen is split with a cheaper form of energy, maybe wind, solar or hydroelectric. Without the infrastructure it'll always be a novelty and not practical. When I was in college back in the '70's one professor drove an electric Citicar to school. The only one I ever saw on the road. The second university I attended had one as part of their research they were doing on alternative energy. Guess which department was working on it? Nope, it was the agriculture department! Started out converting an old Chevy PU to run on moonshine and progressed to a hydrogen powered Nissan and now a soydiesel 'vette is part of the fleet.

Harold

[Dennis Texas]

Originally Posted by SSGDirk First off people have said that you are increasing the electrical load on the altinator which will cause extra drag on the motor. An example given is when you use car A to jumpstart car B, car A motor dies down during the cranking of car B. Now this has nothing to do with the electrical load on an altinator. You have to understand how an altinator works. An altinator consists of a shaft with magnets all the way around them. It is then floated in a casing with wires rapped around the case. as the magnets pass over the wires it causes the electrons in the wire to move thus creating energy. Motors work on the same principle, but are completely different because how they create an electrical field. Since in an altinator it doesn't really create an electrical field there is no more resistance wether you draw 3 amps or 60 amps out of a generator. If you dispute this, go talk to a physics professor, maybe he can explain it easier. The reason car A dies down is the load from jumping car B is excessive and it lowers the power going to the coil in car A causing car A to bog down.

If what your saying is even possible then electric companies would not need generating stations we would just require more from the ones we have since as you state it is "free energy" I would love to see one article that agrees with what your trying to say here. Truth in hand most alternators are induced fields, uses wires to introduce a magnetic field. More field = more amperage using constant rpm. Alternator requires an adjustable field, a load side out and a engine that can spin it. If you think the energy is free then bypass the regulator on your car alternator and load it up listen to motor load up (thats the extra energy used to create amperage the engine spinning the armature requires hp ). You have more voltage going into system then before with the alternator loaded up 100 percent so voltage drop on ignition would not be the reason, the reason is the extra energy required to spin the alternator up to full load.
It's as simple as energy in energy out. You can't create energy only change the form.

Alternator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[hrcollinsjr]

Originally Posted by Dennis Texas Thats bull, propagating half truths.

Harsh sounding words my friend. The good sergeant is seeking the truth and generating thoughtful discussion in the process, just as someone on another thread kept doubting the existence of a particular year car being imported into the U.S.

Harold

[opelgtmaster3]

i just learned so much about alternators from reading this. oh, the stock alternator on a gt is 35 amps.

[traytodd]

My gut tells me that HHO cannot work. The input to the engine is hydrocarbon fuel (H/C), air (~80% N2 & 20% O2) and liquid water. Electrolysis creates H2 & O2. Atomic H & O are too reactive to remain in that form for long. Electrolysis is inefficient hence requires more energy than just that required to break the chemical bond. To then burn the H2 & O2 again in the cylinder albeit in the presence of H/Cs and air mearly turns it back into H2O. There are no net energy gains from the chemistry. Add to that the inherent energy loss of converting heat energy to mechanical energy, I see no gains. I doubt that there is anyother chemical reaction in the process that would release more energy than the H-O reaction.

There would have to be other benefits such as modification of the flame front or burn rate to justify the agruments for HHO not just the chemisty one. In a normally fueled injected engine, does anyone know the amout of O2 in the exhaust? If the O2 is all comsummed, there is not much more that can be extracted. This is why turbos help boost power.

Back in the 1930's John Deere had water injection on tractors running distillate (a fuel between gas and diesel). It required the engine be fully warmed up before injection and fully dried out after. It did improve economy and power but ultimately was hard on the engines. Many since then have tried it but it never took off. From the physics, water injection should work as one is vaporizing liquid water to create steam at 1700x volume increase. The energy to do this comes from the combustion products and results in a lower exit temperature for the exhaust. Thus the laws of thermodynamics are satisfied.

As to the arguments about the alternator, if its electrical output was independent of the mechanical input energy, then the excess energy not counsumed by the cars electrical system would have to tbe turned to heat. An excess 30 amps would make the alternator glow red. Anyone who has had a generator on a bicycle knows it takes energy to make electricity.

As for the government, they spend R&D money on a lot of crazy ideas in the hope that 1 in 50 pays off. Then again it could just be some Congressman earmarking money for his district or a patron.

[hallgeir]

Originally Posted by oldopelguy Whoever is telling you that the amount of Hp required to turn an alternator unloaded is the same as loaded is absolutely wrong. This is what I have done for a living for the last 15 years, I'm pretty confident in what I say.

That is true. I know a bit about electricity. More than enough to say that. Don`t know much about HHO though.

[baz]

my daughter can burn water so why cant an engine ?


in the dim and distant past i did an apprenticeship as a blacksmith then worked @ getting it right for almost 20 years and i think you can burn water !!
if it is in contact with iron up near the melting point it vapourises going way past the steam stage and you can see active flames in the gas shroud round the iron (needs to be a big bit to hold heat ) so i wonder if a burner-can with water injection would produce H and O2 or even, and this is sunday afternoon had a can or two of beer theorising, would high temp steam ( it can be steam, high temp steam or super heated steam iirc ) cool the flame front to get more out of less fuel remembering that an engine will only burn what it can and not what you put in it to an extent , as such would lugging a big O2 bottle round and feeding neat O2 into the engine with the fuel not be a simpler way to do it , oh no wait its already done as NOS



alternative fuels can and do at times cost more in total to make than gas
the intensive farming needed to make crops for bio fuels need fertilizers much of which are petro-chemical based
the land lost from food production to make them reduces the supply of farm land for food so reducing the amount grown and so driving up costs

hydrogen fuel cells need hydrogen which has to be made using inefficient methods at this time with large amounts of power to the point where you would have to go nuke to make it worth while for a mass use system

HHO is a nice idea but i would think a generation or two from being practical at best


poo is the way to go
animal waste from 4 cows put in the converters that make fertiliser gives off methane ,this can be compressed to make a liquid or gas fuel that can be used with an injection system enough to run a car for average mileage / year ( see old "top gear " prog The one with... all the poo - BBC Top Gear , bottom left "crap cars " )

poo is cheap , plentiful and we all make it and all you do is throw it away !!!!!!!!

[jordan]

Like everything that has already been said, alternators are not static, think of any energy conversion device that is rotational or reciprocal as a pump, the more "volume" you want to "pump" the more horsepower is required. When jump starting a car it is most definitely the new high wattage power draw of a starter motor that creates more resistance at the alternator causing the engine to bog; turn a window defroster on in any car at idle and you will notice a change in sound and rpm. The law of conservation of energy will always win you cannot have one output relative to an input and then a different output relative to the same input. There is not free lunch.

[hrcollinsjr]

Originally Posted by baz alternative fuels can and do at times cost more in total to make than gas the intensive farming needed to make crops for bio fuels need fertilizers much of which are petro-chemical based the land lost from food production to make them reduces the supply of farm land for food so reducing the amount grown and so driving up costs

The only way for this to work is to use land that is generally not considered to be prime cropland. Tennessee is supposedly leading the nation in research on producing switchgrass for biofuel. We already do pretty good at converting corn for medicinal purposes.

poo is the way to go animal waste from 4 cows put in the converters that make fertiliser gives off methane ,this can be compressed to make a liquid or gas fuel that can be used with an injection system enough to run a car for average mileage / year ( see old "top gear " prog The one with... all the poo - BBC Top Gear , bottom left "crap cars " )

This works well for dairies because of the way they have to handle all of the manure. Some use the gas to run generators to supplement electricity used on the farm.

poo is cheap , plentiful and we all make it and all you do is throw it away !!!!!!!!

Some more than others. OH YEAH!

Harold

[JonWhit]

Scoffers beware, No I haven't tried it so this is still all heresay, but I do know those who have small systems on their vehicles personally. And.... they all get results of increased mpg on 4 amps or less. Perhaps it is the placebo effect because they want it to be true and they've put some effort into building a hydrogen generator. (ie. they didn't take very accurate readings of mph before and after. But here's what I know: I will ignore the obvious benifits of O2 injection.

The hydrogen burns far more rapidly than gasoline. It propogates 1000's of times faster than gasoline when ignited. So you can advance your timing (Most cars need to have thier spark ignite before top dead center to allow the gasoline to propogate enough to have an effect on the piston, so there is some downward force on the piston before it even reaches TDC.) Too quick a propagation on a rising piston causes ping. Caviat, the 1.9 liter Opel engine sparks @ top dead center.

The hydrogen burns the gasoline much more completely. Correct me if I'm wrong but some 60% is either wasted as heat or sent into the exhaust manifold?

Hydogen and Oxygen are stable enough to be used together. Once formed you would need to add energy to separate the molecules so they could recombine into H2O. This is done in the heat of the engine fireing.

There has been a breakthrough on the amount of electricity needed to break the water molecules into the H2 and O2 molecules; it is a pulse wave that I don't know much about but it produces two different types of H2 molecules that can be independently produced in quantities that can be "tuned" to the on demand needs of your engine.
Engines will run on Hydrogen on demand with approximately 100 watts, say 10volts and 10 amps but not anything with any Hp; those I've seen were 2.5 to 5 Horse. Those I've seen are not very rubust. This is why they are Hybrid systems. It works best with gasoline, or some other conventional fuel.

You can run an engine on pure Hydrogen just fine (with the timing advanced) but it is more complicated to make pure H2 sans O2.

You cannot store Hydrogen together with Oxygen. It is far to explosive and can not be stored in conventional tanks ie. propane tanks. The H2 molecule is so small that it will leach right through the nearly 1/4" steel wall of the tank. The corrosive effects will start to eat through any weaknesses in fittings and find a way out.

Personally, If you want to eliminate the gasoline go with alcohol. You can make it yourself and the government will pay you .35 -.60 cents a gallon to do it.

[traytodd]

1. Electrolysis is about 80 - 94% efficient. This does not include the losses associated with generating the electricity, just the heat and electrical losses in the H2/O2 generator.
2. It does not work with distilled water as there does need to be ions present to make the water conductive. Electrodes, especially the anode (O2 side) needs to be Pt to prevent corrosion. The minerals/salts in the water will eventually require replacement or cleaning of the chambers.
3. Electrolysis is usually done at atmospheric pressure so I assume they are using the vacuum of the intake to transport it into the engine. Otherwise they will need a compressor to "inject" into the engine, another energy loss.
4. H2 is not corrosive. It can cause hydrogen embrittlement in metals but this requires higher temperatures and pressures to create the metal hydrides.
5. In 30 years as a molecular spectroscopist, I know of only 2 forms of hydrogen, H and H2. Atomic hydrogen would be obviously more reactive than H2 but it is very difficult to generate and maintain as it reacts immediately with any nearby hydrogen atoms to form H2. In the lab, atomic hydrogen is created using a microwave discarge at low pressures in a flowing H2 stream. The only other possibilities are ions, H+ and H2+ but these would be extremely reactive and would probably be gone at the first collision with another atom. The final possibility would be the OH radical. Are these systems running separate O2 & H2 lines from the generator?
6. It would be a violation of thermodynamics to separate H2O into H2 and O2, recombust it and return more energy than used in the separation process. And that does not even consider the energy losses in the decomposition and the ultimate mechanical extraction of energy on recombination.
7. H2 does not leak through 1/4" steal. Helium is smaller and will diffuse through some glasses. The early sealed He-Ne lasers failed after a couple of years because of He depletion. Placing them in a bag of He for a few hours could regenerate the laser. They now use soft glass tubes to prevent this problem.


Now for some questions:
A. How many miles to the gallon of water are they getting with these systems?
B. Do they all require the spark to be advanced?
C. Are there any other modifications to the normal engine setup required?
D. Does anyone know what the normal % O2 is in the exhaust? We know there are unburned H/Cs in the exhaust (hence the need for a cat) but how much O2 is present prior to the air pump. This will tell you how much more energy could have been extracted from the fuel.
E. After installation of the "HHO" system, what is the uncombusted O2 content of the exhaust?
F. Does the engine run hotter or colder with the "HHO" system? This would be the exhaust temperature. A lower exhaust temperature could imply better mechanical extraction of energy from the combustion chamber as a result of more spatially uniform combustion.
G. If the H2 & O2 are normally aspirated into the intake, they will displace some of the incoming air. In order to keep the mixture stoiciometric, the amount or fuel injected would also need to be reduce, else a rich mixture will occur. On side benefit could be reduced N2 intake, hence reduced NOx output.
H. Could the system actually be drawing in water mist from the generator not just H2 & O2 thus creating a liquid water injection system which is known to work?

Terry

[namba209]

Sometimes history does teach us something that we eventually forget, then try to re-invent the wheel all over again. Pratt & Whitney developed several Hydrogen expander engines for a Hydrogen powered aircraft under development by the "Skunk Works" None of them lasted too long because of catalytic embrittlement caused by the hydrogen. Ben Rich, who succeeded Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works stated in a project letter, The same flight envelope of the projected hydrogen aircraft could be flown twice the distance at a bit lower altitude with hydrocarbon fuels. Plus the logistical problems of handling and transporting hydrogen is negated. I can see pistons and valves falling apart and heads cracking with the use of hydrogen fuels, based on the above.