Hydrogen Fuel - Water Gas, Brown's Gas, My A$$

Just to rain on the water for fuel parade even more, no one's considered the rate of reaction or the volumes involved. If you were to run your 2L engine on hydrogen fuel only, just at idle with a stoichimetric air-fuel ratio of 34.33:1, you would be consuming 78.5-liters of hydrogen gas per minute. (We're ignoring the effects of the oxygen also generated in the process since hydrogen is the limiting reactant.) Just to supply that much H2 gas means you have to turn 63cc of water into gas every minute to just to keep the engine running (don't ask how many people I had to consult with before remembering enough chemistry to figure this out). You'll notice two things. You need a lot more water to run your car than most cars will carry, and you need an obscene rate of electrolysis. If you've ever seen electrolysis off of a 12V battery, it happens one bubble at a time.

Proponents of using water gas will say the concept should only be used as a dual fuel process to boost the fuel economy of a conventional gasoline engine. Even so, the energy balance is still not in your favor. You're wasting more energy from the gasoline just to get a small amount of hydrogen and oxygen.

Now the point of this isn't to make fun of or bash on what other over imaginative people are doing without giving them a chance to defend themselves. At least I'm trying my best not to. Crazy people are usually the ones that create world changing inventions and make it into the history books. Crazy people are also the ones you don't want to piss off. I'm just pointing out the physical limitations of the process under current accepted theory, which they are welcome to try to disprove.

I applaud the efforts of what people are trying to do to save gas. This is what progress is about. Ever since the invention of the engine, which converts chemical energy into mechanical energy there's been someone else that's tried to make something better and more efficient. Some work and even fewer have made it into the engineering books as something more than just a historical side note. The difference being, the ones that work, work on paper and in application. The ones that don't are just hair-brained ideas that some homebound inventor came up with and tested erroneously without even considering thermo-chemical or physical law. These usually end up on some patent clerk's desk, wasting time, collecting dust, and ensuring the clerk's job security.

By Jay Chen

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