Here's where the concept of water for fuel and water gas comes in. Water gas, (which the scientific community would actually identify with water vapor or steam, instead of the gaseous components of water), aka brown gas, Brown's gas, or more appropriately oxyhydrogen, is actually a mixture with a ratio of two hydrogen molecules for every one oxygen molecule. It comes from breaking water down through electrolysis into its basic components, (2H20=> 2H2 + O2.) Calling it H-H-O is also a misnomer as oxyhydrogen isn't some strange molecular rearrange of the water molecule H-O-H. H-H-O as a molecule can't exist in stable form just because of its electron arrangement. Calling it by what it actually is, H2+H2+O2 might help.
Regardless, instead of using the H-bonds in hydrocarbon chains, you can use the same H-bonds holding the hydrogen molecules together in Brown's gas as fuel. Hydrogen, like many gases in a stable natural state, exist as a diatomic molecule with two atoms double bonded to each other in a pair like hydrogen (H=H) and oxygen (O=O). The two atoms are now held together with two H-bonds making the molecule slightly harder to break apart and combust. Hydrogen can be used as an alternative fuel just like ethanol, CNG, or LPG. Just throw some oxygen at it and you're ready to rock the Hindenberg. You also need less than half as much weight in H2 than you would if you were using gasoline (since its stoichimetric air fuel ratio is 33.43:1 compared to gasoline's 14.7:1). The tradeoff is much higher combustion temperatures, which will decrease your knock threshold, increased wear on your engine and more NOx emissions (that's the brown stuff in the air) than gasoline.
Using hydrogen as a fuel isn't really the issue, people have been doing it in various applications for years, but how you get your hydrogen is. This presents the primary dilemma with water for fuel. In order to get the hydrogen gas from water, you have to spend electrical energy from your battery to break water down into its parts, a process called electrolysis. In a laboratory experiment, that's fine and dandy since no one cares about how much electricity it consumes. But, in a car, where the power for your batteries comes from your alternator (which is driven by your engine), it doesn't work. Broken down, water for fuel uses the energy that's in your fuel to both power the car and to create more fuel.
That's fine if you get more energy out of hydrogen gas as a fuel than it takes to make it from water, but that isn't the case. H2O is the lower energy state for two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Not the pure gas forms. That's why water is so abundant and we harvest hydrogen from water, not water from hydrogen and oxygen. A real fuel cell, which does work, runs the opposite direction by extracting the electrical energy of combining oxygen and hydrogen into water. The energy cost of making the hydrogen gas for fuel cells isn't as severe since it's done at a stationary processing plant. In reality, the practical electrolysis process is only 30-45 percent efficient, not to mention the irreversible losses you incur (called heat) every step it takes to get from combustion to electrode potential. Bottom line is you're losing your ass on this energy balance.
By Jay Chen
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