JeffNY

Now that Mazda has a Hydrogen powered version of the RX-8:

http://media.ford.com/mazda/article_...34&make_id=227

...what are the chances it will have a gas powered version that uses hydrogen just to boost the MPG like these systems:

"18% to 31% mileage increase" for your car
(this guy is not too far from me)
http://www.hydrogen-boost.com/

A similar device from Canada..."Hydro-Gen users report an average 21% improvement
in their gas mileage"
http://www.savefuel.ca/

MPG IS a factor in my deciding what car to buy next.....and no, I don't want to here from the idiots out there who will say "if you want MPG buy a Prius!". Please stick to the question and keep dumb unhelpful comments to yourself.

Thanks,
Jeff

Raptor75

Don't hold your breath, Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas or even alcohol mileage would be much worst for the same volume of fuel. Plus it must be kept in high pressure tanks and we have no infrastructure to supply it.

Georgia8er

You would increase your gas mileage but your net "energy consumption" would remain the same. I'm assuming here that the hydrogen wouldn't be measurably different in engine efficiency. So while you'd theoretically consume less gasoline, you'd be replacing it with a much more expensive gas.

JeffNY

You didn't look at the web pages above did you?

>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas or even alcohol mileage would be much worst<<

I said "that uses hydrogen just to boost the MPG".....the key word is BOOST....as in BOOST combustion efficiency...and MPG. (see web pages above)

>>Plus it must be kept in high pressure tanks and we have no infrastructure to supply it.<<

That assumes you need to store it, rather than keep it in water until you need it. Imagine a small box in your car that can split water on the fly to power your car. No heavy storage tanks, no mass amounts of hydrogen to worry about leaking through storage materials or being a source of combustion in an accident or your garage (refuting some of the complaints of the the nay sayers and people who have an interest in us using oil)....

"every cubic foot of water contains about 1,376 cubic feet of hydrogen gas and 680 cubic feet of oxygen. One only needs a 4% enrichment of hydrogen to create a flammable fuel for the use in an internal combustion engine. This makes it so that one can get great "gas mileage"from a gallon of water, anywhere from 50 to 300 miles to the gallon."

Jeff

Georgia8er

Didn't one of the guys from an 80's hair band try to sell this idea about 15 years ago?

JeffNY

What idea? The idea of using hydrogen to increase combustion efficiency (even in diesel engines where it also dramtically reduces pollution) is well known and documented.

JeffNY

Another link for truckers....

http://www.chechfi.ca/sohfitech.htm

They offer a "Guaranteed 10% fuel savings."

ken-x8

About 20 years ago the Society of Automotive Engineers got sucked in on something like this. Their magazine, "Automotive Engineering," ran a series of articles on a breakthrough scheme. The concept was to use electrolysis to split the hydrogen from the water. It takes electricity to refine aluminum from ore, so aluminum must have energy in it. The contraption had a spool of aluminum wire that would be fed into the water tank. That supplied the electricity that would electrolyze the water. Big spool of wire, lasted a long time. You'd have to stop every few hundred miles for more water, though.

I saved some of the later articles before someone at SAE realized they were being fed the old "Car that runs on water" scam and abruptly stopped coverage. Wish I had saved the whole series. I need to look through my archives (i.e., unorganized pile of detritus) to see if I still have those articles.

Ken

JeffNY

>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas<<

Add a little oxygen and see what happens. Question: Why didn't NASA use 93 octane gas to power the shuttle?

Ansewer:
http://www.chewinthefat.com/artman/p...ticle_44.shtml

"The SSMEs are the best-performing engines on Earth," he says. They have a specific impulse (a measure of fuel efficiency) of 450 seconds--higher than any other chemical rocket. "If we wanted a better combination of power and 'gas mileage,' we would have to go to nuclear propulsion."

JeffNY

Ken,

>>About 20 years ago the Society of Automotive Engineers got sucked in on something like this. <<

I agree, the water powered car is not here yet.....or is it?
http://home.earthlink.net/~jeff810095/WaterFuel.wmv

Denny Klien...he is currently developing a Hummer that can run on both water and gasoline...
http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBKD7YQIGE.html
http://www.hytechapps.com

Go here...
http://www.wtvt.com/
....and search on "Denny Klien"

But my question, for now, is if Mazda will at least offer a hydrogen "boost" system to the RX-8.

If you burn 850 gallons of gas a year in your car, what used to cost you $1275 a year now could cost you $2550 a year...and of course you are buying that gas with after-tax money. So you have to make about $4000 just to put gas in your car. The RX-8 needs to get the MPG up...for me anyway....I'm not "loaded"

Jeff

JeffNY

Are you engineers at Mazda reading this stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(molecule)

Hydrogen can be split from water by temperature alone...
High-Temperature Electrolysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-t...re_electrolysis
Interesting PDF:
www.ne.doe.gov/hydrogen/HTE.pdf

"at 2500°C, electrical input is unnecessary because water breaks down to hydrogen and oxygen through thermolysis."


Again, the water powered car is not here yet. But for anyone interested, here are a few more links I have on producing hydrogen. I think the better idea is to find an efficient way to split water as needed (rather than use a storage system). But if we need to create hydrogen and store it (maybe to heat your home) we humans are learning very fast how to create hydrogen cheaply and efficiently....including using some ideas that are a few BILLION years old, and were used by the first living things on Earth.


A news piece on GE's new hydrogen device:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biz...523,295,p1.html
"....researchers at GE say they've come up with a prototype versionof aneasy-to-manufacture apparatus that they believe could lead to a commercial machine able toproduce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of gasoline"


Plants Give Up Secret Of Splitting Water
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1072802/posts
"....the team at Imperial College London and Japan Science and
Technology Corp. in Yokohama said they had taken the best pictures yet
of the plant structures that do it every day."

Improve Hydrogen Production by Genetic Methods: Design a Better Nanomachine
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309096685/html/61.html


Mutant Algae Is Hydrogen Factory
http://msn.wired.com/news/technolog...rss.partnerfeed


Sunlight to Fuel Hydrogen Future
http://msn.wired.com/news/technology/0,65936-0.html
"Hydrogen Solar of Guilford, England, and Altair Nanotechnologies are building a hydrogen-generation system that captures sunlight and uses the energy to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The company's current project is a fuel station in Las Vegas that will soon be dispensing hydrogen fuel."

aerospacediver

from what I remember reading in school, Hydrogen cost more to process than gasoline, and you use more of it.

MP3Guy

Whatever, it is not economically viable right now and I'm sure the Mazda engineers know more than these cranks. I think the future of energy will involve a lot of different sources, like ethanol from biomass, hydrogen, solar and wind.

aethelwulf

It seems that this thread is getting a bit off topic. The systems in question run off of your car battery to produce hydrogen and oxygen gas by splitting water. Now, this process in and off itself is not a viable solution to running a car. However, when combined with a normal gasoline engine it functions in much the same way a hybrid engine makes its power. The battery is used to provide electricity to split water. Supposedly, the main effects of the system are to increase the efficiency of the engine. Now, the main issue is going to be how much energy you need to put in to create the hydrogen (AND oxygen). These TWO gasses are injected into the combustion chamber, where they presumably allow the hydrocarbons in the gasoline to cumbust more completely than under normal conditions. So basically it is a matter of extracting more power from the gasoline itself to increase efficiency rather than directly drawing power from the hydrogen. It COULD be a viable system, but I don't have enough experience with this to say whether it IS a viable system and if it works.

ken-x8

It's hard to translate what's good for a rocket engine into what's good for an internal combustion engine. Specific impulse is a measure of pounds of thrust per pound of propellent, important for rockets where mass ratio is the final arbiter of whether or not something will work. The SSMEs burn fuel rich: more hydrogen is pumped in than actually burned. I don't know the numbers for the SSMEs, but as I recall for the Saturn 5 something like half the hydrogen was not burned - it was pretty much just light molecules added to increase the specific impulse.

I don't think that only burning half your fuel is particularly desirable in a car.

Ken

Freddie

ken-x8 must be a rocket scientist.

JeffNY

The original quote was:
>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas<<

The point was, hydrogen + oxygen is a viable (an efficient) alternative to gasoline, and when mixed would appear to at least as much energy as gasoline.

One thing to keep in mind though, if you had a RX-8 that could burn hydrogen or gasoline (like Mazdas prototype above) and 95% of your trips in the car were under 100 miles....you would only need a small tank of hydrogen on the car that could hold just 4 or 5 gallons of hydrogen. Further, if you had a hydrogen generator (using any of the methods above) in your garage to plug into nightly you would rarely have to put gasoline in your car. Cool!

But aethelwulf was correct. We got off topic from the original question on boost systems.

Jeff

Georgia8er

To get the fuel economy with these systems JeffNY is quoting, you'd have to get more than 100% thermal efficiency. While I'm all for investigating new energy sources, perpetual motion machines don't work.

JeffNY

Georgia8er, NONE of the systems I site break the laws of thermodynamics. Please take a look at the web pages I sited.

swoope

iTrader: (5)

tard off!

beers

ken-x8

Nah. It's just that I once nearly got hit by a Saturn 5, and the smell of unburned hydrogen was overpowering.

As I said before, what makes a rocket great won't make an IC engine great. It's like in the infomercials for those scam "Tornado" gizmos. The guy stands next to a jet engine, points out that there are turning vanes in the front, and if that's good for a jet engine it must be good for your car. Then he tells you to cram a piece of tin in your inlet.

Back on topic...whether hydrogen is worthwhile or not just depends on the energy you get out of it, and the cost of energy to make and distribute it.

Ken

Paul_in_DC

I'll be more impressed when they perfect a fusion reactor. Too bad we have so many people afraid of nuclear power. With all that electricity running around, we could all be driving Teslas.

WantedTwo

iTrader: (4)

you know, this goes along with the same thing that one of my friends is doing.... lets just say there is a viable H2 system out there it gonna cost you a lovely little penny to increase your mpg by 20%. ok, now your getting 25mpg and you spent 5k to get converted. I just dont get it.

rotarygod

The really funny thing is he is completely wrong about how air flows through a jet engine. It does not spin. It takes closer to a zig zag path through the engine. He's the engineer though so he should have known this!

rotarygod

I personally don't see anything positive about hydrgoen when it comes to the amount of total fuel used (gasoline, hydrogen, burned dog carcasses, etc) per mile. It's just less efficient. Sure you can use less gaoline by substituting another fuel in it's place but you are still consuming the same amount of fuel when it comes to total energy. Since hydrogen has less energy than gasoline, you'd actualy get worse mileage per total amount of fuel going in. The only positive trait that hydrogen has is that it's clean burning. That's just not worth it to me. Give me power, economy and dirty air anyday over clean air but wimpy cars. Screw California. I'll survive.

When hydrogen finally becomes viable as an automotive fuel, all cars will be series hybrids and hydrogen will just power generators. Even then it's at a disadvantage compared to other fuels but if it's only a generator, that's not as much of a performance loss to the wheels. Ethanol and biodiesel are still far better choices.