A friend of mine had been talking about these add-on hydrogen reactor things for months. well today at work he showed us the thing. it involves some baking soda/water mix in a canister, its hooked up to the battery and i guess the current produces the hydrogen. he had it installed on a ford F-150. my question is this, provided it actually does improve gas mileage like claimed, what are the chances it can be adapted to a rotary engine? i mean doesnt hydrogen burn hotter? wouldnt it do some serious damage our engine? any info or insight into this gadgets claims would be great.

 

Are you serious?

 

i wanna see pics.

 

https://www.rx8club.com/rx-8-discussion-3/real-147657/

 

When you look at a supernova in a telescope, it is from someone in a distant civilization using one of these. Oops!!

 

2nd law of thermodynamics > you

 

well they tried something similar in the late seventies with the gas shortage where they would shoot water directly into the carb, the water would vaporize and bada bing bada boom. it worked decent enough but it had a tendency to burn up the cylinders, so it went the way of the dinosaurs. and yes im serious. it is a simple process and is absolutely possible. But is it safe with a rotary?

 

i won't work, I still don't understand how people still fall for these things

 

It absolutely does work. it has been done for years, but its not very safe. this method is supposedly safer but i have yet to see any hard core test results.

 

Oh this works, the same way sugar pills and tornado's work.

You just spent a pile of money and you want it to work, so you drive differently, get 2-4 better mpg, and say it's a miracle.

Unless he's getting 10mpg better average over 10 tanks of gas, without changing his driving habits I'm gonna say any changes in mileage are coincidental, not causal.

The truth is there is no good way to make hydrogen. Even commercial hydrogen electrolysis requires MASSIVE amounts of power to work, and they're already way more efficient then anything you'll buy on the street.

What these reactors are are basically science fair experiments. Yes, the chemistry is sound. Yes, it will produce measurable amounts of hydrogen, but the amounts will be so little, that your engine won't even notice it. If it did notice it, it would sense a lean condition, and dump more fuel into your engine to compensate, negating the reactors effect unless you have an access port type device to keep it from happening.

 

The baking soda actually isn't needed. The process is called electrolysis and is very energy inefficient. People try to use low amperage with high current. What they should be trying to do is to use high current with low amperage through the use of a square wave frequency generator set somewhere around 20Khz-21Khz or so. This is more efficient.

In theory there is alot of energy in water. About 40% more than in the equivalent amount of gasoline. Hydrogen has energy potential. Oxygen has energy potential. Put them together and suddenly the energy potential isn't gone. They've just combined into a state of neutrality. The energy content is still there. Unlocking it is the hard part and where the problem really lies.

Once you get hydrogen and oxygen into their separate gasses, you've got lots of energy. It's getting them apart that's the inefficient part. If someone can figure out how to do this will little energy expulsion, they'd be onto something. However the way people have been going at this isn't very efficient. Using standard electrolysis you'd need the total power of a small subdivision to be able to separate enough of it to run your engine.

Yes water can be separated into pure hydrogen and pure oxygen. Yes these gasses in fact can run an engine. You need to get around the inefficiency of separating them. Do this, and fuel will be free. Of course if that happens expect some liberal government to come along and tax you based on miles driven so don't expect even this breakthrough to make driving cheap. The government will change that in a hurry.

 

If anyone wants to build a simple "hygrogen generator", it's cheap and easy. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars to play with it. In fact you can probably find the materials lying around your house.

First you need a container. Even a tupperware container will do. Next you need to pieces of steel. Preferably stainless and preferably the same size. You need to insert these into the container and place them a couple of mm apart. Now run a wire to each plate. Make sure the plates and wires don't touch each other. Now fill up the container with water. Not all the way. You need to leave some airspace. Make sure your steel plates are completely covered with water though. Now you'll also need to drill a couple of holes in the lid of your container to run the wires through. You have 2 of them. One wire goes to a battery + terminal the other to the - terminal. You'll start to get bubbles. Even a 9V battery will do it on a small scale. A car battery will do it much better.

You'll find that the water will turn yellow almost immediately due to oxidation of the metal. If you don't have stainless steel plates, you'll literally start instant rusting the plates.

Try different containers. Try PVC pipe with sealed caps at each end. Use 2 different sized steel pipes with one inside the other. Use your imagination. Seal off the container and make sure there is a small 1/4" or so nipple off of the top running to a tube. Add a pressure gauge and perhaps a ball valve to control pressure through flow. You get the idea. Once it hits about 60 psi you can actually make a torch out of it. It works. Ask me how I know! Very quick and easy to play with. You don't need books or instructions or kits. You don't need baking soda. Pure water alone works fine.

Saying all of this, no I do not have one installed on my car. It's just a fun easy little experiment.

 

Depends on what you mean by "does work". The work it does is less than the amount of work it takes to crack the water. Otherwise we'd all have one in the garage and be paying $0 to the gas and electric utilities. This is 18th century technology after all.

 

the friend that initially installed this thing has tested 5 tanks of gas on it now. He has averaged 8mpg better gas mileage. not so sure im willing to give it a try myself. it sounds interesting, and provided there was no potential for long term damage i would be willing to tinker with it. but not today or anytime soon.

 

How much slower is he driving?

Getting the nut behind the wheel to slow down is the first step to better mileage, and the first step to slowing down is installing several hundred bucks of equipment in your car that you desperately, desperately want to work.

Or he could just lie about it to cover up his shame.

Is he bragging about how he got 8mpg more, and encouraging others to get a kit too? Or did he get real quiet and only tell people he's getting 8mpg more when they ask him.

 

Sorry, not buying it. As has already been mentioned 1000 times in this thread, the amount of energy used to turn the water into hydrogen is greater than the amount you get from burning the hydrogen. The only way this would work at all is if you were somehow tapping into energy that was otherwise being wasted like hybrids do with the brakes.

I'm starting to doubt the "friend" part of the story too

 

We make industrial quantities of H2 at work (100,000m3/day)

You take methane (CH4) and water (H2O) and burn them together (ancient chinese secret!) to get one molecule of carbon monoxide (CO) and lots of hydrogen (H6)

You can then burn the CO in a boiler to reclaim some of the energy.

12 volts thru steel plates in water will may produce a fraction of an ounce of hydrogen in a matter of hours - definitely not enough to even affect the air/fuel ratio in an RX-8 - in those hours of motoring, the '8 would have sucked a small middle eastern oilfield dry!


S

 

Manbearpig Is Real, You Guys!!! He Produces Hydrogen Farts!

 

Perhaps you meant "voltage" (or something else) intead of either "current" or "amperage". The terms "current" and "amperage" are interchangeable in this context. Amperage is a measure of current.

 

Correct.