Thread: Hydrogen (browns gas) by electrolysis

I'll try and not be as overly negative as other seem to be.

I love playing with stuff like this. When I was in my late teens, I played with water injection by simply tapping a hole in the lid of my air cleaner on my old corolla. I fitted a simple agriculture spray jet and sprayed water straight into the carby. It worked a little but I didn't have enough pressure to properly mist the water fine enough and the flow was unregulated. I still believe there is benefits to be had with water injection in a internal combustion engine. Things like adding enough to increase compression and the cooling benefits inside the cylinder. Even the heat that gets absorbed by the water in the intake cools the air and makes it more dense, dense air has more oxygen which is needed to burn the fuel. I suspect it's just too costly and unreliable to use on an everyday basis. Water caused all sorts of other problems as it can be erosive and if a bead of water forms on the intake and then drops into the cylinder all at once. Just too hard for the benefit.


Hydrogen and Oxygen as a fuel makes perfect sense but I just don't see how enough can be made from water on the vehicle to make a difference. I believe any benefit from the extra hydrogen and oxygen going into the cylinder will be traded off in the alternator creating more drag generating to electricity required to generate the gas. I suspect the process of converting the water to gas is pretty efficient in the amount of electricity put in and the energy in the fuel (gas) produced but the problem is the generation of electricity by the alternator is very inefficient as is the use of fuel to movement in the combustion engine. So you are loosing energy in heat and friction in the alternator when making electricity and then loosing masses in heat and friction when you turn the fuel into movement.

I guess the benefit comes if you believe the browns gas is increasing the effectiveness of the petrol. I mean if the gas increased the burn of the petrol enough to offset the above then there is possibly something there but if that was the case then I think it would be far better to make the gas at home and fit gas bottles to the vehicle.

I should add, i believe there are a heap of ideas out there like this but since no one has worked out an easy way to make money from it, it's not being used.

But there are just as many things out there which are just some bright sparks idea but are absolutely useless.

I remember years ago there was some guy who sold this spark increaser at field days and similar shows. I went to these things all the time so I ended up seeing him just as often. I watched his show as he showed a spark plug connected to a coil making an orange looking spark. He would pass a piece of paper through the spark and show it burning the paper. He reckoned the spark was being wasted in heat. Then he attached his device in between the coil and the lead and the spark became much larger and bright white. It was obviously a much bigger spark and then he would put it on his old car and you'd hear the revs increase. I asked him in front of his crowd why manufactures like Honda and Toyota don't use the device if it's so good. He said he had the patent. Then I asked what it would be worth to a multi million dollar company like Toyota to be able to save fuel and make more power. If it was that good why was he standing in the heat at a field day selling this thing for $50 when he could just sell the patent. I might have upset him a bit. I didn't buy one.

On the other hand, I know now that the future will more likely be in electric cars but years ago we had the technology to make alcohol to run internal combustion cars on it but we continued to use fossil fuels even when we knew it was bad.

Why do we continue to burn coal when we have oceans that rise and fall with tides all the time.

I'm not against the idea that there are things out there that are good ideas and we just aren't using them because someone can't make money from them.

Happy Days

Now heres someone whose got his thinking hat on.

Im going to just cut to the chase relevent for this thread, if you'd like you can take me up on waterinjection and why it works particularly in a turbo diesel

Originally Posted by joel0407

Hydrogen and Oxygen as a fuel makes perfect sense but I just don't see how enough can be made from water on the vehicle to make a difference. I believe any benefit from the extra hydrogen and oxygen going into the cylinder will be traded off in the alternator creating more drag generating to electricity required to generate the gas. I suspect the process of converting the water to gas is pretty efficient in the amount of electricity put in and the energy in the fuel (gas) produced but the problem is the generation of electricity by the alternator is very inefficient as is the use of fuel to movement in the combustion engine. So you are loosing energy in heat and friction in the alternator when making electricity and then loosing masses in heat and friction when you turn the fuel into movement.

your theory on what part of the generation is lossy is not correct but its easy to make.

making power out of the alternator is actually very effecient (relatively speaking) using that power to electrolise water is less so. Ignoring all of that...

what you say about why it doesnt work is spot on the money but you also missed a step of loss, in the process of using electricity to split water.

on paper, every single element of what is required to make browns gas work in an engine works and makes sense but if you factor in the losses it just doesnt work, its entropy that gets you in the end.

Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

but you also missed a step of loss, in the process of using electricity to split water.

I don't think I did?

Originally Posted by joel0407

I suspect the process of converting the water to gas is pretty efficient in the amount of electricity put in and the energy in the fuel (gas) produced

As this is a simple reaction with little other by products I think it's the most efficient part of the process of converting motion energy to electricity to gas to motion again.

This might be getting a bit D and M but we never gain or loose energy, we only change its form. The trick is to have it in a usable form. Each time we change it's form we end up with multiple other forms. Friction is just the process of kinetic energy to mainly heat energy. Compression is the process of kinetic energy to mainly pressure. The problem is we rarely capture the minority energy created in the processes. When we have multiple processes, these minorities add up and in the end we have lost everything. The energy is still all around us but we didn't capture it.

Happy Days

Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

.........

on paper, every single element of what is required to make browns gas work in an engine works and makes sense but if you factor in the losses it just doesnt work, its entropy that gets you in the end.

If we assume that burning the Brown's gas is converted to mechanical energy as efficiently as possible, then still at least 70% of the energy goes into heat. (The very best internal combustion engines are only about 30% efficient overall)

Then we use some of that energy to drive an alternator - losing power in the drive belt, then the alternator is at best perhaps 80% efficient in converting the energy to electricity, and probably the same again for the electrolysis cell - both of these get hot, which is wasted energy.

So overall, at best, you are spending about five times as much energy to produce the gas as it contributes in mechanical energy.

You can appeal to the theory that the Brown's gas improves the combustion efficiency by a significant amount, but there is no solid evidence that this actually happens, especially with modern engines that have combustion very closely controlled to meet emission and fuel economy requirements.

John

Originally Posted by joel0407

.....
I remember years ago there was some guy who sold this spark increaser at field days and similar shows. I went to these things all the time so I ended up seeing him just as often. I watched his show as he showed a spark plug connected to a coil making an orange looking spark. He would pass a piece of paper through the spark and show it burning the paper. He reckoned the spark was being wasted in heat. Then he attached his device in between the coil and the lead and the spark became much larger and bright white. It was obviously a much bigger spark and then he would put it on his old car and you'd hear the revs increase. ......
Happy Days

It was probably just a spark gap in series with the plug. This idea goes back to probably over a hundred years ago. (which probably means it can't be patented except for the particular implementation)

It will fire more reliably, probably because the spark gap works to steepen the rise time of the voltage at the plug gap, but it is only effective if the plug is fouled or there are other reasons why the ignition is marginal.

The traditional way of doing it is using a shirt button to anchor the two sections of wire insulated from each other as a temporary fix when you can't replace the plug. A lot easier in the Ford T where the HT wires could be air insulated!

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

The traditional way of doing it is using a shirt button to anchor the two sections of wire insulated from each other as a temporary fix when you can't replace the plug. A lot easier in the Ford T where the HT wires could be air insulated!

John

Yep, did that with my '38 Vauxhall when I was 16 so I could drive it from Brisbane to Sydney. It used 5 gallons of oil on the trip. I suppose I shouldn't say the car was unregistered and I didn't have a licence.

Originally Posted by joel0407

I don't think I did?

the part I was refering to was this bit...

Originally Posted by joel0407

So you are loosing energy in heat and friction in the alternator when making electricity and then loosing masses in heat and friction when you turn the fuel into movement.

I'd assumed when you wrote that that the fuel you are talking about is the browns gas, you need 3 steps to make it on board. the step missing is the production of the gas.

1st loss, mechanical energy to electrical energy (get the alternator turning)
2nd loss, electrical energy to chemical energy (produce the browns gas)
3rd loss chemical energy to mechanical energy (burn the gas to power the alternator)

For the lay level this is good enough, assuming step 1 is 80% effecient, step 2 is 70% effecient and step 3 is 30% effecient. Using the joule as the total measure of energy you put into the system to start with (its lots more but lets just say)

100j *.8=80j (mechanical to electrical)
80j *.7= 56j (electrical to chemical)
56j*.3=16.8j (chemical back to electrical)

Theres actually a bunch of other steps in there if you want to go the whole 9 yards on it but the most important one is the conversion of chemical energy to heat energy (which is what provides the pressure) and then the conversion of heat energy to mechanical energy however this is generally accepted at the lay level to be covered in the loss of converting chemical energy to mechanical energy.