Thread: use water and baking soda in engine

I had a water injection kit of a worked 351,sounds like the same setup you had on the old holden 6.
In theory the atomized water cooled the intake charge to improve the horsepower and help prevent pinging.Was there when I bought the vehicle,the previous owner recommended a splash of metho in each reservior fill.
They are very common kits on turbo motors,helps prevent detonation.
Andrew

I've made a hydrogen extractor out of stainless steel plates. By putting voltage through the plates you get bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen. My next step is to make a series of these to produce enough gas to aid my diesel engine.

Water injection (or water plus additives) was used in aircraft engines from the late 1930s to enable the use of higher compression or boost with the available fuel. As a result of this experience they were commonplace as an add-on to cars in the early post-war period, and in a few cases actually gave improved performance by cooling the incoming charge where the combustion chamber design and available fuel resulted in detonation.

Unfortunately, using electricity generated by an engine to produce hydrogen to aid combustion adds less power than the amount of power used to generate the electricity, and no amount of tinkering will enable a mechanism to circumvent the law of conservation of mass/energy, which is the fundamental law of physics that is involved. (basically you are asking for a perpetual motion machine)

It can be argued that you are using a small amount of hydrogen to improve the combustion of the diesel fuel, and this may have a grain of truth, but given the efficiency of heat engines (even the maximum theoretical efficiency of the Carnot cycle) and the efficiency of belt driven alternators, you are very unlikely to get a net positive result.

John

I had an old Datsun 240K running the 2000GTXE motor with water injection. IT ran cooler with the water and you were able to mix the fuels better. Performance difference was quite noticable and when we pulled the engine down it was quite clean inside.

Water injectors were popular in the immediate post-war period up until the introduction of "Super" petrol about 1957. New cars commonly had compression ratios that were not suitable to run on the "standard" petrol available in Australia. You could retard ignition timing to aviod pinging and thus lose performance, use more fuel, and run the risk of overheating. Many owners fitted a water injector which avoided these problems. A side effect was that a water injected engine rarely needed to be pulled down for the traditional "decoke" which was universal and necessary on the fuels and oils of the times, about every 10-20,000miles. Water injected engines, when dismantled, were always clean inside, usually just showing a fine black deposit on the pistons, valves and combustion chambers, without the heavy, hard caked deposits usually encountered. The introduction of "Super" petrol made these accessories redundant.

Water or water/methanol injection was used in supercharged engines mainly to allow use of higher boost in an emergency situation, "Military Emergency Power" as officially termed, or "through the gate" as termed by pilots. This has the effect of an intercooler and also requires an additional fuel system to add more petrol to the now much denser charge air to restore fuel/air ratio giving a large increase in power. I think it was Wright engines that recommended use for 15 seconds only. The USAAF engines with this capacity had an under cowl indicator that told the ground crew that the pilot had pushed the throttle "through the gate". All engines thus indicated had to be removed for mandatory inspection and overhaul.

The early B747 P&W engines used to use water injection for take off, the system was still fitted when i joined BA but not used, now a days commercial aircraft dont need it with the advances in engine technology, especally the electrical control side of things.

Originally Posted by muddymech

The early B747 P&W engines used to use water injection for take off, the system was still fitted when i joined BA but not used, now a days commercial aircraft dont need it with the advances in engine technology, especally the electrical control side of things.

While there is a tenuous but clear connection between aeroplane piston engines and automotive engines, the connection of automotive engines with turbofans is so slight as to be invisible.

John

JD, same reason as in the supercharged piston engine. Evaporation cools the heated compressed air so more fuel can be burnt giving more thrust.