One of the car engines being developed for the future is a car that will run on water as a fuel?
April 14, 2009 in Alternative Fuel Vehicles
Did you know that you can save fuel and run your car on water
need_help asked:
One of the car engines being developed for the future is a car that will run on water as a fuel. Explain the process and the likelihood of development within the next 5 years.
Did you know that you can save fuel and run your car on water
no way
water is 2 parts hydrogen to 1 part oxygen
but extracting that from the water to get to the hydrogen and the oxygen uses more energy than you would gain
so it can never happen
Here’s how it works:
1. Make a claim that has been debunked literally thousands of times.
2. Promise delivery at a safe date in the future.
3. Collect money from gullible people who don’t understand 7th grade science.
4. Skip town with the money before the suckers realize they’ve been had.
There, did I explain the process well enough?
take the oxygen away and put the hydrogen in a tank. use a hydrogen engine to power the car. Is that dumb enough
you can have either a hydrogen powered…however it is to unstable and likely to explode in a huge blast if you are in a wreck….
There are a great many scams that involve “water as fuel”. Most of them are absolute bunk.
There is a semi-legitimate scheme to use water as an energy storage device. In that system, electricity is used to convert water into its parts, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is compressed, bottled and stored on the vehicle. Then a fuel cell turns the hydrogen and oxygen back into water, making electricity. This does work, but it’s so inefficient as to not be worthwhile.
Yes, this is a very real development that has been done many times before.
Water is H2O, as you know, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Hydrogen is a extremely flammable/explosive gas, and oxygen is a combustible gas. If there was a way to separate the water into the two gases, the combination would be an amazing source of fuel.
It can be done through electrolysis. By passing an electric charge through H2O, the molecules can be separated and the resulting gas used as fuel.
Is it true? Search on Youtube for “Water torch”. You can make one in your own garage. Using it to power a vehicle is simply another application of the same principle.
So, since this is true, why haven’t we been implementing it into our country powerhouses on a large scale? Think it might have something to do with all the oil tycoons worried about losing their business? You think?
If there was no need for oil (petrol and gasoline), hundreds of thousands of people would lose jobs, and a select few leaders/owners/tycoons would lose a tremendous amount of money.
Water as a fuel source will not happen on a large scale in the future for these and possibly other reasons. It WILL be used on a smaller scale, however, by those ingenious people who are really trying to make the world a better place. As I mentioned before, it already has.
Likellihood in the next 100 years is zero. It takes more energy to separate the things that burn in H2O than is contained in the H2O.
The idea is complete bunk. Electrolysis has never been demonstrated at more than 70% efficiency (Wiki electrolysis), and car engines work at about 20% efficiency. Combine that with 30% efficiency from our existing coal-fired power stations and 90% efficiency from the grid (DOE) and you can see why this is not a good idea. It works out to less than 5% thermal efficiency, compared to 20% for a gasoline engine.
But it will probably happen anyway, because people are stupid. Hydrogen will run in a car, the car doesn’t emit much pollution–so people will ignore the fact it takes 4 times as much energy to make the hydrogen car roll as it does to make the gasoline car roll. People will ignore the environmental impact as well. Lots of folks are already working on it, there are probably dozens of these cars on the road already.
It will never happen. Study your physics and then U would know.
There’s a reason water is one of the most abundant materials on Earth: it’s VERY stable. As other people have said, you CAN get hydrogen from water and burn that hydrogen to release energy and get water back, BUT in order to get high-energy hydrogen from low-energy water, you need to add energy to that water. At best, you’re going to get out exactly as much energy from burning the hydrogen as you put in to make it. More likely, you’ll get less out due to friction, noise, inefficiencies in the conversion process, ect. and you’ve just wasted energy. Water will NEVER be an fuel source. At best water will be used as an energy storage medium (i.e. battery) for renewable energy (solar, wind).
I am not familiar with any engine designed to run on water now or planned any time in the future. There are however processes used to split the water molecule into its parts and then recombine them to produce energy to run an engine. There are several problems with this.
The water molecule is very stable. It takes a lot of energy to break it apart. Recombining it you would not get the same energy back. This is not impossible. Theoretically you might put solar panels on a car and makes Brown’s Gas (HOH) from water (H2O) using electrolysis. It would not be efficient but it might be done on some limited basis if you parked the car long enough in the sun and traveled a very short distance (less than 1 mile for every hour that the car stood in the sun.) You would be using the HOH as a storage medium for the solar power but you could do better with a modern battery and run the car with a 90% efficient electric motor. (about 2 miles for every hour in the sun.)
Additionally, the brown’s gas would be far more unstable than the battery. A spark could literally set it off
Advocates of using this process suggest that either using an existing car alternator or a solar cell to produce brown’s gas while it is being used to eliminate the storage issue. The problem with the alternator is that there is no free lunch. The power used by the alternator will decrease your milage by more than the brown’s gas adds.
Solar panels on the roof of a vehicle are not particularly efficient as the sun moves through the sky the angle of the solar panels to the sun means that the max power will be around noon and in the morning and evening far less light energy will be hitting the panels.
There is a chemical way to produce hydrogen using lye and aluminum. But lye is dangerous to human life. There are sure to be many accidents. I am still researching the by-products. It could be that electricity or even gasoline is cheaper.
If you have any reference I would love to see one.
NO CHANCE. only hydrogen