Make your car a water burner

I like that guy who is so indigent because a bunch of delusional dreamers at Ron motor say that hydrogen injecting will improve mileage 40%. Here is the disclaimer at the bottom of the Ron Motor web page: "This document is not a legal instrument and does not constitute an offer to sell securities. This is simply an overview of our company and a brief description of our current state of operations. This document contains forward-looking statements and financial forecasts that reflect the plans and expectations of Ronn Motor Company (?Company?). In this document and related comments by Company management, words and phrases like ?expect,? ?anticipate,? ?will feature,? ?will include,? ?will use,? ?estimate,? ?forecast,? ?objective,? ?plan,? ?goal? and similar expressions are used to identify forward-looking statements, representing management's current judgment and expectations about possible future events. Management believes these forward-looking statements and financial forecasts, and the judgments upon which they are based, to be reasonable, but they involve numerous known and unknown risks are not guarantees of actual future performance or financial position, which may be materially different from what is expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements and financial forecasts." This is legalese for saying: We are a bunch of BS artists and won't you please put in an order and buy our stock, we will let you know when we have a car for sale. PT Barnum was right and the comments to this post prove it.

Paul, Perhaps you can look up some information about the TCP engine that was first developed by an engineer at Texaco in the 1940's. It greatly improved the part load efficiency and overcame the knock problem. It was shelved and then in the early 1960's Popular Science ran an article on it. It disappeared again, but inb the 1970's UPS tested one in their vehicles. Apparently there's also an SAE paper on it. It was essentially a direct cyliner injection (like a diesel) but using a spark plug instead of compression ignition. Since it didn't have a throttle plate, a full charge of air was introduced and only as much fuel as was needed was injected. It got the benefit of full expansion of the charge since it wasn't starved like a throttled engine. The spark ignition eliminated the cetane requirement, so it could burn any liquid fuel. I wonder what happened to it.

I appreciate all of the interest and information provided in this discussion. While I agree with everything that has been said about conservation laws, and things we know about the Otto cycle, one thing I think folks may have missed is that the HHO or Brown gas that these devices provide is not the same as injecting H2. Brown gas is a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. When we burn gasoline in an engine or even when we just inject H2, the oxygen has to be fed from air, which is only about 21 percent oxygen, and the other 79 percent is inert gas. So when we refer to studies that have experimented by injecting H2 in a gasoline engine, it is not equivalent. It takes extra air to burn the hydrogen, hence extra inert gas that has to be heated, and carries off a considerable amount of waste energy. The claims of efficiency improvements have not so much made claims on the energy balance of splitting water and putting it back together again, but rather from the improved combustion of gasoline. If instead of generating hydrogen, the device had claimed to better atomize the gasoline or improve mixture control, I don't think the reaction would have been nearly so negative. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if I claimed that my last tune-up improved my gas mileage by 15%. But the claim has been made that the HHO gas improves combustion. Further, they say that the changes to combustion are so dramatic that the mixture needs to be adjusted to compensate. I think those are claims which can only be proved or disproved by the words, "Show me". I believe some have tried to do just that. But so far, I have not seen their science conducted with nearly enough rigor to convince me either way. For instance, if adjusting the mixture is required, what if you leaned out the mixture without injecting the HHO gas? Or could a simple tune-up provide the same result? What was the impact on emissions, especially of NOx? If the combustion temperatures are higher, what is the long term effect on the engine components? Some engines improve and some don't - what is the critical difference? Etcetera. So I remain interested in the dialog. Keep it up. Maybe we should turn this over to "Mythbusters"?

I am glad to see the most of the readers of this blog in an extremely technical magazine accept that conservation of energy is real and there is no way you can take energy from the alternator and make more energy by burning the hydrogen. So we are left with the magical "efficiency improvement" argument. Sorry, I sat in thermodynamics class back in the 1970s and saw the three blackboards full of formulas that analysed the Otto cycle. What it finally came down to was that efficacy is directly proportional to compression ratio. In a century past, the limit on compression was knock, then for a couple of decades pollution laws restricting NOX emissions meant that compression ratios had to be reduced even further. In the last ten years, compression ratios have been able to go back to the knock limit since fuel injection, cylinder-head and piston-top profiles and catalytic converters have mitigated the NOX production of engines operating with high compression ratios. It is true a faster flame front might improve specific power output, since it would allow the mean effective pressure of the cylinder to peak faster, at a point most advantageous to delivering power to the crankshaft across the connecting-rod angle. But other than that old NASA publication, there is no proof that flame fronts are improved. As I pointed out, the NASA study is obsolete, since modern engines use squish areas to turbulate the charge and burn the charge faster. One might think that adding multiple spark plugs would do even more than hydrogen, since it would allow multiple flame fronts. Indeed, Mercedes has had an engine with multiple plugs and that worked for a while, but improvements in charge swirl and turbulence mean that adding a plug has not made sense, even when done by technological giants such as Honda. So flame front speed is not applicable to a modern engine. No, as a guy that worked at GM and Ford for ten years, I understand things very well, conservation of energy is the first strike against this BS, combustion physics is the second and the third strike is Otto cycle thermodynamics. Add to that the fact that the NASA study all the fan-boys cite actually disproves the theory and I should be more clear-- don't even look at conclusion #2 on the report, look at chart 10, hidden back there because it proves the whole experiment was a failure. The black squares are running hydrogen-gasoline, the round dots are gasoline alone. The x axis on the bottom is fuel air ratio as a ratio from stoichiometric (1:1). You can see the least energy consumption and hence, the best mileage is at an equivalence ratio of 0.8. You can see when they add hydrogen, even though the procedure says they adjust the ignition timing, made the energy consumption go from 7.1 to 7.4, a 4% reduction in mileage. So then they lean out the engine and when the air-fuel ratio goes to 0.63 then the energy used goes to the same level as it was with no hydrogen injection. Also bear in mind that they are pumping hydrogen at 1.42 pounds per hour, a rate that probably exceeds these hobby kits by a large amount. Also note that the flame speed they claim may be due to timing various they induce, they are not measuring the front directly like my buddies used to with laser Doppler interferometry. No, this report is written in a circuitous and tangential and loquacious manner because the results did not turn out as expected. I would put much more stock in it if it was an SAE report, but NASA doing piston engine research is a little suspect. Now another factor is the whole conspiracy nut theory, same as the one that says the car companies have a 80 mpg carburetor. Get this, I worked at Ford and GM and every single person at both those companies actively despises the oil industry and everyone in it. If GM had a way to double the mileage of a car it would be installed so fast it would make your head spin. Now, one of the commenter's in the Pop Sci article did bring up a good point, if what these kits do is bubble water into the intake, well, that we know works. We studied it at GM when I was there 30 years ago. The water cools the flame charge, letting you run higher compression ratios (hence that Otto cycle efficiency I talked about) and as a bonus cleaned carbon off the piston, heads and valves. The downside was that the piston rings would rust and GM rightly concluded that if the American people are too lazy and stupid to keep water in their radiators and washer bottles, they sure were not going to keep adding it every fill-up to the water-injection system. When the system ran out of water the high compression ratios and high ignition advance would cause the engine to ping and knock, doing permanent damage that GM knew it would have to pay for in warranty costs. Now these days I wonder if water injection could not be more successful. If the system kept your car running for a few seconds after you turned off the key, so it could run the engine for a few seconds without water to keep it from rusting, that would solve that. If the spark could be retarded when you ran out of water it would save the motor from damage. I suspect the problem is that the real enabler for better mileage is the higher compression ratio and you cannot change that when Skippy runs the water reservoir dry. So then you have to retard the spark so much you either burn the exhaust valves or, more likely, fail pollution control. Back to hydrogen injection, there is far more reason to believe that hydrogen will lower the knock limit rather than raise it and I am pretty certain there is no real advantage to flame propagation speed since if there was we would see multiple plug engines everywhere long before we see hydrogen. All the science I see points to the fact that this simply does not work. When somebody does a double-blind test then I will put more stock in the anecdotal claims of higher mileage, until then we have to assume people are just driving more carefully.

Please keep in mind it is completely possible to obtain a free lunch that does not violate any laws of physics. All you need do is get the other guy to pay for it. Otherwise TANSTAAFL applies.

Its a real problem convincing people that there is no free lunch. I had a neighbour ask me to help him wire up a windmill on top of his motorhome. "I'll generate huge amounts of power as I bomb along the highways and store it up the juice in batteries." Ever heard of drag mate? Look, he said, it takes almost nothing to turn this (unloaded) wind generator! I am such a dumb pessemist... Last I heard it got ripped off the roof at 70mph and landed in a ditch. So sorry to hear that, I had such high hopes!

I''d be interested to know who paid you to write such stuff? Can you explain how a 5w hho generator can power a 2.5hp engine? Be inventive and stop knelling to the gas, meds, and banks that suck us all dry!

I have built and tested a hydroxy gas generator. The first test cause mpg to decrease from 27mpg to 19mpg due to ECM counteracting the clean burn and dumping more gasoline in. I disconnected the generator and the latest fillup showed an INCREASE from 27mpg to 30.4mpg due to the cleaning effect of hydroxy gas eliminating fuel injector deposits. I will soon be building the electronics needed to adjust the voltage created by the oxygen sensor to fool the ECM so it will not dump excess gasoline in. Naysayers will not achieve anything. Search the web and you'll find people actually building them and posting the results. Many give away the results of their experiments free on the web and have nothing to gain by lying about their results.

What you don't seem to understand is the folks hyping the HHO gas system are talking about an increase in the efficiency of the engine. Conventional cars are around 20% efficient, so there's plenty of room to improve the efficiency of conventional engines, thereby paying the energy cost of the electricity used to generate hydrogen and oxygen gases. Therefore the first and second laws of thermodynamics are not violated, because nobody is getting something for nothing. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence for the huge increases in gas millage. The increased velocity of the flame front (10x) is the secret, but you have to ensure the engine timing is modified so there is no advance and the spark is at top dead center. Furthermore, in many cars the ECU needs to be tricked out (often by modifying the output of the MAP sensor) as the combustion needs to run lean, which comes from the extra O2 from the water hydrolysis. Modern ECU's have control algorithms that adjust the flow of gasoline according to the O2 concentration seen in the exhaust, so that has to be worked around for some models. I have a friend who owns a garage that has beta tested 5-6 installs with failure to see a difference in two cases and almost doubling of the gas mileage in the other cases. There's a guy with some videos on UTube which discuss relevant issues. For 40 years this guy has used H2 from gas bottles and has modified all types of internal combustion engines, gas or diesel, car, lawn mower, generator, etc. One video shows this guy switching between gasoline and terpenes (citrus rind squeezings) on a 3 cylinder GEO and readjusted the timing on the fly using a 555 timer. Check it out.

I''m not convinced yet, but... I did build a HHO generator for my Dodge Diesel (2004). In early testing my mileage increased from 19.4 to 26.1 on a 14 mile trip from my shop to my home on 3 successive trips. I didn''t service the unit and the mileage dropped off again. Someday I will complete the testing to see if it actually works. I agree that most of the ''information'' that is posted on the web is just hype.... Now who wants to buy a bridge?

I can''t see that the article suggests improving mpg''s just by feeding current from the alternator. 20 Amp x 12 Volt is 240 Watt. A car engine is somewhere around 100kW, I asume an extra 240 Watt (wherever it came from) would''nt make a difference. The main improvement suggested in the article is from adding hydroxy gas to the engine, thus improving the engines efficiency. That is some physics totally unknown to me, could someone explain if it is reasonable?

There is a paradox in this sentence: In other words, adding hydrogen did not increase mileage. In fact, it decreased mileage unless you leaned out the mixture and then the mileage was equivalent to what it was with gasoline alone. Is leaning out the mixture means use less gasoline?

Ronnmotors.com is looking for investors.. How many shares do YOU want? Nice looking car, I would consider it if it had a normal engine.

While I agree that there is no way that hydrogen generation through electrolysis can be a net energy producer, maybe it could be a better energy storage medium than batteries for a pseudo-hybrid? Thus there would be net hydrogen generation during cruising and net hydrogen consumption during acceleration/idling. That may be the Ronn Motors approach. However, I did not see any real data on the hydrogen system on their web site.

Dear Not Convinced, I am sure what you intended to say. Did you mean to say; "gets 40 miles per gallon of water" or "gets 40 miles per gallon of idiots?"