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Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 12:50:54 :
In Reply to: Increase Your Truck's MPG using Water posted by Vaughn on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 10:52:17 :
Sounds like some people are dusting off the old gas-saving scams from the 1970s. All we need is a story that the oil companies bought up the patents and/or killed the inventors.
I noticed that the videos on that website were actually for completely different products, a "battery" for portable electronic devices, and a hydrogen torch, both of which actually work. I thought "run your car with water" would be promoting a water injection system, which really does work to increase efficiency and reduce knock, if you can managed to get droplets of water (not vapor) into the combustion chamber and then have them vaporize during combustion. Water injection's been around for at last 50 years and nobody's been able to really make it work like it should.
But this scheme, electrolyzing a small amount of water to make hydrogen and oxygen and then burning it in the engine makes no thermodynamic sense at all. Of course it's a lot easier to sell books than working systems. Of the few people who read the book and actually try to build the thing, they'll either imagine that their car drives a little better or they'll assume they didn't build it quite right.
I especially liked the "battery booster wire" -- add a couple extra feet of battery cable to the ground wire from the battery, wind it up in a coil, and it's supposed to work some magic to "boost your engine's performance" (sort of like the "blue pills" everybody's trying to sell me?)
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