Someone emailed this to me, and after I watched I wanted to know what your thoughts are:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfXNtIv5HyA

I realize HHO gas is possible but doesn’t it take large amounts of energy to produce? Also he seems to say it produces more energy then is imputed; impossible? It’s been a while since my last physics class. :grin:

What makes me obviously suspicious is how easily he produces the gas, with what seems like a small amount of equipment, not to mention if he truly stumbled across something so profound (like going 100 miles on 4 gallons of water) wouldn’t this make more noise, then simply a small little blurb on a local fox affiliate?

I’m not a physicist (and I didn’t watch the video), but isn’t “HHO gas” just a fancy name for steam?

Advocatus, it sounds to me from the video as though his machine is basically stripping the hydrogen atoms off of the oxygen and then re-combining the two into a hydrogen flame ... “H H O” gas I think means a gas of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (rather than water vapor).

I’m also not a physicist but I also think that it takes energy to reduce water into hydrogen and oxygen. Note that his “hybrid” engine uses BOTH water AND gasoline ... it could be that the gasoline is giving him the power to split the water molecules. But who knows? I’m also a bit skeptical. There really isn’t enough information in that news bit to tell what’s going on there.

IIRC most of the true clean-burning energy engines START with raw hydrogen gas as the input and use a fuel cell to combine the hydrogen with oxygen from the air in a controlled environment, producing power and water. The problem with this general approach is that it takes a lot of energy to produce raw hydrogen gas in the first place, at least given present technology. So it isn’t really very energy efficient.

I can’t believe this hoax is still around.  The first time I saw it was in 1938 as a seven year old reading my father’s Popular Science magazine.  The chemical world is not like the social one.  In the physical world you CAN"T get something for nothing.  Or as the Second Law of Thermodynamics says (paraphrased) -You can’t win, and in fact, you can’t even break even.  Almost every way you convert energy from one form to another, say chemical to mechanical through combustion in an engine cylinder you lose part of the energy as heat. 

Water, whether it’s expressed as HHO or H2O, and whether it’s solid, liquid or gaseous, in this case is really part of the ashes when gasoline (a mixture of hydrocarbons) reacts (burns) with the oxygen in air.  Carbon dioxide is the other part of the ashes.  The energy is all gone.  To convert the water back to hydrogen and oxygen takes a great deal of energy - even more than you can get back by burning them together again to power an engine.

I wish more people has stayed awake in their high school physics and chemistry classes (or their teachers were better) so they understood the meaning of the laws of thermodynamics. 

It’s like a very active thread on another forum where someone heard about a car that would run on compressed air and thought this was a wonderful way to avoid using gasoline.  The first thing you need is a compressor with a motor or engine that requires a lot of energy to compress the air.  As soon as you do that, the air gets very hot.  As the heat dissapates from the storage tank, there goes a lot of the energy you put in to pressurize the air.  And to go even a few miles to the store, you’d need a tank truck to hold the amount of compressed air to run a piston or turbine engine.

And now, off of my soapbox.

Occam

electrolysis is a great way for companies and industries to produce hydrogen gas from a cheap substance like water, but when you are trying to actually conserve energy, it is terrible. it take a TON of energy to break water bonds. it is great though that he is using a combination of water and gas, because there is always a start.