Letters to the Editor
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Think about it
Is this April 1? People's ignorance of basic physics is being taken advantage of here.
Electrolysis requires a huge amount of electricity to produce even a small amount of hydrogen. An engine uses a comparatively HUGE amount of air every minute. It is inconceivable that the TINY bit of hydrogen that MIGHT actually get into the engine would have ANY effect on combustion.
Remember, GASOLINE IS A HIGHLY CONCENTRATED LIQUID SOURCE OF HYDROGEN. The release of all that hydrogen makes the car go. Again, the tiny bit of hydrogen (and presumably the oxygen fraction as well) added by this device I doubt could have any measurable effect.
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Not confused
Sorry, looks like you confused this tech with magnets on a fuel line. That's not what this is. Can you say why you think this -- rather than the magnets thing -- is a scam? It'd be great if you can cite something. Thanks much.
The magnets either claim that they arrange the molecules so they burn more efficiently, or that they magically turn water in the fuel lines into oxygen and hydrogen.
You want me to cite something refuting electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Electrolysis of this type not only requires compression, it's takes more energy than is produced.
. It has to be made, usually by splitting water H2O to get the hydrogen. This requires all the energy you are going to get from burning the hydrogen and a bit more on account of inefficiencies. Therefore, hydrogen is an energy transfer medium rather than a primary source of energy.
The well developed way of splitting water is by electrolysis. If fossil fuels, e.g. coal, oil or natural gas, are used to generate the electricity, there is no advantage over using the fossil fuels directly. Indeed you still get all the CO2, and there is a considerable loss of energy.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/hydrogen.html
You cannot cheaply convert water to hydrogen in a vehicle. There are methods to power vehicles using hydrogen, but they also require more power than simply using fossil fuels. They advantage is that they can be done without fossil fuels, or using waste electricity during slow period.
I could place a block of aluminum in water and mix in mercury and produce hydrogen, but creating that aluminum takes far more energy than is available from the hydrogen.
These things are scams that can't work, because they violate the laws of physics.
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Of course it works
In a way.
People use nitrous oxide injection to increase the performance of their cars all the time. Forcing additional oxygen into the fuel/air mixture allows you to add and burn more fuel, producing more power. The amount of nitrous you can introduce is limited only by the amount of fuel you can get into the engine, the size of the tank, and the amount of heat the engine can stand. You can make an engine a lot more efficient this way if you also increase compression with a turbo or supercharger (more fuel, more air, but burning a lot more completely), but they didn't do that in this test. Does bad things to reliability and longevity, too.
The problem is that you have to maintain an air to fuel ratio of right around 14:1 to get it to burn at all. That simple fact is the reason our cars don't just blow up while they are sitting in the parking lot. Forcing more oxygen into the mixture isn't going to help you unless you reprogram the fuel system. And if they reprogrammed the ECU to compensate for the additional oxygen, the test as described is invalid. The car may have gone from 9.4MPG to 23 but also from 230HP to 105. Was the car still drivable, or did they only do dyno testing? Did maintaining 55MPH require them to run much closer to (or even at) wide open throttle, the point of maximum efficiency in any internal combustion engine? You could say that you would rather have the fuel mileage than the horsepower, but a 4,000 pound car with 100 horsepower would be dangerous.
In a modern engine, something a Durango doesn't have, the problem isn't so much incomplete burning of the fuel/air mixture. That aspect isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than it has been in the past. The problem is turning all the energy produced into work instead of heat. And the Hydro 4000 doesn't address that issue at all.
People have been coming up with shit like this for 50 years, and conducting fairly convincing demonstrations for just as long. Oddly, not a single one of these advances has ever actually worked. Imagine that.
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Probably not, but I sure know how to increase mileage....
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick... there is no such thing as a free lunch. That said, this thing MAY work by virtue of improving combustion dynamics. If so, it's really EASY to determine. There's nothing wrong with using a dynamometer to do the test, either...it's actually more convenient and repeatable. So, a few dozen runs performed with more than one vehicle, under conditions of 'with/without' the unit will provide statistical evidence that something is happening or not, and that is easily subjected to informed engineering judgement. To say it works or not based on no testing is equally stupid. This can easily be empirically verified.
As to WHY it works (or not), speculation can be useful, but it can only provide furhter paths to investigation. Whether dynamometer results transfer directly to interstate driving is different question.
REGARDLESS, to double one's gas mileage in a vehicle, simply add one passenger's ass to the passenger count. Passenger miles per gallon leap in huge increments. Share the ride. Quit relying on exotic technology to do what simple scheduling can accomplish with almost no effort.
Even a Hummer gets impressive mileage when it transports 4 people to work and back.... comparable to my Honda Insight tranporting only a driver.
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Empiricism, empiricism
The Hydro folks propose that they achieve a large increase in miles delivered per gallon of gasoline. They present an empirical case. Critics are certainly free to cite flaws in the experimental design or alternate interpretations of results. Hydro, or anyone, is then free to counter with a modified experiment, and/or counter-arguments on interpretation. Repeat if necessary.
It is also fair to express skepticism based on one's experience, but to say that "this can't work because there is no free lunch" could be wrong in two different ways. First, and least likely in my opinion, is that this is in fact the long-sought free lunch -- I'd put the likelihood of that in the same range as all the molecules of air in this room gathering into one cc in the upper northeast corner. But thermodynamics doesn't say that *cant* happen, just that it's statistically so unlikely that we don't bother considering it for any practical purpose.
The second way the "impossible because no free lunch" argument could be wrong is that Hydro may not actually be offering a free lunch. They don't, after all, claim to run your car on zero gas, just a lot less.
Skepticism is fine, but elevating dogma over observation is not. E.g., I say it's extremely unlikely that you can jump across the Grand Canyon, but the experiment would be fairly easy to run, and if you were successful, I'd be a fool to keep insisting that you didn't do it.