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Is the amount of hydrogen extracted from H20 limited by the principal of conservation of energy?

hydrogen energy
ninebadthings asked:


Is it possible to extract a quantity of hydrogen from water with a greater potential energy than that of the amount of energy in the electricity used to produce it?

Seems to me conservation of energy is always going to be the spoiler.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under Green Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Is the amount of hydrogen extracted from H20 limited by the principal of conservation of energy?”

  1. Dana1981, Master of Science Says:
    August 5th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    You can extract as much hydrogen from as much water as you want, as long as you’ve got a sufficiently large supply of energy to use.

    This is the fundamental flaw with HHO, however. You’re using the energy stored in the gasoline to separate the hydrogen in the water molecule instead of to power the car directly. The argument is that the hydrogen will then increase the efficiency of burning the gasoline sufficiently to more than make up for the energy used to extract the hydrogen.

    I don’t buy it. All you’re doing is burning the hydrogen that you just extracted. Will it increase your fuel efficiency? Only if you ignore the gasoline you had to use to extract the hydrogen in the first place. It’s summed up nicely in this article:

    “So, simplifying this, they’re breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning hydrogen and oxygen to create water. This is, of course, possible, but you can’t get more energy out of the system than you put in. Otherwise, it’s simply a perpetual motion machine.

    {…}

    Until someone puts a box on the driveway and it generates more power than goes into it … everyone who says you can power a car with water is either a fool or trying to take someone else’s money.”

    The whole thing is just a scam.

  2. dooberheim Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 8:56 pm

    Supposedly HHO allows you to run the engine very lean and therefore increase it’s mileage.

    I will wait for a reputable outfit like Consumer Reports or Motor Trend to test one of these. If it works, great. But I have a feeling the manufacturers of these devices might not want them to be tested by an impartial third party.

    DK

  3. James W. Early Says:
    August 8th, 2008 at 7:39 pm

    You can accomplish almost the same results just by spraying a mist of water into the carburetor intake. What it does is to cool the intake flow and make the mixture denser so engine pre ignition is reduced imitating higher octane fuels. This will give slightly more power and slightly more mileage as long as you do not let the sprayer run out of water.