Running a car on water.
I posted this in response in a Care2 forum to the common question from the non-scientist as to whether you can really run a car on water. Since I've been asked this question I thought I'd post it here as well.
Can a car run on water?
Its a good question, and it isn't surprising that non-scientists find it confusing.
Using cheap electricity to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen and recombining them into electricity at the place you want it (e.g. in a running car) is the basis of the so-called 'Hydrogen Economy'.
But .... its also the basis of a lot of scams by people either deluding you, or deluding themselves. Most (though not all) of the "run your car on water" projects are essentially variations of this.
There are very real challenges to get the Hydrogen Economy to work. The inefficiencies of generating electricity, converting it to hydrogen, moving it to where you want, and back again to electricity mean that it is hard to make it economically viable. In addition it is hard to use early variations as cars need to fill up where, and when they need to. There is some good progress and you'll hear of for example some city buses running on Hydrogen Fuel Cells. (Often the headline will read something like "Bus running on Water").
Then there are the scams ... we have an indigenous one in Australia called the "Joe Cell", characteristics include: Everyone knows someone whose seen it running, but noone has seen it themselves, or it fails to run when the journalist is around. If you see words like "Zero Point Energy" or "Above Unity" beware. If the system appears to work it can take a while for even the scientificaly trained to figure out the catch - for example it might be drawing power from the car's battery, or sometimes its using a so-called "catalyst" as the source of power. For example there is one that uses aluminium cans, ignoring the energy that went into making the cans, and that the aluminium smelters make generous contributions to politicians rather than paying anything close to the full cost of the electricity. There are also a miriad of excuses why a working prototype has never been completed, most commonly they are a variant of a visit by the "Men in Black". Sometimes I've wished I could blame delays in one of my projects on such a visit
The proliferation of scams detracts from the ability of good projects in these areas to get attention. For example Cold Fusion is probably real but finds it hard to get research attention and dollars. Also I've read some material on adding water to petrol but can't tell if it is real or a scam. And there is some really good work happening in the areas of Fuel Cells and electro-chemistry.
I'm also suspicious of many of the fuel additives and devices. Especially those driven by MLM schemes. It is hard for a consumer to test them, as driving style, as anyone who has watched the Prius fuel-meter can tell you, is going to eclipse any changes to fuel economy from the device or additive.
As Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and if you are a non-scientist most of these technologies are hard to distinguish from the scams, so if in doubt - steer clear!
Posted by admin at April 25, 2007 9:24 AM
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Comments
The guidelines for running your car on water available at http://www.runacaronwater.com seem to be effective for conversion of most cars to a fuel system supplemented by (but not entirely run by) water.
My results with them were an increase in miles per gallon from 19 mph to 32, which completely floored my seasoned car mechanic!
Posted by: jakester81 ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mitra.biz/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 30, 2007 8:59 PM