YES, you can melt rock, fuse glass and even boost an I.C.E. ... no Cyril not the ice in a fridge, an Internal Combustion Engine.
But first you'll have to toss out the schoolboy experiments with carbon rods and paper clips dipped in saline or baking soda solutions.
That was fine to demonstrate a concept with lighting the soapy bubbles, but thats pretty much all you're going to do.
If you want to move into the future, then....
Its time to build a better electrolyser.
Better than what you ask?.... well better than all the glass pickle jar and tupperware container contraptions out there.
But first you'll have to toss out the schoolboy experiments with carbon rods and paper clips dipped in saline or baking soda solutions.
That was fine to demonstrate a concept with lighting the soapy bubbles, but thats pretty much all you're going to do.
If you want to move into the future, then....
Its time to build a better electrolyser.
Better than what you ask?.... well better than all the glass pickle jar and tupperware container contraptions out there.
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1: Safety First and Procedures
Firstly, whether you call it HHO, Electrolytic Gas, Browns Gas or my personal choice Hydroxy * is irrelevant, the bottom line is that its very flammable and therefore suitable precautions must be taken.
I cant stress strongly enough that pickle jars or glass jars of any type are not suitable containers to generate hydroxy gas. The slightest accident is going to turn that glass jar into a glass grenade with the unpleasant side effects that usually accompany such events.
To prevent flashbacks you will need a water trap otherwise known as a bubbler, which also has the added benefit of scrubbing the gas clean of caustic vapours. Dont rely on existing arrestors as used on oxy/acet gas welders, the flame front speed of hydroxy is way too fast for them to contain the flame.
The electrolyte I will be using is NaOh a.k.a. Caustic Soda a.k.a. Sodium Hydroxide. Not baking soda, it creates carbon monoxide and erodes the stainless steel electrodes.
I get mine as caustic soda flake from the hardware store, but it is also possible to get decent quality from other places in drain cleaner form. Make sure if going the drain cleaner route that it doesnt have additives or aluminium shavings added.
Caustic soda is as its name implies very caustic, and rubber gloves will be the order of the day if you dont want to see your skin start peeling away. Its probably also wise to add eye protection too.
Initially I start a cleansing cycle with very dilute 5% caustic soda in distilled water, and then the conditioning phase with full strength 23% NaOh in distilled water which is then the time to keep your wits about you.
Note, I dont use river water or tap water or melted Italian snow water or something sucked out of a rock layer far below the surface. I dont want spiders, bugs and chemicals in my 'lyzer, so its less hassle if I start with the good and clean and fresh stuff...trraaalala.
Dont use baking soda, it creates carbon monoxide and erodes the stainless steel electrodes.
Dont use salt, it gives off chlorine gas, very nasty stuff.
I cant stress strongly enough that pickle jars or glass jars of any type are not suitable containers to generate hydroxy gas. The slightest accident is going to turn that glass jar into a glass grenade with the unpleasant side effects that usually accompany such events.
To prevent flashbacks you will need a water trap otherwise known as a bubbler, which also has the added benefit of scrubbing the gas clean of caustic vapours. Dont rely on existing arrestors as used on oxy/acet gas welders, the flame front speed of hydroxy is way too fast for them to contain the flame.
The electrolyte I will be using is NaOh a.k.a. Caustic Soda a.k.a. Sodium Hydroxide. Not baking soda, it creates carbon monoxide and erodes the stainless steel electrodes.
I get mine as caustic soda flake from the hardware store, but it is also possible to get decent quality from other places in drain cleaner form. Make sure if going the drain cleaner route that it doesnt have additives or aluminium shavings added.
Caustic soda is as its name implies very caustic, and rubber gloves will be the order of the day if you dont want to see your skin start peeling away. Its probably also wise to add eye protection too.
Initially I start a cleansing cycle with very dilute 5% caustic soda in distilled water, and then the conditioning phase with full strength 23% NaOh in distilled water which is then the time to keep your wits about you.
Note, I dont use river water or tap water or melted Italian snow water or something sucked out of a rock layer far below the surface. I dont want spiders, bugs and chemicals in my 'lyzer, so its less hassle if I start with the good and clean and fresh stuff...trraaalala.
Dont use baking soda, it creates carbon monoxide and erodes the stainless steel electrodes.
Dont use salt, it gives off chlorine gas, very nasty stuff.
- I use the term Hydroxy in the loosest sense in that I infer it to mean a stoichiometric (2:1) mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen in a common duct electrolyzer, and not a gas consisting of mono-atomic Hydrogen.
Visit Our Store »
Go Pro Today »
IT DOES NOT MAKE ANYTHING SPECIAL. HHO, BROWN'S GAS, HYDROXY and KLEIN'S GAS ARE ALL SCAMS
All you are making is plain old molecular hydrogen and molecular oxygen. H2 and O2. Nothing else.
There's nothing special about burning underwater - it's a stoichiometric mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, of course it's going to burn, underwater or not.
So many experts without experience - books are great until reality steps in.
I do not know if this specific unit works or not - but some of these do result in better mileage - yes - I have hands on experience since 1998. The average is around 33% increase in mpg.
You are not making energy out of nothing - there is potential energy in the nature of the product. Just as a small yell from someone can make a tremendous release of energy from an avalanche (oh no - more energy produced than what you started with!), producing flammable gases from an electric current, and then burning taking advantage of the gas' flammable nature (which also interact with the gasoline and improve its flammability) is not magic and "free energy".
You obviously have never tried one and probably never will.
Statements made without hands-on experience are as reliable as Obama making a promise.
... 'nuff said - until after you have tried it personally. Heresy is how mistakes like Obama end up plaguing us.
(so off subject)
If your units *genuinely* increase efficiency by 33%, then why are they not in massive production, earning you millions of dolars a year in licenses?
And, FYI, if you bother to read what I posted, I did not claim electrolysis produces free energy. That was the project author.
The author makes grand claims for simple electrolysis, and claims that the general public know nothing about it, even though most children do it as a basic school lab experiment.
Independent tests (by a variety of scientific bodies, plus Mythbusters and BBC TV) have shown that water electrolysis units (often incorrectly called "HHO generators", "Brown's gas generators", "hydroxy generators" etc) contribute, at best, absolutely nothing to fuel efficiency, and some designs actually make cars use more fuel, thanks to drains on the car's electrical system.
although would you agree that this system would be good for things such as microtorches due to the extremely high heat hydrogen gas burns at?
2. Increased *efficiency* is possible - an IC engine is only around 35% efficient, so changing the way the fuel burns is a feasible method of increasing mileage.
3. Hydrogen is fairly useless as a heat-producing fuel. Larger-molecule gases are much better.
Also "No" is a little strong, you just have to look deep and have a good set of people and other sources, so basically mythbusters did it right.
One last thing, who doesn't like to talk about how many Liters per Minute they make. ha ha
2. you know more than me :P
3.hmm... I didn't know that either...
so you are saying other than for science experiments this kind of technology is essentially pointless?
The problem is the expectations of those using the idea, and the advertised advantages from those currently selling it.
It *could* bring benefits in terms of fuel efficiency, but it cannot be used to get more energy from the gasoline than was originally stored there. Using a gsoline engine, for instance, purely to run an electrolytic plant so that the car could run entirely on the gases produced could work, but at a hugely-reduced milage.
It has potential to be fine when people are using it as a way of modifying the combustion of fuel.
Using an electrolysis unit cannot create more energy than not using one, but it is potentially possible that using one could change the efficiency of the combustion of the petroleum, thus releasing more of the energy already stored in it.
Unfortunately, as stated elsewhere, when placed under test conditions, none of these units produce results any better than "no benefit", and many actually reduce the engine's efficiency.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3F-498MBG5-103&_user=10&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F1994&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1628676173&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0f281d5587ee900759f8f1841012ee44&searchtype=a
They got good results using vaporising water and splicing it into H2 - O using an electric arc, which arc is alimented by the car alternator. Those guys got fuel economy going from 20 to 30% and 80% less nitrous oxydes.
By the way, it's a study from the MIT... so there's no doubt about it's credibility...
> Hydrogen as an alternative to gasoline.
> Hydrogen made from gasoline.
It also says that there is a possibility that hydrogen could increase the efficiency of the gasoline burn, something I said here on Sept 8th, 2010.
What you propose (splitting water with an electric arc run from an alternator driven by burning the split water) is *not* feasible - it runs counter to all the laws of thermodynamics.
What I meant was, while there is nothing "special" about the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen generated by this, to most people it's very exciting and fun to have a homemade cheap electric torch that burns underwater. And there is nothing "special" about a torch that burns underwater, it's just because it supplies oxygen to the hydrogen. But most people don't have anything that can burn underwater like this, so to them it is exciting.
Yes, many people think it improves efficiency of engines which it does NOT, and some people even think up crazier things about it. It is just hydrogen and oxygen, nothing special, but this can be quite an exciting project for fun.
I respect your effort to correct the pseudosciences of the world, it's just that sometimes you have to see what people are actually claiming before you correct them. All of those names like hydroxy that he used, he was simply using them to refer to the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (at least I hope so), not some "special" gas. Although he does say you can "boost an I.C.E" right at the beginning, everything else seems valid to me.
Hydroxy my preffered label for essentially "electrolytic gas" means a Hydrogen and Oxygen gas combined. Some used to call it oxyhydrogen...rather clumsy in my opinion.
Therefore as you pointed out in a rather blasé manner ...
it's a stoichiometric mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, of course it's going to burn
WELL YES Its Hydroxy and it carries its own oxygen to combust rather differently from ordinary hydrogen. Its plain to the eye that its NO SCAM.
What is a SCAM, is the fact that in todays day and age people should have to pay decent money for info that is free, well if this instructable ends "that" scam, then mission accomplished.
"There's nothing special about burning underwater"
Well excuse me Spongebob Fancypants ready at a moments notice to whip out your "Thermal-lance" and weld something in your pineapple house under the sea.
For the benefit of normal everyday folk similar to myself who have never seen a gas flame burning underwater, an extract from a dive welder's related site....
"An underwater torch must therefore have a separate means for sustaining a bubble around the work location. This is accomplished by separate jets of compressed air introduced around the tip of the torch to protect the flame from the surrounding water by forming a rather large bubble enclosing the flame and the region directly adjacent to the work location.
As you might imagine, a great deal of skill is required for divers who perform this kind of work"
A little more appropriate, though. Like how a torch that uses acetylene and oxygen is called an oxyacetylene torch.
"Its plain to the eye that its NO SCAM."
Selling people on the idea that the reaction chain somehow conjures free energy out of nowhere is a scam.
"What is a SCAM, is the fact that in todays day and age people should have to pay decent money for info that is free, well if this instructable ends "that" scam, then mission accomplished."
Empty rhetoric.
our oceans or salt water would have a gold mine here.
but, for simple and basic carb type engines. lawn mowers, garden tractors,
etc. and also for pre 1970 automobiles that were built without those nasty
devices called 'oxygen sensors'.
but hey! if you could expand yet 1 more section to this. see what happens, is
both the H and O gases are pointed into the engine. the sensors sense more
oxygen coming in than normal. and the results is the computer pumps in
more gas. it'll work fine for about a week. but after that, hmmm! yes, no.
but, if you could seperate the H gas from the O gas, pipe the H gas into the
engine. and discard the O. this could work.
you can purchase plans, etc. for a device to trick the sensors. but, in most
states if not all, it is again illegal to tamper with these sensors. go figure.
haha!
I have also designed my life such that I don't need to flog these devices to make money, actually I can afford to build to my hearts desire without taking food out of my children's mouths.
Bottom line, its safe to say I will never be selling these devices.
Just for info, I didn't take an ache over your comment :)
and hints on changes that could be made to improve it.
nothing more, nothing less.
thank you,
aware what they will work on and what they won't. I'm just throwing out hints.