Water Power: If Real, This WIll Change the World

David brought this to my attention...

Please, please let this be real.  If it is, then we are witnessing a fundamental change in the world as we know it.  This guy has apparently figured out a practical method to run an engine using only water as a fuel.

The science behind this is pretty common, extracting Hydrogen from water via electrolysis.  As far as I understand it though, the process of releasing Hydrogen from H20 molecules requires more energy than is released when you oxidize (burn) the Hydrogen.  Burning the Hydrogen is essentially the reverse process... re-combining the Hydrogren with Oxygen to make water.  At 100% efficiency, which is impossible to attain, the net result should be 0 gain.

The whole thing smacks of Perpetual Motion, which is a violation of either the first or second laws of thermodynamics.

[Update]  Alas!  Thermodynamics wins out and we are back to depending on oil.  Here is a nice explanation.

The thing that bothers me most is that this “news” piece has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter of the claimed patents. Journalists ought to be the best critical thinkers in the country. At best, those two are gullible saps. At worst, they fabricated 90% of the piece to inflate it’s apparent importance.

What is claimed is a very simple design for an electrolytic cell that will split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The primary innovations are it’s ease of servicing and the enhanced surface area of the electrodes. The intended purpose of the invention is to mix small quantities of hydrogen and oxygen with conventional petroleum fuels. Apparently doing this promotes complete combustion and can reduce the emission of partial combustion products, as well as possibly making the engine somewhat more efficient. no real science was done here, just some fairly simple, but clever, engineering.

Another thing that really bothered me was their reference to water as a “fuel”. I’ll try to explain things in a way that non-scientist can understand.

Why can water never be used as a chemical fuel? Because it is already at a potential energy minimum. Splitting water and then burning it is like picking a book up off the floor and then dropping it again. By picking the book up you store gravitational potential energy, and by splitting the water you store chemical potential energy. Dropping the book, or burning the hydrogen simply releases that potential energy, and gets you back where you started. However, the trick is that you’ve got to put more energy into raising the book or splitting the water than you will ever get back out when you burn/release it. That is a fundamental principal of nature, no way around it. Any time you convert one form of energy to another you loose some as dissipated heat.

As others have said, electrolysis of water is an incredibly inefficient way to generate hydrogen. You’ve got to put WAY more electrical energy in than you get out in chemical potential energy. So, unless you have a cheap, clean, plentiful source of electrical energy, you can forget about using electrolysis as a means of generating hydrogen as a vehicular fuel.

The on-board system described by the patent would have to use electricity generated by the cars alternator to make the hydrogen. this would increase the load on the engine and decrease the power available for actually moving the vehicle. The only way a system like this could improve fuel efficiency is if adding the H2 and O2 caused a large enough increase in petroleum combustion efficiency to overcome the losses incurred by running the electrolytic cell. I doubt this would be the case, and if it is, I expect that the gains would be rather meager.