Raymond Raud. July 2009
While I am a scientist and an engineer in addition to a businessman this is not a scientific report. You'll find out reading to the end why. Here's the story:
My youngest son was going to a special high school 30+ miles away. His gas bills way exceeded mine even though he was driving a 30 MPG Mazda Protege. This was early spring 2008. The gas prices were going through the roof. Although there was no fundamental reason for the energy prices to jump, they did. There was no way for me to influence them any more than requesting our elected officials to fix the legislation that gave specific investment banks and their clients free rein to corner the energy markets. That I did and some things started moving (a flurry of hearings in Congress with promises to fix the situation), but not nearly fast enough. Besides, I can't trust the same people to fix it who created this opportunity for the banks in the first place. There probably was a reason why they did it in the first place.
How can I fix it for myself and 270+ million other motorists in the USA? Hoping for the politicians to come up with a solution that makes sense is pointless. Their only idea – electric and hybrid cars does not solve it in my lifetime. It does not take a math wizard to calculate how many years will it take to replace 270+ million gasoline cars on the road when at the best year car makers managed to sell 17 million a year (only 0.5% hybrid). Now they sell less than 10 million per year. What's worse, hybrids are expensive to manufacture and maintain. The production process pollutes more than a regular diesel or gasoline car does throughout its lifetime. There is no economic nor environmental benefit of an hybrid car, only political. The real solution must allow a simple installation on majority of cars on the road. It can not be expensive and should not do harm to the car, nor to the environment. Equipped with knowledge that a regular gasoline engine uses only about 20% of the energy in the gasoline it burns the burning efficiency seemed to be a good starting point for search of known solutions.
Apparently it has been known already for many years that electricity breaks water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. This mix introduced into cylinders of internal combustion engine improve substantially the speed and fullness of gasoline burning. Faster and more complete burning will release more energy and reduce the amount of harmful gases in the exhaust that without that will go waste. Different sources call it Brown gas, Klein gas etc. The US patent application 20060075683 attempts to prove that the gas produced in this process differs substantially from molecular mix of oxygen and hydrogen as it was believed to be the case by earlier researchers. We did not validate this claim. We are only interested to find a practical solution for meaningful increase of the internal combustion engine efficiency. Whether oxygen is in molecular or atomic form it does improve and speed up burning and hydrogen is itself a fuel. If sufficient amount of this gas can be efficiently generated during operation of an engine by an inexpensive and easy to install device then we may have a solution.
An Internet search brought up dozens of merchants selling “water for gas” do-it-yourself e-books or ready made devices for wide variety of prices. Further search gave some theory and patents on the same hydrogen and oxygen gas mix from the splitting of water with electricity. The story appeared plausible enough to try, even though all the material noticeably lacked any measurements. How much gas the device will produce and how much energy it will consume doing this? How much gas will improve mileage of this or other engine by how much? Only anecdotal evidence and videos how wonderful world would be if you bought their stuff.
Nevertheless, I bought the book and built the device with my son. First measurement of the effect was somewhat disappointing. The simple device in the Mason jar improved the gas mileage of his car about 10%. Instead of 30 MPG he drove 33 now.
The HHO gas appeared to work. One jar did produce about 20 mL/min cold and 50 mL/min when hot, not enough to make a dent. Suggestions to put 6 to 12 of jars under the hood of a Mazda Protege did not appear rational any more as there simply isn't enough space.
We observed that the jar got very hot fast. The baking soda electrolyte started boiling and the plexiglass tower the electrodes were wrapped around warped and disintegrated. Quick intro to plexiglass characteristics revealed that this material like most acrylic thermoplastics gets soft at temperatures above 180 F. Only remedy to control the rampant surge of temperature suggested by authors of water-for-gas was to lower the concentration of baking soda. This in turn, reduced further production of HHO gas and correspondingly, the effect from a Mason Jar.
What's worse, after about 3 months of driving with the device one of the electrodes completely dissolved in HHO gas. The electrode was made of four 16 gauge 316L stainless steel wires wrapped around themselves. The wire electrode dissolved above the electrolyte level – hence it could only be effect of the gas and the current heating it up. The device drew about 15 – 20 Amps of power while switched on. Looking into the reasons for the electrode to dissolve we found that stainless steel wire is a lousy conductor of electricity. With Electrical Resistivity, 7.40E-05 ohm-cm the electrodes made of four 16 gauge wires will get red hot under 20 Amps. The peculiar HHO gas characteristics in welding very much support what happened to our electrodes.
It became clear that water4gas was not a solution to the problem. It was slapped together by folks with an objective to make quick bucks. No real research nor attempts to find a practical solution to a problem. After lots of time and some dollars spent we were back at square one having learned some. One thing a true engineer hates most is to invent another bicycle. Is there a practical, existing solution out there or is it all only fluff?
A non-profit organization that has been operating from the revenue of its research distills credibility. Although, web site does contain only sales materials – one has to buy a book or two. Adding to the uncertainty these are not down-loadable e-books, but real brochures on paper one has to wait several weeks to arrive. Yet, what Dr. Wiseman writes certainly makes sense. It kind of gave us an explanation why our first device did not improve the gas mileage more than it did. Explanation was the oxygen sensor measuring more oxygen in exhaust supposedly signals the engine control computer lean mix. The computer will direct the injectors to push more gasoline into cylinders this way defeating the mileage improvement. At least we did believe this to be the explanation. To deal with this issue Eagle Research offers a small electronic device that installed between the oxygen sensor and computer will fudge the signal to always show richer mix causing the computer not to direct more gasoline to the cylinders.
We did order one, waited few weeks and installed. Unfortunately, next mileage measurement did not show a difference. To add an insult to injury we learned that newer cars have up to 4 oxygen sensors measuring individually before and after the catalytic converter of each cylinder bank. What's worse, the computer is constantly fluctuating the fuel ratio to allow catalytic converters to burn out residue. With Eagle Research solution that would mean $240 and each tuned individually only to fool the computer. Dr. Wiseman never mentioned the intentional gas/air ratio fluctuation in his book. Will his devices make any difference?
Looking into a device's diagram in another of his books he suggested to use to control the amperage consumed by the device I discovered few components that were discontinued some years ago. Apparently, he did his research on this issue some time ago and never revised. Once again, material lacked verifiable measurements and many suggestions were speculative. The reasoning behind them made sense, though. How would you know other than build it and measure. So we did and measured.
Dr. Wiseman's suggestion that alternating current improves efficiency gas generation efficiency because it allows the gas bubbles to clear electrodes turned out false. A simple experiment using 60Hz AC from power outlet (transforming it down to about the voltage on board of a vehicle) proved no gas generation at all. The electrolysis process is too slow to even start in half a cycle of 60 Hz.
Dr. Wiseman's suggestion that a pulse generator type electronic device can be used to control the gas generation and improve the efficiency turned out half true. With the great help of my old friend and electronics wizard we built a wide tuning range pulse generator – pulseGen. Our pulseGen allowed us to change the width of the pulses independently from the duration of the gaps between the pulses. This way we were able to cover wide range of frequencies in search for suggested efficiency improvement.
Feeding the gas generator through pulseGen proved that the effective amperage is about proportional to the amount of gas produced allowing to control the production based on the need for it, but there is no specific pulse frequency that would be better for gas generation.
Instead of baking soda solution in distilled water Dr. Wiseman uses lye for electrolyte in 25% concentration. Our measurements confirmed that lye solution is about 4 times more efficient than baking soda, but it is also much more corrosive. The optimum concentration is 6 tea spoons per cup of distilled water. The efficiency curve (watts of power for each milliliter of gas produced in a minute) flattens out above this concentration. In other words, one can use higher concentrations, but that will not benefit further.
Our devices use 316L stainless steel electrodes. The best distance we have found is 3/8 inch. Possibly because with our primitive implementation capabilities we have been unable to secure electrodes uniformly at closer distances. The distance is as suggested by Dr. Wiseman. Our attempt with steel electrodes (much cheaper and simpler to work – taken from Dr. Wise man) was a fast failure.
Measuring simple 2 electrode devices with oscilloscope revealed an interesting fact. There was a consistent 2.1 V potential on the electrodes. It took some time after the power was switched off for this voltage to gradually disappear. Almost like each of these cells would become a battery. It also means that applying less than 2.1 V on a 2 electrode cell will not operate anywhere close to a HHO gas generator. This is most relevant to a serial electrode device below.
As brought up earlier one of the major problems with HHO gas generator design is the run-away current. A natural way to combat this is to connect the cells (2 electrodes) in series to lower the voltage on each cell. Dr. Wiseman promotes the serial connection of electrodes. This will make much more compact devices. As usual there are drawbacks and “not so obvious” practical issues that one must consider designing one. These are not found in Eagle Research publications yours truly has purchased.
All-in all we learned few things fromWater4Fuel folks and Dr. Wise man as we did from Mr. Klein of Hydrogen Technology Applications, Inc. None of the solutions out there in public domain at the time of our market evaluation appeared to be practical enough to solve the problem for 270+ million vehicles. To establish some baseline we tested the MPG improvement on 2 vehicles easily available to us: 1.8L Mazda Protege and 4.8L V8 Jeep Grand Cherokee. The only objective of this test: is it worth exploring the HHO generators any further? We had in our use the one cell HHO generators and a set of 5 compiled from 5 Mason Jars with 2 electrodes of 2”x3” each and lye electrolyte. Each cell produces about 100 mL/min cold and close to 200 after some time of “warm up”. The “optimal” temperature of a cell appears to be around 165oF. Above that temperature the amount of water vapor (not HHO gas) appears to increase rapidly. Although water vapor is also beneficial to MPG the process is completely different. Note, that the 165oF temperature level is subjective and has not been proven with measurements. With a gas flow meter in our disposal it is impossible to separate the measurement of the amount of HHO gas from the amount of water vapor.
The measurements where performed on a 24 mile loop with mixed highway/street driving. Each measurement involved driving the same loop twice. Once with and then without the HHO generator. Both trips were driven by the same driver as he would drive normally and followed the same schedule as much as possible due to traffic. Both trip were performed immediately one after another to capture similar weather and traffic conditions. A loop always started and ended at the same pump at the same gas station with the tank filled to the first click to measure the gasoline consumed during previous trip. The trip was not long enough to warm up the HHO generator. Hence, we calculate 500 mL/min production.
This certainly is not a scientific method, but as close as we can get without special equipment.
Here are the numbers:
|
Vehicle |
Without HHO MPG |
With HHO MPG |
Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
|
1.8L 4 cyl inline Mazda , 175,000 miles |
29.19 |
43.68 |
49.64% |
|
4.7L V8 Jeep, 25,000 miles |
16.81 |
18.71 |
11.30% |
Clearly, a box with 5 jars for generating gas and one to “wash” the gas from potentially corrosive lye before injected to engine is far from a practical solution. Yet, if one can make an old engine to drive as good as brand new hybrid for the cost of about $50 then IMHO, the technology itself has proven its virtue.
Looking for much more compact implementation that would be capable of producing much more HHO gas led to the experiments with multi-cell serial generator suggested by Dr. Wiseman. Each electrode except for the terminals will serve a dual purpose of being the positive for one cell and negative for next one at the same time. This will eliminate the need for the walls between the cells and connections between the electrodes of adjacent cells. Drawbacks to a practical solution are as follows:
As it turned out the current will flow only between the electrodes with highest potential difference it can find through the electrolyte. That means each electrode can only be exposed to the electrolyte between its neighboring electrodes. Each electrode must serve as a wall isolating the cell between it and its neighbors. Considering the distance of 1/8 “ between the electrodes this leaves very little electrolyte for each cell and the electrolyte is consumed in the process of gas generation. Measuring the electrolyte level becomes difficult and frequent filling up with distilled water is required.
In the gas generation process the electrolyte “foams up” several inches. Therefore the electrodes must be high enough to block the electrolyte foam from connecting across several cells.
The challenge from a combined effect of these two issues is a practical solution for frequent and precise filling of all cells of the generator and monitoring the electrolyte level. Essential drop of electrolyte level in a cell also reduces the effective surface of electrodes and gas production of the cell.
We are currently experimenting with one, but are not happy yet. It generates 1300 mL/min using 25 Amp cold. Measuring the MPG effect on 1.8L Mazda yielded a 65.4% improvement from the baseline. We will write more about it when certain we have found a practical solution.
© 2009
Raymond Raud. All Rights Reserved.
Last Modified: July 2009