We have talked about hydrogen cars before. This is coming to my attention again since a friend has been experimenting with extracting hydrogen from water to increase the mileage for his truck. He has the process working, but there are some problems. The biggest is heat generation. As the water heats up, due to electrolysis, the electrical current goes up. There are ways to dissipate the heat, but that doesn’t solve the problem completely. Heat is loss, therefore lowering the efficiency of the process. The more loss of energy you have, the less chance at a successful project.

My friend informs me that most the devices found for sale on the internet are tested for only short duration trips, less than ten miles. That is not enough time for the generation of heat to a point that the current skyrockets. I, personally, haven’t researched that aspect of products for sell on the Internet. I can only say that Mythbusters television show tested one such device for a short period and did find some improvement of their test engine, but not enough to give the device a passing grade.

I see one way only to make this project a success, and that is to produce the hydrogen at home and then compress it. I haven’t researched the dangers of compressing hydrogen, but I would think compressing to two bars as something relatively safe and then used some compressed air/bellows system to force it from the tank. This is a thought for later since the topic is if it’s a waste of time to do the electrolysis on the vehicle itself, in which I think it is.

“Mythbusted: none of the devices they tested made the car more fuel efficient. The EPA has tested 104 of these devices, and only 7 showed improvement in fuel efficiency. However, none of these improved efficiency over 6%.”

Let’s say you can get 6% increase in mileage at best, is it worth the cost of such a device? For me it all depends on the price of gasoline. Lets see how much tax will be added to the price of fuel with the democrats having so much control of the government.

I would say that if you want to run your car, or increase the performance of your car with hydrogen, you would have to do the electrolysis off the vehicle. I would recommend a natural gas fuel cell if you are serious about this, or build (if you have the nerve) a device to extract hydrogen from natural gas or methanol. That’s how NASA gets theirs.

The latest on my friend’s hydrogen test is that heat continues to be the largest stumbling block. This is a segment from his latest email.

“I removed my hydrogen from my big truck and set up in the shop, I was running 7 plates, made one with 9 plates and played, even back to 7 plates once the water gets hot it draws more amps and trips the chargers, yea even my big one. I started to hook it up to my DC welder but decided against that, Ha Ha. The temp that the water trips the charger is about 120 degrees.
I played with the distance between the plates, more distance means less bubbles, at cool temps. 6 volts will make bubbles too but as one would expect 12 volts is better / more bubbles.
moving water seems to slow the bubbles down so running a cooling pump all the time would not be good.”

Okay, so he will kill me for posting that. The informal style was meant for my eyes only. I thought it easier to understand from his own words.

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