tech e blog

05/30/2006

First Water Powered Car?

Danny Klein's water/gasoline hybrid just might be the solution to high gas prices. Watch after the jump.
A U.S. inventor has come up with a new electrolysis process that he claims could revolutionize how cars are powered. Last week, Denny Klein filed for a patent on the process, which has reportedly gotten attention from the Department of Defense and one major U.S. automaker.
[via HackedGadgets]

This entry was posted on 05/30/2006 5:19pm and is filed under Auto, Science, Video .
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There are 60 comments about this post (3 pages).

1
Posted at 05/30/2006 5:27pm by Jean-Yus
he will be dead in a year
2
Posted at 05/30/2006 5:32pm by idiot
i really reeeeally hope this comes to fruition. I've heard about this before so maybe it's credible. good thing the government has gotten ahold of it. If the automaker had it would have been to to the paper shredder for that patent.
3
Posted at 05/30/2006 5:34pm by Ryan
saw this before, very amazing.
4
Posted at 05/30/2006 5:42pm by James
Electrolysis on water has the disadvantage of either: Taking more electricity (alot) to create hydrogen gas then is recoved by buring that gas. Or, takes a LONG time to generate a signifigant amount of gas. I'm guessing that his welding torch is set up to only effect conductive things, I'd suspect that this gas is as explosive as hydrogen. Maybe this guy has solved all of those problems, I don't know. If he DID do that, I suspect he'd be on more then his local Fox News at 10
5
Posted at 05/30/2006 5:51pm by Air
Water? Yah but what type, Fuji water no doubt, that stuff is more expensive than gasoline. If we can get this to run on salt water we would find a cure for raising sea levels due to global warming. Keep polluting with no side effects! Finally, let see the Middle East get a monopoly on this resource. The Great Lakes will be our National Reserve.
6
Posted at 05/30/2006 6:05pm by Mike
"HHO" gas, 2 hydrogen and one water so water gas? look, I know it looks legit and stuff, but I smell bs
7
Posted at 05/30/2006 6:23pm by jasper
@James your right you need lots of power to make H this is HHO there is a difference Now also let me just say YELLOW STONE NATIONAL PARK. the smart people under than automaticly say Thermal Plant. in iceland(whitch has a insane amount of thermal wells) they use Geeiser to make electrisitie Run Distilled water throw Pipes than run deep in the ground the water boils and make steam this power up the generators that can make HHO or H Gas. now... makes sence BTW you would want H gas in your car cause just think about what hapens if it explodes ;) just Google for the 200Liters H Bomb the army developt i know there is a movie of such bombs that completly distroys a M2A1 Tank to like a 1000pieces. and thats 200Liters. well thats just mine opinion I LOVE THIS give me one of this(BTW 1galon of EURO98 Fuel will cost you 6Dollar in the netherlands so i think we here have a little more presure to get this car here)
8
Posted at 05/30/2006 7:26pm by VanRude
How coes he get two hydrogen atoms to co exist and not bond together? I thought they'd form H2 gas. Same with the oxygen. You'd figure the product would be 2H2 + O2.
9
Posted at 05/30/2006 7:41pm by Jeroen
This is all a hoax. The second law of thermodynamics contradicts what is happening here. This is quite an old piece that has been resurfacing regularly lately. If this would be true, there would be much more attention going to it.
10
Posted at 05/30/2006 9:35pm by K-SO
this is amazing...sheerly amazing
11
Posted at 05/30/2006 9:56pm by Brad
here's the patent info here just granted on March 15th of this year
12
Posted at 05/30/2006 10:58pm by drew
damn u people are smart i really need to stop smoking this stuff
13
Posted at 05/30/2006 11:45pm by Anon
this is old news. Digg had the story 2 weeks ago.
14
Posted at 05/31/2006 00:14am by Ford Parts Information
Alternative Fuels Please As part of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Ford Motor Company is part of the initiative to support alternative fuel automobiles in Mexico. Whether it’s achieving greater fuel economy or reducing America’s reliance on oil as a primary fu...
15
Posted at 05/31/2006 08:43am by ryan
Hmm... I guess just remember the old adage (probably butchered that phrase/spelling) "anything that sounds too good to be true probably is!" I firmly believe that. There IS NO miracle cure to our energy problems. There is a solution though. Stop using fossil fuels and start using your head. Very simple, yet not very convenient. The wells are running dry... and when they are tapped, the entire world as we know it will end. I personally can't wait for the true world to come back. In the end, nature always wins.
16
Posted at 05/31/2006 5:54pm by Obadiah
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(as posted above). 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. All that said, I think the welding torch idea sounds pretty cool. All you've got to do is fill it up with water and plug it into an electrical outlet and you've got a hydrogen torch. No need for dangerous compressed gas cylinders! Plus, I expect that the purity of the flame would be hugely desirable for welding reactive metals like titanium and aluminum.
17
Posted at 05/31/2006 11:39pm by Moo said the cow
He isn't the first man to come up with the Water-powered vehicle. It was a Filipino.
18
Posted at 06/01/2006 00:11am by Six
yeah, 'moo said the cow' is right. it was a filipino. that was years ago and people didn't really bother with the invention.
19
Posted at 06/01/2006 07:41am by Howard Bruce
This is a very old invention as I have seen this development 25 years ago in Sydney Australia. The inventor is Professor Yul Brown and the website is located: http://www.energyoptions.com/tech/browns.html The devices was demonstrated at the Royal Easter Show about 25 years ago from memory. The Professor can give you the details and how the system can weld a nail to a brick !!! I am of the understanding that the equipment was being manufactured in China at one stage .
20
Posted at 06/01/2006 5:05pm by Talos
http://randi.org/jr/2006-05/052606action.html#i3, duh.
21
Posted at 06/03/2006 4:38pm by Frank Drebbin
It is irresponsible to accuse government or big business of wrong doing when armed with crackpot theories and no facts. Most of you need to read a thermodynamics book. Write out the chemical reactions, calculate the energy added to the system and the resulting energy produced. Make sure to keep realistic efficiencies in mind as well as the laws (not theories but laws) of thermodynamics. Oil companies are in the business of making money. Don’t you think that owning the patent to a never ending power supply design would make them a good bit of that money? If they are truly driven by greed I doubt they would shelf the opportunity to monopolize the world’s energy production. If you are so angry, stop pointing fingers and go ride a bike.
22
Posted at 06/20/2006 2:08pm by curtis
If anyone has any information on how to make a water powered engine please do not sell it to the oil companies. I would be intrested in learning more about this you can email me at curtis.bourland@mountainhome.af.mil
23
Posted at 07/01/2006 11:50am by tommy
Great. Thanks! nokia6630
24
Posted at 07/01/2006 12:05pm by sonia
Hey man...sorry I missed the party. nokia6630
25
Posted at 07/18/2006 6:33pm by Dallas
This type of "free power" thing pops up about ever two years or so. I remember when Cold fusion was the big thing, but then again it was really easy to tell that those guys were fakes. Scientists look on these types of thing with a healthy dose (if not hopeful) skepticism.
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