[gonrod]

Ok, there is a heck a lot of confusion here quite obviously. But first let's get two things straight. First water can be used to improve the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, second it's got nothing to do with the HHO scam.

Let's look at some facts.

First to separate the oxygen and hydrogen in a water molecule takes energy. That energy comes from somewhere, and in electrolysis it's from electricity.

When you perform electrolysis on water or anyhting else, part of the enegry goes into a number of other unavoidable processes which among other things make the water warm! So even if you burn all the hydrogen, you won't get all the energy back.


Also, energy has been lost heating the wires that delivered the electricity to your house, and there have been losses involved with burning the fuel at the power station, and most of those burn fosil fuels anyway.

However, looking at the efficency of large electricity generating plants, that is a more efficient way of burning fuel, but that does not mean you will save money, because you still have to deal with the appalingly low efficiency of the internal combustion engine.

In theory, if we had perfect engineering materials available, and we could totally eliminate friction, then a four stroke engine has a theoretical maximum of about 70%. In the real world it's more like 17% A huge loss to friction, you might think, but of course the average engine in practice departs somewhat from the theoretical ideal!

So rather than changing to a different fuel, which will have no effect on the efficiany of the engine, you rather need to look at making the engine more efficient in some way. This is where water comes in.

The theory which tells us that the engine can only be 70% efficient at best shows us that a big part of the problem is waste heat. 30% of the fuel's energy is thrown away as hot exhaust gases. If we could get that back, it would help quite a bit.

There are a number of engine desings in laboratories that use the exhaust heat to boil a mist of water in an extra power stroke. Thermodynamically speaking we have reduced the exhaust heat by lowering the temeprature of the exhaust gases by a couple of hundred degrees. From the typical three or four hundred degrees centigrade to one hundred degrees. That means more energy has been extracted. (Porvided it's not just vented off as waste steam etc. But that would be another 'exhaust' you would need to account for!)


In effect they are a hybrid petrol/steam engine. They still suffer the same sort of frictional losses but they can make a marked difference to the energy extracted from the fuel.

It is probably the existence of this type of experimental engine which is used to confuse the issue. Water using engines do exist in the lab, they are more efficient, but they do not burn water, and do not improve fuel combustion. Just make use of stuff we are currently throwing away.

So why are we not seeing them in new cars? Well basically there are two problems.

First no one has figured out a way of getting water pure enough that it does not furr-up the injectors, and which does not use as much energy as has been saved to purify it Second the materials that we understand well enough to build an engine that will not fall to bits in a relatively short time will corrode when exposed to liquid water. (The high operating temperatures of engines is too high for water to exist in liqid form in the places which are nmost vulnerable to water damage.)

Injecting water into your air intake over an extended period will damage your engine for much the same reasons. Though is should be noted, that spraying water into a running engine can sometimes be partially effective in removing combustion chamber deposits. If anyone has seen any improvement in engine performance by doing this, that would be the reason. That is to say your engine is in serious need of a de-coke, and running even more inefficiently than normal. So get the spanners out!


Another problem is that most engines which use the steam generation technique involve an extra cylinder, and are more expensive to make. But some just require a new type of cylinder head and camshaft as the steam is generated on an extra stroke. But the corrosion probelm still persists.

Interstingly there has been an engine around for over a hundred years which without using water also utilises the exhaust heat to increase efficiency, achieving theoretical efficiencies in excess of 90%. It's called a Stirling engine.

Unforunatley the stirling engine uses a complicated arrangement of cranks, and concentric pistons etc, to achieve a complicated operating cylcle. Not really a practical proposition for a car engine, although static sterling engines have been built. (We had a small demo ennine at school which would happily chug away on the amount of heat generated by a small torch bulb!)

So much for the thermodynamics, but that's not the only story.


A heck of a lot of energy is wasted in friction. Not just by way of parts rubbing together, but oil needs to be forced through narrow pasages in the engine, at considerable pressure, which uses an apreciable amount of power in fluid friction, and other systems also suck power from the engine system. By far however the biggest loss is due to friction between the pistons and cyliner walls.

If you think about this for a moment, you have a large lump of alloy, with a large surface area rubbing up against a large iron (usually) surface which is the cylender wall. As if this was'nt enough there is a considerable side force coming from the angled conecting rod pushing the piston against the cylinder wall!

Racing engines use very short pistons, which reduce the surface area and hence friction to reduc this loss, but we all know that these engines need to be stripped and re-built after only a few hundred miles, or they blow up. Not rally a practical solution for the everyday car. (Though some 'boy racers' do it, but exactly what good it does in a 73' ford cortina I have no idea!)

There is a new engine design however that the inventors claim to eliminate most of the side force by eliminating the crank shaft, and replacing the conrod with a rigid beam. The linear motion of the piston is transferred to the shaft by means of two counter rotating multi-lobed cams working against a pair of rollers fitted to the piston beam, arranged so that the recation tourque of one cam is balanced exactly by the other.

This it is claimed virtually eliminates side thrust, and so reduces the friction by an enourmous amount. Also they piont out that the piston now requires no skirt at all to keep it straight in the cylinder bore and to spread the side thrust load, further reducing friction.

This engine they claim burns only 60% to 70% of the fuel of a conventional piston engine, (which is about 50% more mpg in road terms.) and requires no special materials of manufacturing teqniques. It is also pointed out that as they can choose the cam profile, the piston motion can be bery accurately controlled so as to provide a much closer approximation to the theoretical ideal, or conversely, trade efficiency for power, or engine longevity etc.

Having said all of the above, it won't make a tad of difference if people will insist on buying the biggest heaviest vehicle they can afford! Lugging un-necesary weight around, and pushing more air out of the way than you really need to in order to get around, is a great way of reducing the efficency of any mode of transport.

Let's face it, if it's jut you getting your bod about town quickly, you can do 25Mph on a level road on a pushbike, and when did your average town driving speed average that?

Personally I drive a Citroen AX, on which I just rebuilt the cylinder head and gave it a proper de-coke. It's now driving like a new car, and getting 50Mpg on an urban cycle. On motorways, I'm told (I haven't tested this one out yet!) I can get 80Mpg if I don't insist on caning it. And in truth it does not seem to matter how I have driven in the past, on UK motorways an average of 50Mph is about the best you can usually hope for, and going much over 60Mph just gets you to the next traffic jam that bit sooner.


So doing stuff with electricity to your water will not make your petrol burn better. It's pretty well completely burnt already, and what you get for your trouble is at best a bigger electricity bill (more per KW.hr than petrol gets you) and if you are unlucky a serioulsy wrecked engine.

So don't go there. It's a scam, snake oil, whatever you want to call it, it does not work!