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Originally Posted by pressld2  Leaving aside potential damage to engines not designed for it, adding hydrogen to the fuel / air mix in your engine might very well improve it's efficiency and give you better mpg or power or both. This is because hydrogen itself is a fuel that burns in the presence of oxygen just like petrol does. We don't need to do any alboratory experiments to prove this - we've been using hydrogen fuel for years, usually in rockets but recently in hydrogen powered cars too.
But where are you getting your hydrogen from?
a) It can be mass produced, transported and sold in the same way that petrol is which would mean two things: - You'll have to pay for it so your extra mpg will cost you more money
- When deciding how "green" it is you have to factor in the energy cost of producing, bottling and transporting it. I'm not pre-judging that. If you are using renewable energy to produce the hydrogen then it may very well be a green fuel source.
b) You can fit a device to your car that uses electricity generated by the engine to split hydrogen out of water and then inject the hydrogen back into the engine. But as has been said before, doing this will decrease the efficiency of your engine because every time you convert energy from one type to another you lose some along the way, usually as waste heat radiated into the environment. If the extra energy you get out of the engine with hydrogen in the mix is greater than the energy needed to split the hydrogen from the water in the first place then you will have broken the law of conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics and also invented a perpetual motion machine. Once again, no laboratory experiments are needed to prove that this cannot be done.
Dave P. |
No you won't. By using the hydrogen to increase engine efficiency, more power is diverted to driving the pistons from otherwise dissapearing down the exhaust pipe or wasted as heat. You are not simply transferring the energy of the burnt hydrogen to the pistons, you are altering the whole combustion dynamics, which may well yield a greater amount of extra power than that from the burnt hydrogen.
You can increase combustion efficiency simply by redesigning the airflow so the combustion is more turbulent. This gives you extra power with no extra energy input at all. This is not contravening the laws of thermodynamics either.