Thoughts on Hydrogen Generator Kits??

Hello TacomaWorld! Just wondering what does everyone think about those Hydrogen Generators I keep reading about all over the internet?? They are supposed to drastically improve fuel economy which is awesome, but my main concern is what type of negative effect might happen to the engine after using one for a prolonged time? I have a 2007 Tacoma double cab. This seams interesting but don't want to jump into something that might hurt my ride. Thanks guys.

 

Snake oil.

In theory, if a legitimate company like Toyota poured real engineering resources into it, the technology could provide a 15-20% fuel economy gain similar to hybrids. (i.e. when max horsepower isn't needed, the engine generates electrical power using an oversized alternator. The electricity then creates hydrogen from water by electrolysis. The hydrogen is stored in a tank, ready to be injected into the engine as fuel. This way the engine always operates at the most efficient rpm range and never gets a chance to idle.) The homebrew DIY kits can't achieve that kind of milage gain.

 

I have done a lot of research on these systems, and have seen some installed. There honestly should be no negative effects. What it does is takes water and using electrolysis it breaks it down into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen gets circulated into your intake system, where it is burned. As the Hydrogen is burned with your fuel, it produces a slight increase in performance. The computer monitoring your exhaust (i.e. oxygen sensors) will show a rich condition at first, so the computer will lean out the injectors, hence you burn less gasoline. The older vehicles benefit the most, because they can be designed to run off the hydrogen directly, and shut off the gasoline completely. The newer vehicles have had some problems with the fuel management system. It is not designed to expect the Hydrogen, so when it leans out the system, it can only lean out so much. The result is usually a check engine light with a "fuel system lean" code stored (P0171 and P0174). Not every vehicle does this, and some of the advanced systems actually can turn off your fuel pump when the generator is operating to prevent this lean condition from happening. The theory is VERY sound, and the system is nearly 100% safe. (nothing is 100% safe anyway) It all depends on what kind of money you want to spend. Pre-built kits can cost between $500 and $2000. The plans for a DIY cost from free to $250, depending on how much searching you do, and how much you know the system already.



These generator systems are NOT designed to store hydrogen at all. Hydrogen is explosive when under pressure. These systems generate and administer the hydrogen as it is being created, so you do not want the system running when the engine is not. If there is any doubts about this system, I suggest you Google "HHO" and mythbusters. They did a show on it and proved that the theory is very sound. The biggest hurdle at the moment is generating enough HHO to be able to run the car exclusively on it. THAT is where the hurdle is right now. It takes a large amount of current to generate the amount of HHO needed. So right now, these generators are designed to SUPPLEMENT the existing fuel system.

The system generates HHO, not just hydrogen. You would need an oxygen separator to get pure Hydrogen. If you were to attempt to store this in a tank, it would get pressurized, and then just turn right back into water....lol

 

Leave it to a swimmer to ask a question like this

 

The biggest problem is that perpetual motion does not exist.
One of the most basic laws of physics is that no energy conversion process is 100% efficient.

In this case, we are using the engine to drive an alternator that generates electricity that separates hydrogen from water.

That's two conversions where energy from the gasoline is lost to heat.



Hydrogen is a viable energy transport medium, just as batteries.
Like batteries, hydrogen is not an energy source... it must be produced, and it takes more energy to produce a pound of hydrogen than you can extract from it.
Like batteries, hydrogen's portability allows us to select the source of the energy used to produce the hydrogen. If a cheap, renewable energy source is used to power the hydrogen extraction, then we need not be concerned about the energy losses.

But on-board systems can not gain any long-term fuel economy unless they are incorporated into a full hybrid-design system that uses regenerative braking rather than relying purely on the engine and alternator.


In simplest terms, the DIY kits are at best, a "hybrid" that uses only the alternator to recharge the batteries.
There's a reason that hybrids get 45mpg city and 35mpg highway.
Without continual slowing/braking, there is no energy available for charging the batteries that is normally wasted through heating brake pads.

As Bama said, it is possible for an on-board hydrogen generator to approach current hybrid efficiency... but only through regenerative braking.

 

Exactly. Just a scam. Of course they will all try to tell you how their "secret recipe" overcomes these fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics to make perpetual motion somehow doable. One of my favorites is frequency modulation where they claim that setting the frequency a certain way makes hydrogen dissociate from the water with almost no energy input. It is nonsense.

 

Ha ha ha, good one brian! Even in Tacomaworld we have haters! It's all good.

 

Thanks for all the input so far! You guys rock!

 

Didn't know about this. If that's the case, you'll never get any mpg gain.

In theory you can generate hydrogen offboard using household electricity, then fill a pressurized tank in the car. Get a lot more range out of it than plug-in hybrids.

 

It would have a range of several thousand yards when the tank detonates. I tried all this stuff a few years ago, and the end result was blowing the sheetrock off the walls of the shop when the cell went into thermal runaway. I'm just glad it was on the bench and not under the hood. Pro tip: Do not store hydrogen under pressure in a PVC vessel. I think that the future of splitting water molecules for energy lies in solar powered cells. If you used solar panels to charge some deep cycle batteries during the day and then switch the HHO cell on during your commute, without drawing anything off the vehicle, you could save a little bit on fuel cost. The economics don't work out though, you can buy an awful lot of fuel for the cost of engineering and building a system like that and even three panels wouldn't allow for much over one liter of hydrogen per minute production.

 

How do you figure to not get any gain? You have to realize that those who actually DO use the system, not the scammers, they will tell you up front that they are not running the engine on 100% HHO. It is a SUPPLEMENT that helps reduce the amount of gasoline you burn. Obviously you cannot achieve perpetual motion here. It is impossible. But gasoline is only around 20% efficiency in itself. Your car's alternator is designed to be able to generate around 105 to 140 amps on a continuous basis. If you use say 40 amps of this to break down water into HHO, and allow this gas to be burned in your engine, you WILL gain efficiency, and use less gasoline. Basic physics here. Now I am not saying that you will be able to use 40 amps of current to break down the amount of water needed to run your engine at 75 or 80% efficiency, but if you were to even get 25% efficiency, you should be able to reduce the actual gasoline consumed, hence you will increase your MPG. I am not just looking at theory and watching videos, I have SEEN this system work. I was calling BS before I had one of my instructors actually bring in his Geo that worked.

Originally I had cited GM and Ford's variable cylinder engines as being proof that valve damage and engine damage won't occur when running a car lean. Then I realized that running a car too lean increases temp in the cylinders, as well as emissions. The GM and Ford systems prevent this because when they shut down the cylinders, they shut them off completely. No valves opening, and no combustion. So no damage.

 

The fact that is is a "supplement" is irrelevant. This is really simple. You don't get any gain because there is LOSS in any process to dissociate the H2 from water. IOW it takes more energy to make the H2 than you get back when you burn it. You can choose to belive what you want but etropy doesn't give a rat's ass what you think.

 

This.

Gasoline may only be 20% efficient... even if the hydrogen extraction and conversion back into energy were 100% efficient, you still used gasoline to drive the alternator to create it, so you've still lost 80% right off the top.

Of course, the alternator to electricity conversion is not 100%.
The electricity to hydrogen conversion is not 100%.
The hydrogen back to energy conversion is not 100%.

All 3 of these losses add to the 80% lost from the gasoline conversion.
Net loss of MPG with an onboard system unless there is off-board energy being added to the network.... solar, pre-charged batteries, regenerative braking, etc....

 

Some potential here, but not with modern alternators.
This could be done on permanent-magnet generators often used in motorcycles, but alternators use a variable field... the regulator adjusts the field current so the alternator current output to match the demands of the system.
The alternator was designed to produce 105-140 amps, but it doesn't run anywhere near that level under normal conditions.

OTOH, permanent-magnet generators, as used in many motorcycles, do.
They are running "full bore" all the time, and the voltage regulator is simply a zener network that shunts the excess power to ground.
The result... the regulators run very hot and have to have large heat sink fins and they need to be located in areas of high airflow. My Vulcan has a pair of regulators under the front edge of the frame under the radiator.

 

Rich, exactly... but you and I are pissing in the wind with facts. The folks selling this stuff put out enough mis-information to keep the myth alive. Reminds me of the 200 mpg carburetor back in the day.. another physics and thermodynamics defying device that worked by a secret known only to those selling it. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute.

 

/thread

 

Rich pretty much already nailed it but I'll drive the point home hopefully.

Imagine you had a vehicle which had 2 separate engines. One run on gasoline, and one run on hydrogen. If you could run both engines at the same time, you would have more power (although not necessarily more efficiency). If you had no hydrogen, then you have a regular ass car that gets whatever MPG it gets. If you started running both engines and had a hydrogen source, assuming they both did the same amount of work then you would see a 50% reduction in the gasoline requirement. so that would be a pretty awesome system if you could get the hydrogen for free.

But if you're in the idiotic situation where you use your gasoline engine to produce the hydrogen to run the hydrogen engine, then you are in loss country as rich explained. You would be better off using your gasoline engine to produce 100% motion, rather than wasting it in a lossy process to run a second engine you don't even need.

Also think about if you had a 100% hydrogen engine in the first place. If this system adds like 10% hydrogen to your fuel stream, then you should be able to drop to 90% throttle and still get your original power output due to the injection system. So why not put two injectors and replace 20%? or 5 and get 50% or hell, 10 and get 100%? Or fuck, 20 and you can sell the excess. This could be a real cash cow if anyone caught on.

 

140 A x 12 V = 1680 W. Figure 90% generating efficiency, that's a 2.5 hp load on the engine. The power loss when generating HHO is worse than driving with air conditioning on all the time.

AFAIK the valves still open because they are mechanically actuated by the camshaft, but the fuel injector and spark plug to the cylinder are shut off, so the piston pumps air. This actually cools the cylinder. The Cadillac Northstar engine in the 1990s had a limp-home mode in case of coolant loss that worked on a similar principle, alternatingly shutting off cylinders to cool them.

GM and Ford have bi-fuel trucks that can run completely on natural gas, and I've seen enough airport taxis running on propane, so you probably don't need the "wetting" effect of gasoline to cool the valve seats.

 

Harley Davidson does this. If the engine temp gets too high, the rear cylinder shuts down.

The valves would have to open or the vacuum would pull in oil from the sump and foul the plugs.

OTOH, there may be a solenoid that operates a pin that holds the intake valve open slightly so not only does the cylinder not attempt to draw oil, it also is not working against compression.

 

People have a hard time wrapping their heads around this, they hear that H2 gas
is being generated, and burned, so it must be increasing efficiency.
If the gas was being generated by something other than the gasoline engine,
maybe it would help slightly. The alternator discussed above, using 40 amps,
that the engine produces by burning gasoline (or Diesel, there was a lot of
discussion on this over on the GM Diesel forums I go to)
would maybe produce 3 amps worth of HHO gas..and I'm being generous.