Talk:Hydrogen fuel enhancement

removed section
following was removed:

Hydrogen only
Besides hydrogen mixing with conventional fuel, hydrogen only conversions exist aswell. These type of conversions have as a benefit that they are completely emissionless, aldough the mixtures reduces the range significantly versus supplemental hydrogen conversions.

Please reintroduce to article

Does onboard produced hydrogen always consume more energy than is saved?
The opening paragraph contains this sentence: However in all of these experiments the hydrogen has come from an external source, hydrogen created by electrolysis "on board" must always consume more energy than is saved in order to not violate conservation of energy laws.

Although I am sympathetic to the intent of the sentence, it is wrong. A principal theory behind hydrogen fuel enhancement is that there is a net energy gain by the promotion of more efficient burning of the fuel with the addition of a small amount of hydrogen to the air/fuel mix. The possibility that this is true can not be ruled out by the simple application of the law of the conservation of energy.

Clearly the large efficiency improvement claims of some of the prominent promoters of the idea are suspicious because the very large efficiency gains which would be easily detectable in any kind of standardized testing and no credible test results indicate anything like what is claimed. However, there was some university research many years ago that reported small gains in efficiency. My guess is that the legitimate researchers that pursued this idea have abandoned it either because the effect is insignificant in modern engines or because the cost of producing the on board hydrogen is not justified by the small gains achievable, however the possibility that some kind of hydrogen enhancement technology could work can't be excluded because it would violate the conservation of energy law.

What are clearly bogus are the claims that cars can use this idea to run on just water. This would be an obvious violation of the law of the conservation of energy. I think this was the intent of the sentence and I think it would be good if the sentence could be reworked to make this intent clear. --Davefoc (talk) 19:48, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I believe you are correct. Unless there is a more subtle chemistry argument I'm not aware of, the simple laws of physics wouldn't prevent the energy gain from more efficient burning of fuel to exceed the energy required to produce the Hydrogen, although conservation of energy and the Laws of Thermodynamics can be used to calculate an upper limit which many of these claims exceed. I think the sentence can be removed or at least clarified. The situation is often confusing because many of the Hydrogen fuel enhancement technologies started life as Water-fuelled cars, and in the more egregious fraud cases, the "inventors" go out of their way to blur the distinction between the two (Aquygen being a very good example).Prebys (talk) 20:30, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I tried to address the problem, but I don't know of any source for this issue. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:22, 19 August 2012 (UTC)


 * The problem is that the guys who are promoting this don't have a clear idea of how they are going to claim that it works...and since it quite plainly doesn't work - pretty much any explanation is as good as any other. The claims run from:
 * The hydrogen is simply a fuel and supplants the gasoline - the battery is recharged using "waste" energy from the engine. This obviously fails the first law of thermodynamics.  There is no "waste" energy going into the battery because the alternator/generator is easier to turn when the battery is fully charged than when it's not...discharging it via this electrolysis process makes the generator harder to turn - which consumes more fuel than the electrolysis process can produce.
 * That injecting hydrogen into the cylinders makes the fuel burn more efficiently. There is no scientific evidence for the truth of this claim...but let's see in a moment how useful that could be if it did work.
 * That injecting water into the cylinders makes the fuel burn more efficiently...because the cylinder is kept cool or something. Why they don't just inject water into the cylinder rather than re-forming it from hydrogen and oxygen is anyone's guess.  This idea contains a grain of truth because water injection does help some classes of internal combustion engine...just not the kind you find in cars, SUV's and light trucks.


 * For the claims that fuel is burned more completely in the presence of these gizmos, there is a major problem. Consider this:


 * The emissions control regulations the EU and USA have required since about 1991, that car engines are not allowed to have more than 2.9 grams/kilometer of unburned hydrocarbons in their tailpipe emissions. All modern vehicles meet or exceed that requirement.  That means that if this technology were 100% effective and ensured that every last picogram of fuel was completely burned, then the most it could possibly do is reduce the unburned gasoline to zero - which would save at most 2.9 grams per kilometer.  Since gasoline weighs about 750 grams/liter, then this technology saves 2.9/750 = 0.004 liters for every kilometer driven.  A typical 25 mpg car goes 10km on one liter of gas - so this represents at best a 4% improvement in mpg.  So the best you could possibly get from improving combustion efficiency is a pathetic 4%.  If you look at the claims these guys make, not a single one of them claims as little as 4%.  So they are definitely lying, cheating, evil scammers.


 * Worse still - these things don't produce hydrogen - they produce oxyhydrogen - a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen at precisely the right stochiometric mix to be maximally explosive!  If they worked, they'd be lethally dangerous!


 * Worst of all - if they truly were producing anything more than a minute amount of hydrogen, it would rapidly destroy your car engine. Hydrogen embrittlement results in any engine that's not designed to burn hydrogen getting microscopic cracks that can simply trash an engine after enough miles - and which will cause a roughening of the surfaces of cylinders and a tendency for piston rings to break.  Hydrogen gas would also leak past the piston rings and dissolve in the engine oil - resulting in water building up in the oil pan and generally causing corrosion and other mayhem.  True hydrogen-fuelled cars need very special materials in their engines to avoid these problems.


 * So - these things don't work, they can't work, and if they did work, they'd be dangerous as all hell and would wreck your engine in six months.
 * SteveBaker (talk) 16:09, 20 August 2012 (UTC)


 * This certainly sets the scale for the maximum improvement in fuel efficiency; however, it's not an absolute limit for two reasons: (1) Those are the tailpipe limits. Some unburned hydrocarbons are converted in the catalytic converter, so I'm not sure how much comes out of the engine. (2) Some of the inefficiency of engines comes from the time it takes the combustion to propagate; the hydrocarbons are burned, but it happen late enough in the cycle that the energy isn't as efficiently extracted. In theory, some sort of admixture could address one or both of these problems, it's just that nothing has ever been shown to, and I don't think there's any compelling reason to believe any of these schemes would (although I admit chemistry isn't really my subject).Prebys (talk) 16:55, 20 August 2012 (UTC)


 * I found a source: Why Water Won't Improve Your MPG: A PM and Dateline NBC Investigation. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:38, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I generally consider Popular Mechanics a marginally reliable source (they've had some crazy articles over the years), but this looks pretty good. Why don't you put it in and see if anyone complains.Prebys (talk) 14:55, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * It's already on the lead. It should appear also in the body of the article. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:49, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I deleted the sentence that stated that onboard generation of hydrogen must consume more energy than it creates. There is nothing about the conservation of energy law that leads to such a conclusion and the source for the sentence doesn't support this. I understand that as a practical matter there is no credible evidence that on-board generation of hydrogen leads to enough fuel efficiency improvement to overcome the energy cost of generating the hydrogen, but that is a different claim than that it is impossible, especially based on the idea that it is impossible by a simplistic application of the law of conservation of energy.Davefoc (talk) 20:16, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Agreed.  There are some sophisticated arguments about the limit of the increase in efficiency which might come from these techniques, but small increases in overall fuel efficiency wouldn't a priori violate the laws of thermodynamics, in the same way that actually running a car on water would.  I haven't been able to find a good reference about the limits of efficiency, so that discussion would classify as WP:OR, and would be overly detailed anyway.  The strongest evidence that these things don't work is simply that they've never been shown to work in anything like a controlled test.Prebys (talk) 02:27, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Due to the complexity of different engine management systems, the fuel saving effects are not noticable at first because the ECU takes time to learn to adjusted to the new fuel mixture, hence HHO systems will generally fail to achieve the claimed results in the various testing that have been done. What people fail to realise, is that the claimed results are not actually due to Hydrogen(although it does help break down nitrous into water and nitrogen gas) but due to the pure Oxygen gas that is produced as a byproduct of the electrolysis, which when used in an engine with a PCV valve could redirect the extra Nitrous in the exhaust gases back into the combustion chambers. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen, " burning, exploding, or decomposing nitrogen compounds to form nitrogen gas releases large amounts of often useful energy" this means that part of the reason hydrogen fuel enhancement works is by using the Nitrogen in the air itself as both a fuel and catalyst and this is achieved due to the oxygen byproduct of the electrolysis which increases combustion temperature and the formation of nitrous compounds. A PCV valve then enables fuel enhancement to take advantage of this when the car has an ECU with adequate learning capability and has self tuned after sufficient learning to adapt to the new fuel mixtures. full equation with exhaust gas re-circulation/PCV valve : HC + H2 + O2 + N2 + H2O + COx + N2O + NOx == H2O + CO2 + N2 (with ideal ECU + cat). PCV valves generally work at WOT(and have more Nitrous content) whilst EGR valves will close at WOT. EGR sacrifices performance for emission control, it has less Nitrous and more CO2 than PCV due to lower pressure and hence does not improve performance or efficiency unlike PCV which operates at higher pressure. — Preceding unsigned comment added by nullyoa (talk • contribs)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016815001714

I will add in the straightforward results without interpretation as this is acceptable according to the rules: "A primary source may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge."


 * Overemphasizing a single primary source in that way is undue weight. Please stick to secondary sources. - MrOllie (talk) 17:59, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214785318329675 http://www.ijirset.com/upload/2016/october/92_EFFECT.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314154058_A_Review_on_the_Application_of_Hydrogen_Rich_Gas_as_Fuel_Supplement_in_CI_and_SI_Internal_Combustion_Engine https://www.ijresm.com/Vol_1_2018/Vol1_Iss11_November18/IJRESM_V1_I11_102.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nullyoa (talk • contribs) 01:14, 18 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Those sources are about Oxyhydrogen, (also known as HHO gas or Brown's gas) a common feature of fringe scientific theories. This article is not about Oxyhydrogen. Also, please start signing your posts properly. MrOllie (talk) 01:46, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

should i put these links on the oxyhydrogen page? Nullyoa (talk) 06:03, 18 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Probably not. They're barely cited and in low impact journals, and they attempt to contradict the scientific consensus that Oxyhydrogen does nothing for fuel ecomony. - MrOllie (talk) 12:14, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

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Regenerative braking
hey guys But what about this info? "Mileage of a hydrogen internal combustion engine can also be enhanced from the effects of a combined energy recovery and water electrolysis system which would improve mileage by enabling the conversion of wasted energy into usable hydrogen fuel. Regenerative braking would be one way to make such electrolysis systems save fuel without violating the laws of thermodynamics because it allows these systems to be powered by recovered energy which would otherwise be wasted. A significant amount of energy could be recovered from regenerative braking which could be used to power an on board water electrolysis system in order to increase available fuel. " I get it you guys want to protect consumers and all that but it does allow fuel mileage to be improved using this method. The electricity could also come from an onboard battery which would retrofit the vehicle into a plugin-hybrid-like application i think it should be taken into consideration as it could effectively be used to reduce fuel consumption using electrical energy and waste energy with water electrolysis as a means of achieving the improvement in mileage? It is also a form of mis-information to stress that the law of thermodynamics make this technology useless because this argument has its limitations when regenerative braking and battery power is added into the equation. your thoughts?

 — Preceding unsigned comment added by nullyoa (talk • contribs)


 * Yes, you can increase efficiency by capturing energy from some other source, such as a battery or regenerative braking. But it would be just as efifcient to use that energy to charge a battery. And that isn't what this article is about. Nor is it what the ref you are citing is about. - MrOllie (talk) 12:52, 14 November 2019 (UTC)


 * All electric and hybrid cars use regenerative braking, but it's far more efficient to charge a battery than to use the power to hydrolyze water and then re-burn it KaturianKaturian 19:02, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Since electrolysis technologies are designed to work with existing vehicles they allow the motor to save fuel using recovered energy without having to completely replace the vehicle. It is not as efficient as using an electric motor and does not save as much energy but it is still better than nothing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by nullyoa (talk • contribs)


 * That's original research. We'd need reliable sources explicitly saying that (not saying semi-related things about regenerative braking) to include it in the article. - MrOllie (talk) 13:24, 17 November 2019 (UTC)