AlexR Wrote:The technical answer is that Brown's Gas (BG) reduces the endothermic energy required for combustion. What this means is that a gasoline charge in your vehicles cylinder with BG mixed in will take less energy to burn the fuel charge. It takes some energy to begin the chemical reaction of combustion - spark. Once the spark is present it begins the chemical reaction of a few molecules, these give off heat starting more molecules burning and so on. The presence of BG allows less heat to be needed to begin the process. This means less fuel will produce the same amount of power.
Thanks Alex. This answer is getting us on th right track, but it is still a bit too top level. Why exectly does HHO reduce the amount of endothermic energy needed for combustion? For example, does the free floating monatomic H in HHO cause combustion reactions with less energy required, because otherwise the combustion reactions would need to expend energy to strip the bonded H's from the various hydrocarbons in gasoline? Or does the monatomic H cause other chemical reactions to occur that would not occur in normal gasoline combustion? I'm hoping there is a chemist out there who can tell me (and the world) the answer at this level of detail.
One would think that scientific journals would have some papers on what happens (in combustion chemistry terms) when you inject some amount of monatomic H into gasoline during combustion. Anyone know of any specific references?
UPDATE: Just found this in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_Fuel_Injection
In this article, they reference this technical paper:
G. Fontana, E. Galloni, E. Jannelli and M. Minutillo (January, 2002). "Performance and Fuel Consumption Estimation of a Hydrogen Enriched Gasoline Engine at Part-Load Operation". SAE Technical Paper Series (2002-01-2196): p. 4–5
I ordered this paper, and these university researchers do indeed state that hydrogen injection in gasoline combustion improved overall gas mileage, although they were using a hydrogen generation process that generated hydrogen by using some of the gasoline itself rather than through electrolysis. But the basic principle does indeed seem to work and have scientific basis from peer reviewed research.
On the other hand, this paper discussed experimental results - it really didn't go into WHY (in a combustion chemistry sense) this seems to work.