chemistry of Brown's Gas in cars

[zortag]

Hello
I'm trying to understand the chemistry of using Brown's gas in cars. It appears that there are two main points:
1. It takes more energy from the battery to create the Brown's gas than the energy you get by the combustion of Brown's Gas, BUT
2. The presence or Brown's gas when mixed with normal gasoline "acts as a superior catalysts for breaking down the gasoline and getting better gasoline combustion efficiency."

I understand that at the top-level energy balance view I just outlined. But I'm not entirely clear what Mike means when he says that "monatomic hydrogen (in Brown's Gas) makes a superior catalyst for breaking down and burning petrolium based fuels." What exactly does this mean in a bit more detail? Does the presence of hydrogen cause different combustion products to form, thereby releasing more energy?

Can Mike (or anyone else) explain this in a bit more detail? I'm an engineer (but not a chemist) and I'm just trying to figure out if thee really is something to the water car systems that seem to be popping up everywhere.

Thanks

[Nick_Greyden]

It takes more power to create Brown's gas than the energy it would take to put it back together via electrical means. This is a law that (as far as we know) can't be circumvented. If we could, we'd have a perpetual motion machine.

My take on it (as wrong as it may be for the trouble with knowing it all is that you can't remember it all at once :-) ) is that the purpose of HHO is to take electrical means, extract HHO, mix it with gasoline, cause combustion with gives you mechanical motion (go go wheels and alternator spin) which produces more electricity. The deal is we are using TWO forms of fuel and creating only 1 AND in the beginning, gasoline is the BATTERY + GASOLINE (via the alternator) to help make our HHO so in a sense, we are using 3 types of fuel.

It's the same as hooking up a radio in your vechicle. It pulls a load on the battery and the alternator. Now people are saying it takes gas to turn the alternator and thereby adding a radio increases gas mileage. While I have nothing to disprove this and it is late and don't wish to look it up right now (go go all you research buffs), but it's my understanding that the alternator spins all the time, producing current/voltage all the time, and whatever isn't used up by electronics or etc is pumped into the battery to keep it charged so it's doing this all the time... hence untapped energy that HHO gens can potentially tap.

Once again, as I always say, I could be wrong. But to dissway you from my own opinion, I have never found nor heard of a bleeder circuit on a car that drains off the "extra charge" when a battery is full of juice and doesn't need any more to thus keeping it from blowing up.

[zortag]

Actually the question I was asking was this: what exactly is the chemistry of Brown's Gas/HHO such that it "acts as a catalyst to extract more energy from the gasoline combustion." Nick's post just talked about the flow of energy from the battery to making HHO to mixing HHO with gas, which combusts and makes more energy for both driving the car and for charging the batter to make more HHO. Yes, I already knew that was the general process - again, I was asking about the specific means by which HHO increases gasoline's combustion effiiciency. For example, does the presence of more atomic H in the gas cause different and more powerful chemical reactions to occur in the gas?

[Nick_Greyden]

sorry, got off on a tangent... my bad :-(

I took one line "I'm just trying to figure out if thee really is something to the water car systems that seem to be popping up everywhere." and ran with that... should have known better.

However, as far as your question of the exact chemical breakdown and what happens in each step I cannot give you more information that a common google search could on the operation. I do electronics, not chemistry :-)

On the plus side, we have an engineer and someone in electronics! WHERE IS OUR CHEMIST AND MECHANIC!!!

[zortag]

Thanks Nick, no worries.

Yes, hopefully Mike himself can chime in on this, because I was actually quoting (or nearly quoting) some of what he was saying about monatomic H acting as a catalyst to improve gasoline combustion somehow.

Any chemists out there who can shed light on this?

Nick_Greyden Wrote:sorry, got off on a tangent... my bad :-(

I took one line "I'm just trying to figure out if thee really is something to the water car systems that seem to be popping up everywhere." and ran with that... should have known better.

However, as far as your question of the exact chemical breakdown and what happens in each step I cannot give you more information that a common google search could on the operation. I do electronics, not chemistry :-)

On the plus side, we have an engineer and someone in electronics! WHERE IS OUR CHEMIST AND MECHANIC!!!

[AlexR]

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.

[zortag]

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.

[Nick_Greyden]

quick question of my own... is it monatomic H or H2 that is supplied through BG and if it is monatomic H, what stops the bonding from with another H before combustion? Might need to answer that first.

[Dino]

From what I can understand from all of this is that the hydrogen makes the gas burn better and cleaner because you have less unburned gas. This is also why you can run leaner because you are burning a higher percentage of your gas thanks to the HHO so you can get away with using less without damaging your engine.

[zortag]

Dino Wrote:From what I can understand from all of this is that the hydrogen makes the gas burn better and cleaner because you have less unburned gas. This is also why you can run leaner because you are burning a higher percentage of your gas thanks to the HHO so you can get away with using less without damaging your engine.

Thanks but I'm not sure if I believe this because my standard textbook on internal combustion engines (Pulkrabek, Engineering Fundamentals of the Internal Combustion Engine) says that IC engines already have a combustion efficiency of 98%. So the HHO must be affecting combustion in some way other than increasing efficiency.

Are there any combustion chemists on this board who can comment?