Water Power
| March 22, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Off Topic, Science |
I read somewhere about a guy in Florida some years ago who was winning races in an offshore speed boat powered by hydrogen/oxygen by water electrolyzed on demand. He used a conventional piston engine modified slightly to run on hydrogen/oxygen (which is one of the most efficient fuels you can get). Normally there’s no way to store hydrogen and oxygen that’s lighter than a tank filled with gasoline. High pressure or cryogenic tanks are HEAVY and DANGEROUS. This guy had developed an extremely efficient method of rapidly electrolyzing water at a throttled rate where the combined weight of the batteries and electronics were much lighter than a tank of gasoline. He won races by having a superior power-to-weight ratio in his boat. He claimed that his workshop was vandalized twice, his prototypes and working models stolen, and he didn’t have time or motivation to tool up more of his inventions. But he described the appartus in some detail on the internet (which I could probably find a link to again if I tried googling for it). As I recall the invention worked by using high frequency pulse width modulated electric current to perform the electrolysis with specially designed anodes and cathodes. Throttling was accomplished by varying the pulse width. Normally electrolysis is done by using simple direct current to the anode and cathode and throttling it by varying the voltage which is easy to do but not particularly efficient. The news clip on this water powered torch and water powered vehicle appear to be based on identical technology to what the boat racer described. If someone wants to look up Klein’s patent(s) before I get a chance to I’d appreciate it. As far as I know he IS the guy from Florida I read about a year or two ago. If not his patent(s) might have some prior art which would make them unenforceable as the Florida guy described the apparatus well enough for an expert to understand and duplicate it and put the description into the public domain.
32 Responses to Water Power
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JGuy,
“In general, regarding the hypothetical over unity energy machines. I think it is not neccessarily impossible (practically speaking!). That is, in a practical sense of the matter. For example, suppose that we could tap into the ZPE. One might argue that that the ZPE energy is then beign depleted, and therefore whatever machine you use to tap it is not actually over unity. Maybe so.. but from a PRACTICAL sense, it woudl be limitless energy. Perhasp, a mechanism could be devised to tap into that energy.. if so, it might as well be called over unity… even though it would not technically be so.”
JGuy, this is just so much balderdash. Energy is that(don’t ask me to identify what ‘that’ is) substance of the universe that is capable of doing work. In order to do work energy has to ‘flow’ from a higher quality energy source(reservoir) to a lower quality sink(eg., water falling down a cliff), or, if you prefer, from greater concentration energy to lower concentration energy, but I don’t actually like that description. The zero point energy is already at the bottom of all possible quality levels. There is no where else for the energy to ‘flow’ to. The zpe cannot be tapped not just theoretically but practically as well, as if there was an actual difference between the two. Perhaps you should go back to just watching Stargate(a show very dear to my old heart nonetheless), and not commenting on it.
sincerely,
d. grey
Dave Scot,
At first I took your post to be indicating that the powerboat is really running on straight hydrogen, and therefore an energy losing proposition, but when you clarified it later to mean that the hydrogen was merely an additive to improve burn characteristics I understood. I would add that perhaps, despite your statement about the danger of tanks, cryo or otherwise, you could get more out of the situation by cracking simple H2 rather than cracking H20. This is because the cracking energy is coming from the engine, as you point out, and the H2O molecule is at a lower energy level than the H2 molecule, hence the reason H2 burns. This would reduce the (albeit already small) drain on the engine for the cracking energy. Having a simple pressurized bottle of H2 on board would certainly increase the danger but powerboating racing is already pretty dangerous. How much more could a steel bottle of H2 really represent?
The other thing I thought about this was that the souping up of engines has a long and honorable history. If simply adding H to the engine can accomplish so much I am astonished that it has not been tried already. Especially in the hotbed of engine development that was WWII. If you could do it to make a fighter go faster than it was tried, the two most common being methanol/water and nitrous. I can imagine that the people here:
http://www.airrace.org/indexJS.php
would be terribly interested in testing this. Many of them don’t even bother with gasoline anymore, simply pouring straight alcohol into their tanks now. For a race, aero or marine, the short nature of the burn would mean the tank of H2 would not be disadvantaged over some complex machinery.
your humble,
d. grey