Now that Mazda has a Hydrogen powered version of the RX-8:

http://media.ford.com/mazda/article_display.cfm?article_id=17134&make_id=227

...what are the chances it will have a gas powered version that uses hydrogen just to boost the MPG like these systems:

"18% to 31% mileage increase" for your car
(this guy is not too far from me)
http://www.hydrogen-boost.com/

A similar device from Canada..."Hydro-Gen users report an average 21% improvement
in their gas mileage"
http://www.savefuel.ca/

MPG IS a factor in my deciding what car to buy next.....and no, I don't want to here from the idiots out there who will say "if you want MPG buy a Prius!". Please stick to the question and keep dumb unhelpful comments to yourself.

Thanks,
Jeff

Don't hold your breath, Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas or even alcohol mileage would be much worst for the same volume of fuel. Plus it must be kept in high pressure tanks and we have no infrastructure to supply it.

Now that Mazda has a Hydrogen powered version of the RX-8:

http://media.ford.com/mazda/article_display.cfm?article_id=17134&make_id=227

...what are the chances it will have a gas powered version that uses hydrogen just to boost the MPG like these systems:

"18% to 31% mileage increase" for your car
(this guy is not too far from me)
http://www.hydrogen-boost.com/

A similar device from Canada..."Hydro-Gen users report an average 21% improvement
in their gas mileage"
http://www.savefuel.ca/

MPG IS a factor in my deciding what car to buy next.....and no, I don't want to here from the idiots out there who will say "if you want MPG buy a Prius!". Please stick to the question and keep dumb unhelpful comments to yourself.

Thanks,
Jeff

You would increase your gas mileage but your net "energy consumption" would remain the same. I'm assuming here that the hydrogen wouldn't be measurably different in engine efficiency. So while you'd theoretically consume less gasoline, you'd be replacing it with a much more expensive gas.

You didn't look at the web pages above did you?

>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas or even alcohol mileage would be much worst<<

I said "that uses hydrogen just to boost the MPG".....the key word is BOOST....as in BOOST combustion efficiency...and MPG. (see web pages above)

>>Plus it must be kept in high pressure tanks and we have no infrastructure to supply it.<<

That assumes you need to store it, rather than keep it in water until you need it. Imagine a small box in your car that can split water on the fly to power your car. No heavy storage tanks, no mass amounts of hydrogen to worry about leaking through storage materials or being a source of combustion in an accident or your garage (refuting some of the complaints of the the nay sayers and people who have an interest in us using oil)....

"every cubic foot of water contains about 1,376 cubic feet of hydrogen gas and 680 cubic feet of oxygen. One only needs a 4% enrichment of hydrogen to create a flammable fuel for the use in an internal combustion engine. This makes it so that one can get great "gas mileage"from a gallon of water, anywhere from 50 to 300 miles to the gallon."

Jeff

Didn't one of the guys from an 80's hair band try to sell this idea about 15 years ago?

What idea? The idea of using hydrogen to increase combustion efficiency (even in diesel engines where it also dramtically reduces pollution) is well known and documented.

Another link for truckers....

http://www.chechfi.ca/sohfitech.htm

They offer a "Guaranteed 10% fuel savings."

Imagine a small box in your car that can split water on the fly to power your car.

About 20 years ago the Society of Automotive Engineers got sucked in on something like this. Their magazine, "Automotive Engineering," ran a series of articles on a breakthrough scheme. The concept was to use electrolysis to split the hydrogen from the water. It takes electricity to refine aluminum from ore, so aluminum must have energy in it. The contraption had a spool of aluminum wire that would be fed into the water tank. That supplied the electricity that would electrolyze the water. Big spool of wire, lasted a long time. You'd have to stop every few hundred miles for more water, though.

I saved some of the later articles before someone at SAE realized they were being fed the old "Car that runs on water" scam and abruptly stopped coverage. Wish I had saved the whole series. I need to look through my archives (i.e., unorganized pile of detritus) to see if I still have those articles.

Ken

>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas<<

Add a little oxygen and see what happens. Question: Why didn't NASA use 93 octane gas to power the shuttle?

Ansewer:
http://www.chewinthefat.com/artman/publish/article_44.shtml

"The SSMEs are the best-performing engines on Earth," he says. They have a specific impulse (a measure of fuel efficiency) of 450 seconds--higher than any other chemical rocket. "If we wanted a better combination of power and 'gas mileage,' we would have to go to nuclear propulsion."

Ken,

>>About 20 years ago the Society of Automotive Engineers got sucked in on something like this. <<

I agree, the water powered car is not here yet.....or is it?
http://home.earthlink.net/~jeff810095/WaterFuel.wmv

Denny Klien...he is currently developing a Hummer that can run on both water and gasoline...
http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBKD7YQIGE.html
http://www.hytechapps.com

Go here...
http://www.wtvt.com/
....and search on "Denny Klien"

But my question, for now, is if Mazda will at least offer a hydrogen "boost" system to the RX-8.

If you burn 850 gallons of gas a year in your car, what used to cost you $1275 a year now could cost you $2550 a year...and of course you are buying that gas with after-tax money. So you have to make about $4000 just to put gas in your car. The RX-8 needs to get the MPG up...for me anyway....I'm not "loaded"

Jeff

Are you engineers at Mazda reading this stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(molecule)

Hydrogen can be split from water by temperature alone...
High-Temperature Electrolysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-t...re_electrolysis
Interesting PDF:
www.ne.doe.gov/hydrogen/HTE.pdf

"at 2500°C, electrical input is unnecessary because water breaks down to hydrogen and oxygen through thermolysis."


Again, the water powered car is not here yet. But for anyone interested, here are a few more links I have on producing hydrogen. I think the better idea is to find an efficient way to split water as needed (rather than use a storage system). But if we need to create hydrogen and store it (maybe to heat your home) we humans are learning very fast how to create hydrogen cheaply and efficiently....including using some ideas that are a few BILLION years old, and were used by the first living things on Earth.


A news piece on GE's new hydrogen device:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biz...523,295,p1.html
"....researchers at GE say they've come up with a prototype versionof aneasy-to-manufacture apparatus that they believe could lead to a commercial machine able toproduce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of gasoline"


Plants Give Up Secret Of Splitting Water
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1072802/posts
"....the team at Imperial College London and Japan Science and
Technology Corp. in Yokohama said they had taken the best pictures yet
of the plant structures that do it every day."

Improve Hydrogen Production by Genetic Methods: Design a Better Nanomachine
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309096685/html/61.html


Mutant Algae Is Hydrogen Factory
http://msn.wired.com/news/technolog...rss.partnerfeed


Sunlight to Fuel Hydrogen Future
http://msn.wired.com/news/technology/0,65936-0.html
"Hydrogen Solar of Guilford, England, and Altair Nanotechnologies are building a hydrogen-generation system that captures sunlight and uses the energy to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The company's current project is a fuel station in Las Vegas that will soon be dispensing hydrogen fuel."

from what I remember reading in school, Hydrogen cost more to process than gasoline, and you use more of it.

from what I remember reading in school, Hydrogen cost more to process than gasoline, and you use more of it.


Whatever, it is not economically viable right now and I'm sure the Mazda engineers know more than these cranks. I think the future of energy will involve a lot of different sources, like ethanol from biomass, hydrogen, solar and wind.

It seems that this thread is getting a bit off topic. The systems in question run off of your car battery to produce hydrogen and oxygen gas by splitting water. Now, this process in and off itself is not a viable solution to running a car. However, when combined with a normal gasoline engine it functions in much the same way a hybrid engine makes its power. The battery is used to provide electricity to split water. Supposedly, the main effects of the system are to increase the efficiency of the engine. Now, the main issue is going to be how much energy you need to put in to create the hydrogen (AND oxygen). These TWO gasses are injected into the combustion chamber, where they presumably allow the hydrocarbons in the gasoline to cumbust more completely than under normal conditions. So basically it is a matter of extracting more power from the gasoline itself to increase efficiency rather than directly drawing power from the hydrogen. It COULD be a viable system, but I don't have enough experience with this to say whether it IS a viable system and if it works.

> "The SSMEs are the best-performing engines on Earth," he says. They have a specific impulse (a measure of fuel efficiency) of 450 seconds--higher than any other chemical rocket. "If we wanted a better combination of power and 'gas mileage,' we would have to go to nuclear propulsion."

It's hard to translate what's good for a rocket engine into what's good for an internal combustion engine. Specific impulse is a measure of pounds of thrust per pound of propellent, important for rockets where mass ratio is the final arbiter of whether or not something will work. The SSMEs burn fuel rich: more hydrogen is pumped in than actually burned. I don't know the numbers for the SSMEs, but as I recall for the Saturn 5 something like half the hydrogen was not burned - it was pretty much just light molecules added to increase the specific impulse.

I don't think that only burning half your fuel is particularly desirable in a car.

Ken

ken-x8 must be a rocket scientist.

The original quote was:
>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas<<

The point was, hydrogen + oxygen is a viable (an efficient) alternative to gasoline, and when mixed would appear to at least as much energy as gasoline.

One thing to keep in mind though, if you had a RX-8 that could burn hydrogen or gasoline (like Mazdas prototype above) and 95% of your trips in the car were under 100 miles....you would only need a small tank of hydrogen on the car that could hold just 4 or 5 gallons of hydrogen. Further, if you had a hydrogen generator (using any of the methods above) in your garage to plug into nightly you would rarely have to put gasoline in your car. Cool! :)

But aethelwulf was correct. We got off topic from the original question on boost systems.

Jeff

To get the fuel economy with these systems JeffNY is quoting, you'd have to get more than 100% thermal efficiency. While I'm all for investigating new energy sources, perpetual motion machines don't work.

Georgia8er, NONE of the systems I site break the laws of thermodynamics. Please take a look at the web pages I sited.

tard off!

beers :beer:

ken-x8 must be a rocket scientist.

Nah. It's just that I once nearly got hit by a Saturn 5, and the smell of unburned hydrogen was overpowering. :)

As I said before, what makes a rocket great won't make an IC engine great. It's like in the infomercials for those scam "Tornado" gizmos. The guy stands next to a jet engine, points out that there are turning vanes in the front, and if that's good for a jet engine it must be good for your car. Then he tells you to cram a piece of tin in your inlet.

Back on topic...whether hydrogen is worthwhile or not just depends on the energy you get out of it, and the cost of energy to make and distribute it.

Ken

I'll be more impressed when they perfect a fusion reactor. Too bad we have so many people afraid of nuclear power. With all that electricity running around, we could all be driving Teslas.

you know, this goes along with the same thing that one of my friends is doing.... lets just say there is a viable H2 system out there it gonna cost you a lovely little penny to increase your mpg by 20%. ok, now your getting 25mpg and you spent 5k to get converted. I just dont get it.

NIt's like in the infomercials for those scam "Tornado" gizmos. The guy stands next to a jet engine, points out that there are turning vanes in the front, and if that's good for a jet engine it must be good for your car. Then he tells you to cram a piece of tin in your inlet.

The really funny thing is he is completely wrong about how air flows through a jet engine. It does not spin. It takes closer to a zig zag path through the engine. He's the engineer though so he should have known this!

I personally don't see anything positive about hydrgoen when it comes to the amount of total fuel used (gasoline, hydrogen, burned dog carcasses, etc) per mile. It's just less efficient. Sure you can use less gaoline by substituting another fuel in it's place but you are still consuming the same amount of fuel when it comes to total energy. Since hydrogen has less energy than gasoline, you'd actualy get worse mileage per total amount of fuel going in. The only positive trait that hydrogen has is that it's clean burning. That's just not worth it to me. Give me power, economy and dirty air anyday over clean air but wimpy cars. Screw California. I'll survive.

When hydrogen finally becomes viable as an automotive fuel, all cars will be series hybrids and hydrogen will just power generators. Even then it's at a disadvantage compared to other fuels but if it's only a generator, that's not as much of a performance loss to the wheels. Ethanol and biodiesel are still far better choices.

Hey RG, I've been keeping an eye on this thread anticipating your arrival.

It is my (admittedly rather poor) understanding that when an engine is tuned to produce more power one often gets worse emissions. I believe Mazda de-tuned the 8 somewhat in order to meet emissions and prolong the cat could one use Hydrogen to improve emissions and then tune the engine to gain more power but still pass inspection?

Oh course one ends up with more weight and an additional energy drain to accomplish this. It would be a weight + power drain vs HP/Tq gain and perhaps MPG.

My pipe dream is to see some kind of SC with a fuel vaporizing system and perhaps Hydrogen to do what I said.

I really need to read up on meth injection too.(and read more on everything else I mentioned here)

>>Hydrogen holds far less energy then gas<<

Add a little oxygen and see what happens. Question: Why didn't NASA use 93 octane gas to power the shuttle?

Ansewer:
http://www.chewinthefat.com/artman/publish/article_44.shtml

"The SSMEs are the best-performing engines on Earth," he says. They have a specific impulse (a measure of fuel efficiency) of 450 seconds--higher than any other chemical rocket. "If we wanted a better combination of power and 'gas mileage,' we would have to go to nuclear propulsion."

When Mazda tested the rotary with hydrogen it had around half the HP and mileage of regular gas.

The reason for this.........for the pressure that can be reasonably stored in a car you have a far less energy then a comparable volumn of gas. You are actual correct in that Hydrogen by weight has 3 times the energy store of gas (120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline). Unfortunately when you look at it by volume, which is the limiting factor in a car you have (8 MJ/liter for liquid hydrogen versus 32 MJ/liter for gasoline). This is why Hydrogen will never be a real player in internal combustion engines.

Additionally you do realise that you would have to use energy to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen with an on board converter. To do this in a volume needed for an internal combustion engine is impractical with present technology.

Finally a far more efficient why to use hydrogen would be a fuel cell which would use the hydrogen 2 to 4 time more efficiently then a Rotary could.

At work we use tonnes of Hydrogen every day, to make chemicals.
Our convertor is (AFAIK) the largest in the world. We routinely split thousands of gallons of water per day, for its hydrogen.

The process uses more energy than the hydrogen produced contains.

So whatever you started with - the amount of electricity used, or the amount of chemicals used up - has WAY more power than the actual H2 you get as a result.

If you have lots of electricity to split water into H2+O, why not just use it to turn the wheels?!!?

If you have a fuel cell that can EFFICIENTLY use alcohol as a hydrogen source, then burn it for electricity (which is what fuel cells do) you may come out ahead of actual combustion - but 2000psi hydrogen in a tank for fuel? Waste of time and resources......

S :hahano:

you know, this goes along with the same thing that one of my friends is doing.... lets just say there is a viable H2 system out there it gonna cost you a lovely little penny to increase your mpg by 20%. ok, now your getting 25mpg and you spent 5k to get converted. I just dont get it.Thank you!

Converting energy from one form (electricity) to another (burnable hydrogen) takes power. How much spare electrical capacity does an average car have? Not much. You could put on a bigger generator, but then you lose HP to generate more electricity to separate the hydrogen from water.

It's as practical as a self-licking ice cream cone.

Didn't somebody mention this "free hydrogen" thing a while back? And get just as huffy when people told him why it wouldn't work?

Why is everyone only lookign at cost? There is a huge factor such as the environmental aspect.
Aside form cost the whole point of shifting away from gasoline is to have clean fueled cars so our planet doesnt die int he next 100 or so years...

I only care about cost and performance. I won't drive a wussie car just because it's better for the air. There are very easy ways to increase current performance, decrease total emissions expelled, and increase mileage all at the same time while still using oil. People are just too blind to accept it. It's called series hybrids. Not this current parallel crap we have right now.

It has to be economically feasible .

Why is everyone only lookign at cost? There is a huge factor such as the environmental aspect.Excellent point - imagine the environmental impact of burning 1.5 gallons of gasoline to create the electricity to make the hydrogen to make your car drive as much/far/well as 1.0 gallons of gasoline. Nothing personal SSJ 909, just wanted to make that point and your post was at the end.

....or, for those hung up on the cost of gas..... imagine paying 50% of your gasoline cost to buy and use hydrogen boost/supplement increase your *gas* mileage (decrease your fuel cost) by 10% to 25%. Total fuel cost still goes up, even if you ignore the $5,000 conversion. For those of you who are interested - please send me $100 every week and I will send you a gift card for $25 of FREE gas!

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see alternatives to dirty fossil fuels sold by terrorist states and I'm no fan of yucky tail-pipe emissions, but I hate bad math most of all.

It has to be economically feasible .
It's FAR more economical to rearrange our cars components while keeping current technology into series hybrids than it is to implement newer technologies that just don't stand up in the performance department. Hydrogen is a huge waste of time and money. I stead of replacing what we have with something that doesn't compare, we need to learn how to use what we have much more efficiently. It's not that hard to do and it's by far the cheapest option with the most performance potential. It's still lowering emissions and cutting fuel costs by boosting mileage. It's just not sacrificing performance.

I refuse to sacrifice performance in the name of the environment. I don't even run a cat on my RX-7 for this very reason. I take that back. One day a year I do.

At present the only time hydrogen makes sense is if you have a large excess of cheap electricity. New Zealand is heading the way into hydrogen with the use of it's vast geothermal electrical generation, cheap and plentiful. But as pointed out Hydrogen is always 10 years away from being a realistic option so only time will tell. RG is correct in the fact that we need to use what we have more efficiently. In my past I would have agreed with him on the environment/performance issue but today I think you can pursue both.

We can but we aren't. Series hybrids are the only way to get it all easily, cheaply, and right now. Parallel hybrids like they are producing right now are a waste of time. For the effort they aren't gaining much. After this is implemented, then power the generators with alternative fuels. Cut first consumption down first. Then figure out what to substitute it with.

It has to be economically feasible .It's FAR more economical to rearrange our cars components while keeping current technology into series hybrids than it is to implement newer technologies that just don't stand up in the performance department. Hydrogen is a huge waste of time and money. I stead of replacing what we have with something that doesn't compare, we need to learn how to use what we have much more efficiently. It's not that hard to do and it's by far the cheapest option with the most performance potential. It's still lowering emissions and cutting fuel costs by boosting mileage. It's just not sacrificing performance.

I refuse to sacrifice performance in the name of the environment. I don't even run a cat on my RX-7 for this very reason. I take that back. One day a year I do.Actually I was replying to the post just before yours. :) But yeah, you're right.

Oops my bad. :)

Imagine how 'efficient' the first IC engines were?
This is the same for any new technology. How many years has the IC engine had to become as 'efficient' as it is today?
Give it some time and you'll see new technologies popping up, but it will take at least a few years for these to become viable. And honestly, I think we don't have much time till we destroy the Earth with our fossil fuel burning/run out of oil (can you say China).

As time goes on cars will continue to be more environmentally friendly without giving up performance. I read an article in a magazine about an electric roadster Tesla made up. I'm not talking about some hokey pokey economy car either. The thing generates 248hp, 200lb-ft of torque and pulls nearly a solid 1g during acceleration and has a 250mile range. On top of all that it looks real sharp...only downside is it sells for $100K. But other more economically priced electric cars are soon to follow. Anywho as that car shows performance and earth happy can and will go together. Hydrogen is a very good next step but the problem lies in producing it. Its not a matter of hydrogen not holding enough energy but merely producing it efficiently. A quote from an article mentions "Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost 3x as much energy as natural gas..." so obviously its a good place to look. Popular Mechanics recently did an article looking at how to go about producing enough hydrogen to support our needs and its not pretty. Suffice it to say that at this point in time it just isn't feasible on a massive scale. Until we find a way to make electricity for next to nothing or "find" enough hydrogen its something best left for experimenting not implementing.

The Tesla roadster is truly a good performer. Electric cars like that may sound like a good idea but many people fail to realize that we don't have an infrastructure that can support too many of them. If everyone bought an electric car, we'd all be in trouble. We already have issues with our power network failing from high use of air conditioners in the summer. We can't supply enough power for all of our needs now. What happens when we try to charge thousands or millions of cars? We need to rebuild the power grid too to compensate. The electric companies aren't going to be as excited about this as those car owners are. It can be done but it's going to take an awful lot of time and money to get it to that point.

Hydrogen lacks the energy content of almost any other fuel we use. We don't run cars on natural gas (unless someone has done a home conversion) so a comparison to it really isn't valid from an automotive standpoint. It burns far too fast and uncontrollably. It is true that someday in the future, engine technology may be able to take advantage of it's burn properties and get some decent power out of it. We are nowhere even approaching what could be considered close to that point now so it is an unrealistic fuel at this point in human evolution. Maybe one day.

The series hybrid would utilize technology we already have and require no modifications to any of our power or gas infrastructures. It would give us better economy which means less oil consumption, lowered emissions which makes environmentalist nuts happy, would make for a simpler vehicle design which could be used to make them safer, lighter, and roomier, and would have better performance potential which is what really matters anyways. Nothing else changes. We just rearrange what we have. We could do this today. No long term anything. If auto manufacturers built them today, when people saw what they could do, they'd buy them tomorrow. It's so simple that no one is doing it. I don't give them enough credit for having thought of it and finding it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work as well for the oil companies. They pay millions upon millions a year to auto manufacturers. Oil companies need them to change over slowly so they can adapt and keep making money.

Basically our technological progression to better cars is only being stopped by outside financial influences. It's all about money. That's why crap like hydrogen is being looked at. Even it can be made from natural gas. Oil companies aren't going to let us progress so quickly and cut them out. It may sound like a conspiracy theory but that's how big business works.