resonant frequency of water (distilled) and how to make speaker play underwater

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Although I see where that line of thinking may be wrong. It's a matter of how much energy the gas produces compared with the percentage you can increase efficiency in the engine with better designed components.

I may also be a crank. If so, I am not consciously working at it.
 
I'm not sure how that satisfies energy conservation unless, as I said, the alternator efficiency improves with increased load.

I'm not totally sure either, to be completely honest.

I'm actually not an idiot, even though I must sound like one. More pluck than brains, maybe. The last few times I've written a post I felt like Rocky bleeding in the corner; "Cut me, Paulie! I'm goin' back in!"

I appreciate the patience. An education like this isn't normally free. If you guys bear with me for a while, I'll even make some donations to the site when I get something to give.
 
Although I see where that line of thinking may be wrong. It's a matter of how much energy the gas produces compared with the percentage you can increase efficiency in the engine with better designed components.

I may also be a crank. If so, I am not consciously working at it.

I would like to contribute here, and in the polite spirit that this discussion has been conducted in up to now, so please don't take anything I am saying as a sign of disrespect to those who have offered their opinions.

If you have engine design 'A', which has a known efficiency, and then engine design 'B', which is tuned to be more efficient, you can fit any new technology to either engine, and see how efficient 'A+New stuff' is and 'B+New stuff' is.

If the new stuff really works, the efficiency may go up, but what you ought not to do is compare the 'B+New stuff' engine with engine 'A' and then put the difference down to the new technology, after you have gas flowed the induction, changed the oil for a low friction one and remapped the whole engine. This is not comparing like with like.

If you are in fact just using water like a battery, then that is thermodynamically just like using a fuel cell in a car. I have a fuel cell car Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Toy Car: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games that I bought to do school visits and such with, and it cracks the water using a photocell, then runs the H2 and O2 back through a fuel cell to run the car. It's not very efficient, but it is only designed to prove the technology works at all. The little fuel cell gets warm to the touch when it runs, and it is this heat that you can feel that I tell the kids is why you don't get back all the energy you put in.

The best place to store energy however is already in the car, it's the battery. If you look at regenerative braking systems and so on, these recover kinetic energy and put it back into the component designed to store electricity. You either get the benefit in using the battery to run a motor or in not running the alternator so hard over the rest of the trip.

I do not get the impression that this thread is about storage however, it seems to be more about getting water to give it up on a first date, without even buying it dinner first. Until we get fusion working (and I mean tokamaks, not cold fusion), I'm afraid I don't think this will happen.

Going right back to the start of this thread, there were some great posts which were essentially asking if you could catalyse the water decomposition using ultrasound. Catalysis is where you provide a pathway from the reactants to the products which avoid going up over a huge peak in energy. Usually this means that you stablise the transition state bewteen them, but it does not change the energy that you have in the reactants or the products. You can think of this as taking the tunnel under Mont Blanc, rather than climbing over. Either way you start and finish in the same places. So, even if you could catalyse the water decomposition using sound, you would just be better able to approach the theoretical limit for the efficiency of the process, generating the minimum possible waste heat. But you would still need more energy to do it than you would get back when you burn the hydrogen and oxygen.

Finally, this discussion has also had various people asking about resonant frequencies of materials. If you start talking about the vibrations or rotations within the molecules, you measure these by shining light on them, filtered to just one frequency at a time, and seeing how much gets absorbed. There is not one eaxct frequency, there are bands, so the peaks are not little needles on the graph, but are normal or gaussian shaped. This method is used at wavelengths out beyond visible light in either direction, and is called spectroscopy. If you have solids, you can also look at how the molecules or atoms shake around their locations in the lattice. This is the study of Phonons and this is why some crystals can be excited to resonate at certain energies. It might work for ice, but I don't know if there is an equivalent for fluids? If you move a water molecule about, there is no reason it must return to where it started, or where it just was, so I don't see that there is necessarily a resonant frequency on a molecular level. The fog makers may break water surfaces up into drops efficiently, but this is really a function of the surface tension and not the bulk of the water. If you move all the water molcules at the same time, you can make a pressure wave, but when and whether they all have to move back again depends on the boundaries of the fluid.

All the best!

Nick.
 
If the new stuff really works, the efficiency may go up, but what you ought not to do is compare the 'B+New stuff' engine with engine 'A' and then put the difference down to the new technology, after you have gas flowed the induction, changed the oil for a low friction one and remapped the whole engine. This is not comparing like with like. "

Well Put. That's the mistake that I have been making in a nutshell.



I do not get the impression that this thread is about storage however, it seems to be more about getting water to give it up on a first date, without even buying it dinner first.

You just won best line of the thread. I don't even get that.

The fog makers may break water surfaces up into drops efficiently, but this is really a function of the surface tension and not the bulk of the water. If you move all the water molcules at the same time, you can make a pressure wave, but when and whether they all have to move back again depends on the boundaries of the fluid.

All the best!

Nick.

IOW, (I think) you're not breaking the bonds of water in a fog machine, just making water vapor. Amazingly I knew that. I had, briefly, considered the idea of putting the water and catalyst in a vacuum, since water (or anything else) will boil off at ambient temps depending on the atmospheric pressure, but that, obviously, doesn't affect the molecular bonds and make them any easier to break.
 
I just found this thread that has been around for quite some time. I read it all and saw a lot of talk but no actual experiments ever performed. I don't remember exactly how I heard about the whole water/hydrogen/"hydroxy" powered car stuff, but I did get interested enough about 5 years ago to actually do some experiments.

NOTE:

PRODUCTION OF "HYDOXY" GAS IS DANGEROUS!!!! You are making hydrogen and oxygen gas together at the same time in just the right proportions to make a big bang. These experiments do it with ELECTRICITY. YOU CAN BLOW STUFF UP, INCLUDING YOURSELF!!!! I watched the Challenger explode from the parking lot at work. Don't play with this stuff unless you know what you are doing!

I heard about some rather outrageous claims of MPG improvements afforded to an ordinary IC engine by introducing "hydroxy" (HHO) gas into the intake manifold of an engine running on gasoline. After spending a few days reading a lot of pure BS, I did find some real research on the subject by credible sources (like MIT) that indeed showed that introducing some hydrogen into the intake mixture can improve the efficiency of a gasoline engine above that of the same engine on gasoline alone.

There were a lot of claims by a man named Bob Boyce showing far greater improvements than those by MIT and others. I had met Bob back in the early 90's at a ham radio show when we were both tinkering with satellite TV. I thought he was a smart guy with a vivid imagination, and a smooth talker.

His experiments were chronicled on several web sites. Some sites had detailed plans for some of his devices including the "Electrolyzer cell". The cell was a device for the production of "hydroxy gas" by electrolysis. There were plans for building an Electrolyzer, but it also needed a bunch of specialized electronics to generate the magic waveform for increasing the gas production.

A few friends and I decided to build an Electrolyzer cell, but skip all the magic stuff needed to make it "special". At the time the details of his "magic coil" were not public. We did some testing to see if it really did anything. The testing was done on my non-turbo 1999 Volvo V70 station wagon with a 2.4L 5 cylinder engine. Before I go into some of the details let me state a few facts and observations based on my experiments.

Bob made it clear that the Electrolyzer must be made using a specific grade of stainless steel. This is needed so that metal ions do not contaminate the water making it too conductive. Excessive conductivity will draw excessive current greating a lot of waste heat in the water. This will lead to steam production. The exact grade of stainless he specified was rather expensive, so we settled on whatever we got from the local metal recycler. We made an Electrolyzer using some Plexiglass and stainless from the recycler. It was similar to Bobs but not exactly the same size. It contained the same number of plates, but each plate was bigger. I had a station wagon, Bob used a Prius.

FACT:
Introducing water vapor, water mist, or steam into the intake of a running engine will improve the efficiency of that engine. This occurs by raising the aparrent octane rating of the fuel being burned (slower burn time). This fact was discovered long ago, and used on aircraft engines during WWII to squeeze more power out of them. It is still in use today on high performance auto engines. See this site for more info: Snow Performance : Snow Performance Water Methanol Injection Systems. The Best Most Accurate Gas and Diesel Water Methanol Injection Strategies for Fuel Injected Carbureted Turbocharged Supercharged

It is clear that accidentally generating steam with the hydroxy will introduce errors in the measurements due to the accidental water injection.
I made a "bubbler" to remove the steam. Bob also detailed the construction of the bubbler, but explained that it was a backflow preventer to keep fire from going back up the gas output tube and causing the cell to explode if the cars engine were to backfire. Good idea!!!!!!!! I made a big one (one gallon) since I had the room and I wanted to keep the bubbler cold to condense any steam.

OBSERVATION:

Bobs cell used AC for hydroxy generation. This means that both hydrogen and oxygen will be generated by both plates in each cell. No attempts were made to seperate the gasses. His system used pulses of multiple frequencies to improve the efficiency of the system. Even Bob stated that there was no way to generate enough hydroxy to run the engine completely using his cells.

I took the cell outside, filled it with distilled water and applied various DC and AC currents to it. I used a 1 gallon milk jug upside down filled with water in a 5 gallon pail (also filled with water) to collect and measure the gas output. The gas displaced the water in the jug. Any steam generated would simply be absorbed in the water (the bubbler). Various "catalysts" were tried. Bob did not use a catlyst, but other builders did. I suspect that the catalsyts just increased the conductivity, since there was little activity with distilled water even with 120 volt line voltage.

I found a combination of water, baking soda, and high frequency AC at about 200 volts from a hacked power inverter produced a good amount of gas, but about half of what Bob claimed, even though my cell was bigger than the one in his plans. I don't remember the numbers but I believe my cell was consuming nearly 500 watts of power which would consume about 1 HP from the engine via the alternator. I could be off here, but I was using a 700 watt inverter (I know this because I still have it) with the output tapped off before the rectifier.

FACT:

All modern gasoline engines use a closed loop fuel injection system to keep the fuel to air mixture at the correct 14.7 to 1 ratio at constant cruise. This is the ratio required for minimum emissions. The mixture is richened during acceleration to increase power, and leaned (or cut off completely) during deceleration. Doing anything to affect the closed loop control will affect the fuel consumption. Simply leaning out the mixture a bit will improve the fuel consumption at the expense of increased nitric oxides emissions due to the hotter combustion temperatures.

Bob detailed an OpAmp device connected into the oxygen sensor circuit that fudged the system "to compensate for the added hydrogen". I believe that this is an incorrect procedure since you are introducing an additional mixture that is already in the correct ratio. The O2 sensor system should not need any compensation. We did not alter the system at all.

Bob also explained that the gas should be injected into the air cleaner ahead of the MAF (mass air flow sensor) for reasons that were not entirely clear. We decided to test injecting the gas into the air box, and directly into the intake manifold through the power brake booster port. Our thinking was that adding a locally generated combustible gas after the throttle body would result in a smaller throttle opening possibly compensating for the extra 1 HP needed to generate the gas.

The entire system was placed into the wagons rear cargo area and connected to the engine by two #4 wires and a 3/8 inch piece of Tygon tubing. All testing was performed with all windows open due to the possibility of a gas leak! The cars AC was off during most tests but we did run it on one or two tests, with the windows open to see if the extra load made any difference.

We filled the cars gas tank to the point where the fuel could just be seen in the filler tube. This was so that we could fill the car to the same point each time. All testing was done at night during the winter to minimize fuel expansion due to heat, the car was black. We made several runs over a period of about two weeks. We used the Florida Turnpike at night where we could set the cruise control on 70 MPH and avoid traffic. All tires were set to 44 PSI (my normal pressure). Each test run was at least 50 miles. We brought a 5 gallon jug of fuel so that all tests were done with the same gas. Most of the times we made a run in one direction with the system on and returned to the same point with it off, or vice versa. Each time the system was not switched on until we were up to speed with the cruise control active.

There were two to four people present for each test, all were engineers well versed in scientiffic methods of conducting experiments (we were all engineers at the Motorola plant). We did several, maybe 10 overall, tests, and we came to the same conclusion each time. Addition of "Hydroxy Gas" to the old Volvo caused a statistically significant IMPROVEMENT in fuel mileage. One of the guys involved in the experiments was a process control engineer. He compiled the data and ran the stats. I don't remember the numbers but we got about a 10% improvement with the gas injected into the air box, and nearly 15% into the manifold. I believe this was because the Electrolyzer was assisted by engine vacuum with this implementation and produced more gas. There were visibly more bubbles being generated.

The car usually makes 25 or 26 MPG under these conditions (averaged over about 15,000 highway miles under various road conditions). We were seeing a bit better during these tests probably due to near ideal (no traffic, night time, minimal AC) conditions (about 27), We saw consistent 30+ MPG with the system on. Sigma was pretty low (1/2 MPG) maybe, but I don't remember the exact numbers.

We did see a significant improvement with this system. It was nowhere near the numbers seen by some of the proponents of this stuff, but just Google BoB Boyce and you can see why some of their numbers are not credible.....

I went along with all of this because I had the old wagon to experiment on, and I understand cars, and electronics. I used to race a few when I was a bit younger. I was a total unbeliever....until I saw it work. Do I believe that you can make enough gas to run a car on water?????? If I did would BIG BROTHER put a chip in my arm to SPY on me?????? Would I bother to make a system like this for my own car????? Not now, I drive 3 miles to work in a Honda.....It wouldn't make sense.

Would a simple water injection system have made the same improvement????? No, increasing the octane rating of the fuel used should not increase the performance unless the engine is octane limited already. If I had advanced the ignition timing to take advantage of the increased octane, maybe, but this was not done. Even though the owners manual calls for mid-grade fuel in the Volvo, I saw no performance improvements in using it, so the car always ran on regular, including for these tests. I did run a water injection system on one of the turbocharged cars I used to race. It allowed me to increase the boost presure causing a significant power increase.

Observation:

All cars will see a different fuel mileage on different brands of the same grade of gasoline. This is due to the differing alcohol content. Alcohol has about half the BTU's per gallon as gasoline. Different brands add different amounts on alcohol to their gas.
 
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Great post tubelab! LOL, should have figured that if it involved high voltages, cars and explosive gases, you'd have done it. :D

If this works so well, then why isn't it being used more? Too much trouble? Too dangerous? Not worth it for other reasons?

Still trying to figure out where the extra energy is coming from. Does the HHO just help pull more energy out of the gasoline?
 
Still trying to figure out where the extra energy is coming from. Does the HHO just help pull more energy out of the gasoline?

My assumption, and those mentioned in the MIT paper, was that it somehow improved the efficiency of the gasoline engine. If I remember right, the MIT experiments used pure hydrogen. The HHO stuff is just easier to make at home!

I know I have copies of all the "stuff" I downloaded back when I did this, but can't find it now. I just Googled the terms "MIT hydrogen gasoline" and found these:

Green Car Congress: Hydrogen-Enhanced Combustion Engine Could Improve Gasoline Fuel Economy by 20% to 30%

Hydrogen fuel enhancement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
I just found this thread that has been around for quite some time. I read it all and saw a lot of talk but no actual experiments ever performed. I don't remember exactly how I heard about the whole water/hydrogen/"hydroxy" powered car stuff, but I did get interested enough about 5 years ago to actually do some experiments.

(snip)

We did see a significant improvement with this system. It was nowhere near the numbers seen by some of the proponents of this stuff, but just Google BoB Boyce and you can see why some of their numbers are not credible....

Thanks, it is really great to hear about some real world results.

From reading the material at MIT e.g. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/17932/56814709.pdf?sequence=1 the nub of the idea seems that the flame propagation is faster with the hydrogen added and the combustion is more stable and complete. This seems possible, so maybe it will one day be used more widely.

You just won best line of the thread. I don't even get that.

Thanks, I just mean that if the combustion of the hydrogen and oxygen is supposed to give more energy than was used splitting the water then somehow we would have got some energy 'for free' from those atoms. We got something without paying for it, which might work in real life occasionally, but in thermodynamics is not allowed!
 
From reading the material at MIT e.g. DSpace@MIT : Page not found

That is the paper I was looking for. Note that this paper is dated 2004. The research was probably done a few years before that. There have been major improvements in gasoline engine technology since then. In 2004 a 5.0 liter V8 engine made about 300 HP. This power level today requires only a 3.4 liter V6. All three major US auto manufacturers now offer 600+ HP cars for sale WITH warantees. This was race car territory just 10 years ago.

We learned how to model dynamic airflow in the 90's, flame propagation and the combustion process in the 00's and more recently direct injection gasoline technology. These improvements may have made hydrogen injection unneeded.

Try injecting pure oxygen and see what happens to the efficiency.

Other than making a big bang???? Race cars often inject Nitrous Oxide which dissassociates into N2 and O under the intense heat of combustion allowing for major power increases. A proper amount of extra fuel must also be injected at the same time, otherwise an overly lean mixture will result. An over lean condition causes abnormal combustion (pinging) resulting in melted pistons.....ask me how I know this?????? Again, somewhere on an old hard drive, I have video of my Nitrous lawnmower experiment.....and you guys thought all I melted was vacuum tubes! Right after the first Fast and Furious movie came out we did a Nitrous injected PC video too....
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Him
You just won best line of the thread. I don't even get that.

Thanks, I just mean that if the combustion of the hydrogen and oxygen is supposed to give more energy than was used splitting the water then somehow we would have got some energy 'for free' from those atoms. We got something without paying for it, which might work in real life occasionally, but in thermodynamics is not allowed!

I wasn't talking science, I was talking about your wordsmithing. Great way to put it.
 
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