Water fuelled car
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A water fuelled car is a fictional motor car that uses ordinary water as its fuel instead of petrol (gasoline).
A water fuelled car is a different concept from a steam engine. A steam engine uses water to transmit energy to its moving parts, but does not obtain energy from the water itself. A steam engine feeds energy into the water by burning coal or other fuel, while a water fuelled car purports to obtain energy from the water itself.
Water fuelled cars have featured in urban legends at least since the 1930s. The story is that a lone inventor invented an engine that could run using water but the idea was suppressed by either the big oil companies or the motor manufacturers in order to safeguard their profits (although motor manufacturers would not have any incentive to suppress such cars).
Water fuelled power sources are also reportedly used to extract money from gullible investors.
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[edit] Chemical energy content of water
The burning of conventional fuels such as petrol, wood and coal releases energy by converting the fuel into substances with less energy. In the case of most fuels, one of the waste products is water. Water is a lower energy state than the original fuel. In contrast, there is no possible chemical reaction that converts water into a substance with even less energy. and therefore no chemical reaction that releases energy from water. The commercially promoted substance aquygen that claims extraordinary properties is almost certainly mixed hydrogen and oxygen created by electrolysis of water (passing an electric current through it) and is not in any way a new source of energy.
The key to understanding this is that chemical processes do not create energy, they merely store it or release it. Water is a chemical compound that has already released nearly all the energy it can, which is why it is so stable and so abundant. Where water takes part in a reaction that produces energy, it is the material it is reacting with that contains the energy that is being released. For example, mixing water with sodium produces a vigorous reaction which generates heat and hydrogen which can be burned in air. But in that case, Sodium is being converted into a lower energy state - it is the 'fuel', not the water.
It is therefore impossible to create a water fuelled engine by any clever use of chemistry.
[edit] Nuclear energy content of water
It is theoretically possible to extract energy from water by nuclear fusion, and indeed, all naturally occurring water contains trace amounts of heavy water molecules in which one of the hydrogen atoms is deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) that is useful in nuclear reactions. However, there is no suggestion that any motor, small or large, has yet been proposed that can achieve this. For further discussion, see: Cold fusion.
[edit] Electrolytic designs
- See also: Electrolysis
Where designs that claim to be water fuelled engines have been made public, they often involve obtaining hydrogen from water by electrolysis. This design can work in the sense that the engine turns, but the energy released by burning the hydrogen is, in the best possible case, less than the electrical energy used to create it in the first place. Hence an engine that electrolyses water and burns the hydrogen is in fact no more than an inefficient and complicated electric motor. When the hydrogen is burned, the heat it creates can be converted into work by a conventional piston engine (car engine), but the efficiency of such engines is limited by the second law of thermodynamics and is likely to be of the order 30%. Because a conventional electric motor does not use heat, it can theoretically have an efficiency close to 100% and 80% efficient motors are commonplace. Hence it is not possible that an electrolytic/piston engine could be more efficient than a conventional electric motor.
A notable electrolytic design is the water fuel cell where it is claimed that hydrogen and oxygen are produced by a mysteriously efficient form of electrolysis and then burned in a conventional engine. However, the product of burning hydrogen with oxygen is water. Hence, the exhaust from the engine could simply be fed back into the fuel tank to create a perpetual motion machine. Since perpetual motion is impossible under the first law of thermodynamics, a successful water fuel cell would require one of the oldest and most fundamental laws of physics to be proven incorrect.
[edit] The gasoline pill
Some sources claim that you can fill your car up with water and then add a small pill to convert the water into usable fuel. Because, as described above, water itself cannot contribute significant energy regardless of what you do to it or what you mix it with, the tablet would have to contain all the energy of a full fuel tank. This would require that the tablet was a safe object that contained, weight for weight, approximately 100,000 times the energy of previously known explosives such as TNT.
[edit] Specific reports
[edit] Garrett electrolytic carburettor
Henry Garrett from Dallas, Texas allegedly demonstrated a water fuelled car in 1935 which was reported on September 8, 1935 in The Dallas Morning News. The car generated hydrogen by electrolysis as can be seen by examining Garrett's patent: U.S. Patent 2,006,676
US patent number 02006676 was filed on July 1st 1932 by Charles H Garrett. The patent was granted on 2nd July 1935. This patent includes drawings which show a carburettor similar to an ordinary float type carburettor but with electrolysis plates in the lower portion, and where the float is used to maintain the level of the water.
There appears to be nothing shown in the patent that could provide a new source of energy unknown to conventional science so it is likely that the energy in the electricity from the car battery would be converted to hydrogen at between 50% and 70% efficiency [1], the hydrogen would be converted to rotational kinetic energy by the motor at around 25% to 30% efficiency and that could be used to generate electricity at around 80% efficiency. Hence only between 10% to 15% of the energy taken from the battery for electrolysis would be available to recharge the battery even if the vehicle were standing still. Whilst the vehicle might run for a while, after a short time the battery would discharge to the point where electrolysis could no longer be maintained and the car would stop. Simply using the battery to drive an electric motor would have been far more efficient.
[edit] New Scientist
An article in New Scientist in July 2006 that described an engine running on water had a misleading headline (New Scientist, 29th July 2006, p35). The engine actually used boron as its fuel. New Scientist later published a letter pointing out that fact (12th August 2006 p19).
[edit] Suppressing useful inventions
It is a frequent claim of inventors of water fuelled engines that the technology has existed for a long time and is being suppressed by conventional fuel suppliers such as oil companies. This is unlikely because once any useful invention becomes technically possible it is likely to be invented independently several times. This makes the suppression of a useful invention for any length of time impossible in practice. Patenting an invention does not suppress it because the contents of all patents are publicly available for inspection.
