A car powered only by water?
[Based on the in-depth piece in yesterday's Elevenses webcast]
"How Toyota's New WATER Engine Will Destroy The Entire EV Industry"
That was the YouTube headline that confronted me last week. Naturally, I couldn't help but investigate. What was it? A steam engine? Nope, according the video you could just top the car up with:
"Distilled water, a resource that is both abundant and accessible".
"This,", the commentary continued "is in stark contrast to the logistical complexities of charging EVs or refueling hydrogen vehicles, areas where infrastructure is still evolving".
So how does Toyota's engine work?
Well, according to the video, all that's needed is to fill the tank was good old H20, then the new technology in the vehicle would produce 'HHO' or 'oxygenated Hydrogen', which would then be fed into an ordinary ICE engine, suitably modified to burn the gas mixture rather than gasoline, thereby producing the energy to drive the vehicle.
Just one problem
How do you split the water? It won't magically disassemble itself in to Hydrogen and Oxygen. Basically, chemistry works like this; the energy released by by combining Hydrogen and Oxygen creates a chemical bond. And that bond can only be broken again by inputting the SAME amount of energy to break the water molecule to be split into its constituent parts again.
One way to put energy into the water to split it would be to use a battery - that's the process known as electroysis. But the battery would soon run flat.
Some of the comments had the answer: "You take some of the power from the engine, and use it to turn an alternator, which charges the battery".
Just two more problems
First, ICE engines operate at nothing like 100% efficiency - that's why they get hot - so the energy produced at the crank is well short of the amount of energy needed to split the water that spun the motor round.
And the generator won't be 100% efficient either.
So even if you devoted ALL the energy at the crank to powering a generator, you still couldn't get all the energy back that was needed to split the water in the first place. The battery will go flat.
Second, you're hoping that your water-powered ICE engine is going to do some work in pushing a vehicle along. So that's going to take some of the energy leaving even less to wind up the generator to recharge the battery. The battery will go flat even more quickly.
In other words, the entire proposal is the mythic 'perpetual motion machine'.
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Are there ANY ways this could be made to work?
Well, if you could draw power from an external source of energy, such as a powerful solar cell on the roof, you could in theory keep the battery charged, but not with current solar technology. Or you could use some kind of induction-charging circuitry that relies on accessing a power source outside the car - such as under the roadway - to charge the battery to split the water to create HHO to drive the ICE engine that powers the car.
But here's the thing - if you're using electricity to split the water to create HHO in order to burn it to generate energy to drive the vehicle, you might as well skip the entire water-based step altogether, and use electricity to drive an electric motor directly - there will be far fewer energy losses along the way!
Could Hydrogen and Oxygen be sourced from water by some kind of chemical reaction?
Of course, and they are not exactly new to science either - I remember generating Hydrogen and Oxygen from water by dropping a chunk of Sodium into a beaker full of the stuff back in my school days. As I knew very well, when you get to the right proportion of Hydrogen in air, the reaction is explosive. It was enough to blow the lid off the sink in the lab and put a dent in the ceiling. I got detention for that little stunt, but I'm not sure I'd want this kind of reaction going on in a car's tank! And the Sodium is consumed in the reaction so you'd constantly need more of the metal.
An article in New Scientist in July 2006 used Boron to generate the Hydrogen from a tank of water but eventually the car's supply of Boron would run out, then you'd need to 'refuel' the car with a fresh supply of Boron. It's still not running on water.
In this case, having removed the borate waste product, it can be regenerated. But guess what, that's an energy-intensive process and you still need electricity.
Last summer, I did cover the accidental discovery by a team at the University of Massachusetts that they could generate a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. But right now it's a long way from being scaled up to the sort of device that could generate the current needed to power an EV. In any case, though it could conceivably be described as a water-powered car, it would still be electricity driving the vehicle, not an ICE.
There's a long history of water-powered cars
Mind you, that hasn't stopped a bunch of dodgy entrepreneurs from continuing to claim that they alone have the secret to the water-powered car that only needs water. And that all that's holding them back from going into full production is some investment.
Most of them seem to have ended up in jail.
Oh, and the Stanley Meyer who appears to have been first to claim that he had built a dune buggy that ran on water back in 1980? That's his design in the graphic.
He supposedly sold the patent to BP and then 'disappeared'. Sadly for the conspiracy theorists who believe he was bumped off, he was found guilty of "gross and egregious fraud" in an Ohio court in 1996, and died from an aneurysm in 1998.
Whilst the water-powered engine is fine for comedy value, the depressing thing is that by couching the topic in pseudo-science, there seem to be plenty of people willing to believe in the bunkum technology, and see the fact that there aren't already cars running around powered by water as some kind of dark repressive plot to deprive them of cheap fuel.
If only...
Read more at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car
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