A friend just showed me an instruction package for a conversion kit to allow a car engine to run on hydrogen and oxygen extracted from water. He paid about $60 for the privilege of downloading and printing out over 100 pages of text and crude drawings and schematics. I looked through it, and it appears to be a scam, but I was unable to find any serious discussion on-line (nothing on snopes) to indicate that it cannot possibly work as it claims. My arguments are as follows:
- It should require at least as much energy to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water as could be regained by combustion, so unless the gases are generated from the power grid and then used in the vehicle, the energy ultimately must come from the gasoline engine.
- The instructions call for a carburetor conversion kit. My last vehicle with a carburetor was a 1986 model. I do not see how the introduction of a hydrogen/oxygen mixture to the manifold can work with a fuel-injected system, especially when it is controlled by a computer as most vehicles have had since about 1995.
- The electronic circuits you are expected to build are designed with old technology parts, such as a 555 timer, 2N3055 transistor, CD4069, LM741, etc, and operate at frequencies from about 10 Hz to 350 kHz, with no instruction on PCB layout. These circuits are basically variable frequency PWM generators, with one set of pulses to electrodes in the water, and another set that go to a toroidal transformer.
- The toroidal transformer has a ferrite core and is to be hand wound with about 2000 turns of special teflon-coated magnet wire. Its purpose, as I understand it, is to somehow use magnetism to align the water molecules and dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen.
- There is also some reference to a "water capacitor", whatever that is, and somehow this 12 VDC circuit generates thousands of volts.
- The instructions are so extensive and complicated, and the illustrations are so poor, that I cannot imagine anyone actually going through all the steps and completing the project successfully. That is also a convenient way to make it always possible to tell someone they disn't follow the instructions exactly, if the thing doesn't work.
- As far as I can tell, there is no way to regulate the pressure of the H-O mixture (also known as Browns Gas), or to maintain a sufficient reserve for long-term power, and I cannot imagine a small generator like this being capable of providing enough gas continuously for automotive use. If it could, and the source of the power for hydrogen generation is the battery, I'm sure it would be overloaded or quickly discharged.
I thought I saw a post about this sometime back, but all I found was an "ad" in SEB.
My friend is going to try to get his money back through his credit card company. I doubt if he will have any success at that. He would probably have to first invest the time and materials to actually build the device, and then (if he could prove he did everything exactly right), maybe he could have a case. But he paid for an instruction manual, and he got one.
Paul