[cleverklutz]

I also have to agree with the info in wiki. You take an engine with 20% efficiency, take power from it to perform electrolysis at 70% efficiency, and then feed it back into the engine. The math doesn't add up, and it's not possible to make a perpetual machine, so it can't work this way.

I discovered this on wiki though, it's a very interesting read.

It seems that with adding hydrogen to an engine you can reduce fuel consumption by about 50% at idle and allow for a 30:1 air fuel ratio. (stock will likely be right around 14.7:1 afr) It also said that it will significantly lower the combustion temperatures. I don't know what the frictional losses of an internal combustion engine are, but I found that electric motors operate at about 94% efficiency since they don't generate heat and pretty much just have frictional losses. Now if you figure that maybe an engine has 10% losses due to friction that would leave maybe in the area of 70% loss to heat if working on a 20% efficiency. If the hydrogen is lower the amount of heat generated, and also if it increases the amount of fuel being burnt (the cat is there for a reason) then shouldn't it be possible to raise the efficiency of the engine? I wasn't able to find out how much hydrogen they were using, but I have found that these electrolysis setups use around 5 amps which isn't very much, I think the stock stereo has a 10-15 amp fuse.

I'm not saying a setup like this has to work, but I'm saying I think it can work within the constrains of the laws of thermodynamics. All I think they're doing is burning fuel more completely per combustion cycle, running the engine very lean, and dropping the amount of heat generated. It's not quite the same as a perpetual engine with an electric motor hooked up to a generated that charges the battery the motor is hooked to and makes power forever...

I'm very tempted to try a setup like this, but that does bring up the question as to why the car manufacturers aren't using this technology? I have a hard time believing that the big three would let all there truck and suv sales totally crash when they could make them all get 30+ mpg by adding $50 of parts to each car that could be found at a hardware store. I would think the reasons they wouldn't do it would be either that it doesn't work, is unsafe, they aren't allowed to, it is unpredictable (hard to regulate afr mixtures), it would shorten engine life. I just can't see that these guys with huge r&d departments wouldn't have stumbled on this.

I still would like to try tho, but with plans starting at $50 I don't know if I should. $50 will buy me almost a tank of gas...

Ben