Jul 22 2008
HHO Scam, Part IV: “It’s the Thermodynamics, Stupid!”
Table of Contents for HHO Scam
- The HHO Scam: Run Your Car on Water, Part I
- The HHO Scam, Part II: “Examples”
- HHO Scam, Part III: Big Oil, Big Auto and Governments Laugh
- HHO Scam, Part IV: “It’s the Thermodynamics, Stupid!”
- HHO Scam, Part V: The Real Dangers
Scientific theories are adjusted all the time by new observations. However, thermodynamics, the study of heat and work, has not changed fundamentally in decades. Everybody’s favorite scientist, Al Einstein, even said he thought it was the only physical theory that would never be overthrown.
As a quick lesson, here are the layman’s version of the Laws of Thermodynamics:
- There is a game, and you must play. (Zeroth Law)
- You can’t win at this game. (First Law)
- You can’t break even, except on a very cold day. (Second Law)
- It never gets that cold. (Third Law)
What’s all this mean? It means you don’t get something for nothing. Indeed, you can only lose, through inefficiencies, over time. For fuel economy, it means you can’t use the part of the output of the engine to produce something that, when consumed in the engine, boosts your performance beyond the initial energy content.
Let me translate that last bit. You put gas into a car engine through a carburetor or fuel injectors. That engine is burned, releasing energy. This energy pushes the pistons (or turbine blades, or whatever), converting energy/heat into motion.
That part you knew.
Car engines, however, are notoriously inefficient in a thermal sense. They make better heaters than motivators, in fact. That will be important in a few minutes. Also, the burning of gasoline isn’t quite complete; which is why we lug around those catalytic converters on the bottom of our vehicles.
Bear with me: Here’s where it gets tricky. The HHO gizmo uses electrical power from the alternator, which is being powered by the engine. That power is converted into some kind of gas, which is then fed back into the engine to drive energy. Thermodynamics kicks in here and says, simply, that you will spend more energy getting the gas and consuming it than you get back.
No Free Lunch.
Two possibilities still exist, however. The first is that the magic fufu-gas somehow improves the thermal efficiency of the engine. It doesn’t, however, as long as you don’t change the thermostat and some other components on the car. Once the engine is at operating temperature, it’s efficiency is dictated by the Carnot Cycle, which follows the Laws of Thermodynamics.
You’re stuck on that one.
But wait!, you say. What about improving the combustion of the fuel? (You then put on a smug face and shake your head up and down, doing the chicken-walk in victory.) Yes, that’s a possibility.
As it turns out, if you have a terribly out-of-tune engine in the first place, you might see a teensy bit of improvement. If your engine is performing "normally" then the short answer is, it takes 1.5 horsepower of energy, taken through the alternator and into the HHO generator, to produce enough gas to get back 0.5 horsepower.
Yes, you read that right. You lose 1 horsepower overall running the HHO producer. And that’s the best-case calculation; I’ve got the spreadsheet that demonstrates that for a typical, middle-of-the-road 3-liter engine operating at 40 mph for an hour. Sign up for the site and leave a comment, and I’ll send you the sheet. Or you can study the test data presented here.
If you really want to improve the thermal efficiency of your car a bit, let it run hotter. Of course, if you do that, it’ll wear out faster or suffer a catastrophic failure in a short distance. Probably not what you had in mind when you considered HHO.
Take a look at the plethora of YouTube videos on HHO. All the devices are fairly compact, using fairly small wires. They pump out an amazing amount of gas! But don’t let this fool you; that amount of gas is well less than 1% of the air volume your car will push through at 40 miles per hour. So it’s not likely units this size have enough oomph, even it it weren’t for the limitations of physical law.
And remember, you’ll have a performance loss by drawing more power off the alternator. Still no free lunch…
By the way: The HHO Generators I viewed on YouTube work; that is, they produce gas. That’s not a demonstration of capability!
Next time: The real dangers of the HHO scam. Until then,
Seeya ‘Round the Ol’ Physics Lab…
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