Water injection works better with gasoline engines, especially ones with forced induction, like turbos and blowers for those reasons you mentioned, and because it also cools the compressed air from the turbo too. Water vapor's expansion ratio is much better than pure air, so there is a gain of a few MPG's with water injection, and also a gain in pickup too.
This hydrogen thing though sounds like a bunch of hype though. The most important thing to remember is that an internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient for gasoline and 35% efficient for diesel. Most of the energy released from combustion is in the form of heat, which is wasted out the radiator. There is NO WAY such a device will ever achieve any noticeable effect because of this dismal efficiency ratio! If you are burning 1 part of hydrogen, you are only getting back .25 parts of hydrogen after that first unit is burned and converted to mechanical motion and heat.
The ultimate trick would be to electrolize hydrogen from electricity at home, compress it in bottles, and then burn it in your car. Even with the combustion efficiency of an engine being so low, you could consume electricity, which is MUCH cheaper than gasoline (and also not taxed!) and come out much more ahead!
The other trick is if you could recover all that heat lost and convert it somehow to mechanical motion...well, it can be done really...it's called a steam engine! When built right, they can be 50-60 percent efficient, which is the reason why the power company still uses steam engines to turn their generators, versus internal combustion engines. The problem is equipping a car with all the components needed to make it work, and then having all that stuff work good through all sorts of driving conditions. In the days of old, driving a Stanley Steamer was a 2-person job...one to steer and control the car, the other person to control the boiler and engine components.
cybervanner wrote: The other trick is if you could recover all that heat lost and convert it somehow to mechanical motion...
I saw a short article somewhere (Popular Science?) about a 6 cycle engine. It added another cycle (2 strokes) after the exhaust stroke to spray in water which would flash to steam on the hot surfaces providing some energy back in the expansion and providing the cooling. The steam was then condensed out of the exhaust stream back to a liquid to be used over again. If you could use something like that to do the majority of the cooling it should recover some of the energy lost in just keeping it cool.
Rob & Kasey wrote: Why not just get a Mr. Fusion? These handy countertop appliances can generate over 1.21 gigawatts from household garbage.
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do anyting for mpg??? what about slowing down some...??
david_42 wrote: It takes much more energy to break water apart than you can get back by burning it. Most of those devices run on electricity, where does that energy come from? Your batteries? Where do they get their power?
If you were a major trucking company and were spending 35-50 thousand dollars a year on fuel PER truck, would you NOT be using H2 if it worked? Trucking companies (unknown to many people) are not owned by oil companies, they'll do just about anything to gain a tenth of a mpg.
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