Science Free Energy? Is this the answer? Or is it a scam? (Read 1570 times)

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So, today I didn't have anything to do but I was curious about the "water car" after watching an episode of That 70s Show, and I decided to do some research.

As it happens, there is lot of hullaballoo and heartache spent over the adverse costs and effects of the energy we use and the unrenewable fuels we are consuming. But as I see it, we have it well within our capacity to produce enough low-cost energy (and I don't just mean solar energy, wind energy, and other impractical and inefficient alternative resources) and to power it in such a way as to supply the world with nearly free/free energy with relatively few adverse environmental effects.

Part of why I am optimistic has a lot to do with using water as a fuel source...
Well, let me clarify, the water itself is not used as a fuel source, but when submitted to electrolysis under certian conditions, water can be made into oxyhydrogen gas, or HHO, also called "Brown's Gas" after Yull Brown, the inventor of a water-elecrolysis cell from the late 70s.

What the electrolysis process does to H20 is it separates it through the electric energy into its basic atomic compounds, hydrogen and oxygen. These gasses will pair off into their diatomic molecules (H2 and O2) then burn.

Brown's Gas is apparently amazing. HHO is 300% more potent than gasoline, entirely clean to burn (no CO or CO2 as waste, there is no carbon involved in the combustion process), and cheaply available. An electrolysis unit to create HHO can be developed for relatively cheap.

HHO has some pretty amazing and baffling properties. It ignites at around 250 some degrees Celcius, but it can sublimate Tungsten, which requires temperatures of over 10,000 degrees. How does it do this? Well, apparently, the materials it comes in contact with determines the nature of the reaction. In some cases, this violates a lot of what people had traditionally assumed about chemistry.

In my understanding, patents similar to this kind of technology date back to at least 1918, and experiments in elecrolyzed energy sources date back to the beginning of the Scientific Enlightenment (and maybe to ancient Babylon (but they would'nt have really known what they were doing (or did they...?))).

If you combine these theories of producing HHO in electrolysis with some of Tesla's now legitimated theories of ambient electricity and magnetism or theories of radioelectrics, it is clear that current applied engergy procurement methods of hydrocarbon combustion have been made direly obsolete.

For information on just one of the many practical applications of Brown's Gas (HHO, or oxyhydrogen gas) watch this neat little video on HHO in commercial/industrial/educational welding.


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If you're interested in learning more on free energy techniques, I reccommend this web site, http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/

So its clear that clean and cheap energy is right at our fingertips but for some reason I don't see it anywhere except on the internet. What do you guys think of this technology, where do you see it going in the future, and what do you think of the idea of free/nearly free energy for everyone?

Also I heard something about a honda car that ran on the same technology or something similar, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PzAm1WKuOU ) but it was pretty vague, but idk lol discuss.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 04:59:10 am by Blitzen
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no one will go to this until it is too late because guess where its way easier to make money: gasoline. people are way greedy. hybrid cars are just now becoming semi popular.

at least imo.
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I like how the water molecule at 1:32 is backwards

ps I don't have anything more to contribute atm
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Yeah I think the problem with this is whilst this makes everything a lot cheaper in the LONG TERM it is always a rather significant cost for in the short term, and most people have no idea wtf it is so would rather stick with 'tried and tested' fossil fuels and shit.

I am a bit a of a dabbling engineer myself and I think this is rather cool, although I do question the safety of something that is going to cut holes in EVERYTHING you are working with, including the bricks (which are meant to be heat-proof safety nets....)
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But, Sarevok, electrolysis units to supplement our petroleum consumption in ICE/diesel vehicles can be built for next to nothing. You can make one out of a mason jar and some discarded electrical supplies. And the HHO flame is much safer than any acetalyne flame. (You see the guy with his fingers on the nozzle of the welding torch in the video, and he's not bursting into flames. That is some messed up safety business right there, how are his hands not burning off? Because the heat generated is contained to the flame, or some other magical explanation of this gypsy witchcraft.)

I like how the water molecule at 1:32 is backwards

Haha, wow I didn't even see that. Good one, Bob.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 03:44:27 am by Blitzen
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right off the bat, HHO "boosters" are garbage. it's a scam and it doesn't work. more importantly, take a look at this article here:

http://aardvark.co.nz/hho.shtml

even from a practical point of view, every single car company on the planet would have these pre-installed if you could get any kind of significant fuel boost. who wouldn't buy a car that was vastly more fuel efficient than the competition?

also, HHO is a method of energy storage, it isn't actually fuel. this is one of the most common misconceptions about hydrogen. technically it is talked about in comparison to something like a battery, which needs to be hundreds of times the weight of gasoline to contain the same amount of energy. whereas hydrogen is actually more of a compact fuel than gasoline. however a huge problem with hydrogen is storing it, because it is so incredibly small it's very hard to store it.

there is a reason these water cars have not progressed very far. there's still a lot of problems, and you will always lose energy on the conversion from electricity to hydrogen.
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Ok, yeah the HHO-Booster thing is mostly marketed as a scam but the scientific principles behind it are well grounded and applicable (thus the HHO welding). I'm sure the same technology could be developed for motor-vehicles if applied correctly and burned in conjuntion with or instead of hydrocarbons.

I've just learned about this today so its not like I've done extensive research on it, so I didn't learn about the scammy part yet, but there were passing mentions to the HHO-Boosters in the sites I parused, but at a first glance the HHO thing made sense to me after I looked at some of the patents and learned about the welding.

Now I am very curious how much of this is a scam market and how much is actual science....

Okay now I feel like an idiot for not being able to tell if the Brown's Gas thing is actually science...
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 04:35:29 am by Blitzen
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once again, you don't just find HHO, you have to manufacture it. no matter how you apply it, there will always be loss on the energy transfer. in relation to the HHO welding, it's simply more efficient than previous technology. this really doesn't mean a whole lot, there are breakthroughs all the times in certain fields.

if your suggestion is that they could somehow use HHO in cars to make them more efficient versus gasoline, probably, but you still end up with the fact that you can never exceed the energy you put into the hydrogen. gasoline cars today are also amazingly efficient in how they use their fuel. even if we found out today how to properly store and use hydrogen, imagine the cost in infrastructure to actually set up a HHO fuel network. people will be even reluctant to do that because you need hydrogen cars on the road for this to happen, of which there are virtually none currently. how much energy do you think it would take to manufacture all those hydrogen cars too, in addition to the network?

in general, producing energy from a central source and distributing that energy is easier than making everything else produce the energy on site and removing the distribution (which combustion cars do). as for electricity, this power still mostly comes from coal and oil plants though, so it's not like there is too much of an environmental improvement even if you consider the efficiency gained. that efficiency will be used up anyway and will quickly set back the energy consumption to how it was previously.

i guess i am mostly saying this topic is called FREE ENERGY and hydrogen has none of this (it's basically a battery). it is not a source of energy we can simply just take from a river or ocean and use without intervention.
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I just thought that it was possible that if we combine hydrogen-power techniques with Teslian electric theory that we could eventually produce very cheap (and really clean) energy for next to nothing with a relatively small power generation base because of improved efficiency.

After a bit more research into it, the "run-a-car on HHO" thing seems to be regarded mostly as a scam, but still, it looks like it could replace acetalyne, propane, natural gas fairly easily.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 05:06:39 am by Blitzen
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Of course it isn't a scam! Why, the people of old have been using water as their "fuel" for ages until it fell out of style!

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i'm figuring they haven't made it practical yet otherwise it'd be everywhere in the industry
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Oil is potential energy
Water isn't potential energy
period
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 06:57:43 am by DJ Soup
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once again, you don't just find HHO, you have to manufacture it. no matter how you apply it, there will always be loss on the energy transfer. in relation to the HHO welding, it's simply more efficient than previous technology. this really doesn't mean a whole lot, there are breakthroughs all the times in certain fields.

if your suggestion is that they could somehow use HHO in cars to make them more efficient versus gasoline, probably, but you still end up with the fact that you can never exceed the energy you put into the hydrogen. gasoline cars today are also amazingly efficient in how they use their fuel. even if we found out today how to properly store and use hydrogen, imagine the cost in infrastructure to actually set up a HHO fuel network. people will be even reluctant to do that because you need hydrogen cars on the road for this to happen, of which there are virtually none currently. how much energy do you think it would take to manufacture all those hydrogen cars too, in addition to the network?

in general, producing energy from a central source and distributing that energy is easier than making everything else produce the energy on site and removing the distribution (which combustion cars do). as for electricity, this power still mostly comes from coal and oil plants though, so it's not like there is too much of an environmental improvement even if you consider the efficiency gained. that efficiency will be used up anyway and will quickly set back the energy consumption to how it was previously.

Interestingly, conventional gas is around 30%-40% efficient.
http://www.volvo.com/group/global/en-gb/Volvo+Group/ourvalues/environment/products/dieselengines.htm

You're assuming that coal and gas is used to convert HHO. Why not let a nuclear or a solar-powered plant do this? Not only is HHO (allegedly) more efficient, but we don't even need to use up gas and oil in the process. Which is better for our ecosystem.

I think that this should first be pursued by gov't subsidiary companies. Introduce it on a small scale, like in a single state. If it's a good idea, the rest of the nation will catch on. The oil trading companies themselves would want to build their own versions of this to get in on the action before they are totally screwed.

As for the solar-powered plant idea, this is awesome because we have HUGE amounts of area that we can cover with this. (hint: Pacific Ocean). I think the US of A would be pretty happy about all this.

At any rate, this entire idea is iffy because HYDROGEN FUELED CARS EQUALS


EDIT:
also by the time the system is fully implemented the amount of money earned would far exceed the initial investment. Think of all of us fatass Americans fed up with the price of gas today. Everyone will want a car like this. You will basically revitalize the economy because people would want to travel more and you are basically trafficking cash straight from the oil-industry and into your own pocket.

ahem not to mention the fact that you will probably be the sole cause of WWIII because Saudi Arabia will be pissed (15% of world's oil reserves) Russia will be pissed (5%) etc etc HOWEVER you can trade with China and other, more important countries so fuckem.

EDITEDIT:
Imagine the number of terrorist attacks on these hydrogen plants.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 02:20:08 pm by Juris
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Sigh, still either way i think hydrogen fuel cells are the way of the future. We just don't have the methode to turn water into hydrogen/oxygen efficently enough. Once we can work that out it will be all the energy we need, might not be 100% efficent, but its certainly more efficent then gasoline and no emmisions.
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Get this in your head:

FREE ENERGY IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. NOTHING WILL CHANGE THAT. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. ALL "ATTEMPTS" ARE EITHER CHARLATANS OR IDIOTS.

I am sorry to be this blunt, but I have had to deal with quite a few physics cranks.
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I think you're paying too much attention to the title of this thread. Yeah it's pretty obvious energy is not free. It is conserved, in the physical sense. And in the other, someone's going to need to process it -- so it's not free in terms of my wallet.

But heck if this is cheaper than gas today I would totally support it.

At any rate, I don't understand your point. Are you saying that we can't get energy from water at all?

EDIT: From some small research and intuitive understanding, it actually takes more energy to process this than to simply use gas itself. However, this does not even address the suggestion of using solar power to do this, which is nearly infinite. We don't use gas at all. The process itself involves electrolysis -- using electricity to separate the water molecules into their respective elements. Then there's something about processing them again, but I haven't researched that yet. What we do is we take a bunch of PHOTOVOLTAIC CELLS, convert sunlight to energy, and we use that to separate the molecules. The rest can be processed again through solar power. Then we just ship the product to filling stations for your cars.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 03:58:16 pm by Juris
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bring back steam locomotives you bastards

Also on a half-related energy note biofuels are a stupid idea.
Last Edit: July 04, 2008, 03:52:23 pm by Rockman.
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Yeah, using food sources for fuel was doomed to failure.

Instead, let's make people-processing plants. Imagine that! We take a bunch of our fatass American friends, process them, and then turn them into energy! Think about it, processed correctly, one obese male can fuel your car for an entire year. Not only do we get rid of the obesity problem, we get fuel, too! Ah, if only Jonathan Swift were alive today...
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It'd be like soylent fuel!

also we should start eating people. we'd solve overpopulation and world hunger in one swift stroke.
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Also on a half-related energy note biofuels are a stupid idea.
cellulose-based biofuel which can be produced from grass, weeds, and food waste products is the type of biofuel that would actually be put to use, it just hasn't been fully developed yet (like every other source of alternative energy)