It was not meant to be taken literally.
Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%.[7][8] Wikipedia
Trust me, I'm an engineer, and this so-called technology is bogus. The explanations use 'common-sense' arguments that are understandable by the average person, but they omit plenty of important details. For instance, everyone knows that you can hook an alternator up to your engine, and if it spins it will generate electricity. Intuitively, the engine is big and generates a lot of power, and the alternator looks small, so it seems to use an insignificant amount of power. But one detail that seems to escape these "water-powered car" sites is that the more electrical load you hook up to an alternator, the harder it is to turn. This makes the engine work harder and use more gas, in a way that isn't insignificant at all.
Being an engineer, seems you'd do a little research on this before commenting so negatively. I'm no engineer, but it makes sense to me that if you are adding combustible material (I've seen this with my own eyes, it makes a big bang) and the chemical make up of the combustible also helps the complete burning of the parent fuel, (Gasoline or Diesel), you would have to increase the efficiency of the ICE, translating to more power and more fuel mileage. The most amperage a v-8 unit draws is around 30 amps. Most modern V-8s have 100+ amp alternators and the driving load varies around 10-40 amps, depending on the type of stereo or day or night driving.
See, this is the part that probably tripped you up. Water by itself doesn't combust; water is the product of combustion. You can make flames come out of water by adding energy, but you're still losing energy overall. For instance, you can put sodium metal in water, and it will burn, but you're adding chemical energy in the form of sodium. You can split water with electricity and then burn it, but you're still adding energy in the form of electricity. You can bombard salt water with microwaves and get the water to split into hydrogen and oxygen, which will burn, but you're still adding energy in the form of radio waves. In all three instances, you're adding more energy than you're getting out.
yes, and my point is we can create electricity virtually emission free. We can not produce oil emission free. Or burn it.
You're right, we can create hydrogen virtually emission-free. However, storing that hydrogen for use in vehicles is the hard part. The pressures it would need to be under are immense, and even liquid hydrogen (which is the densest it can be compressed to) is only about as dense as styrofoam. One alternative that I think is pretty interesting is converting hydrogen and CO2 to methanol. Methanol is a liquid at room temperatures, and it can be used in fuel cells or internal combustion engines.
We need to find the technology to do it is what im saying!!!!
But
To compress hydrogen to higher pressures than it can physically be compressed to? Technology can't do everything. And pretty much every material we can make tanks out of would weigh much more than the fuel inside it if it were designed to withstand that pressure. It's not impossible, but there are other technologies that are more promising, like methane-powered vehicles or plug-in hybrids.
I was just trying to differentiate between what medicineman was talking about and what you were talking about, not trying to say you were wrong. Still, it would be more practical to charge a battery than it would be to generate hydrogen via electrolysis.
I'm not looking for practical. I'm looking for emission free.
unlike gasoline, methane and ethanol.
First, it'd be more practical to develop non-toxic batteries for use in electric cars or plug-in hybrids than it would be to build a hydrogen-powered vehicle.I'm not looking for practical. I'm looking for emission free.
Batteries die out in the long run. Then they go to the dump where they leak toxic acids into our beautiful mother earth.
I ride a bike, thats A LOT less "impractical" than a hydrogen powered car. But, 100% emission free,
Battery power is emisson free but the battery cells are bad for leaking their pollutants in our mother earth.
We can create electricity emission free (solar, wind and hydro), and we can use that electricity to split the combustible atom Hyrdogen from water to create energy! Energy that is non-polluting!
I don't think that is a proven fact. You can speculate that with substantial reasoning, but I don't believe it is a proven fact.
Again, something I do not believe to be 100% true. Lithium may not be bad in the concentrates it occurs naturally in spring water, but the concentrate in man-made batteries will be many multiples of that. That could EASILY be bad for the environment.
Exactly how do you "recycle" used toxic waste? And i thought you said Lithium was non-toxic?
Hmm, this comment is slightly foolish.
But all of this does not even come close to the environmental damage burning fossil fuel does.
I did not previously know about lithium being non-toxic. Interesting. The lithium battery cost will go down as electric vehicles come into widespread use. Just as battery recycling will increase, as you say. Hopefully all recycling will increase.
Bio-diesel is carbon-neutral, too.
Easy to forget that all those green options must be developed and manufactured under present conditions. But it's a long road and we must start somewhere with the hope that emissions can eventually be limited as much as possible.
Well, there are a lot of problems with hydrogen. At the extremely high pressures it has to be stored at, you'd essentially have a bomb strapped to your car. It isn't very good for powering internal combustion engines, so we'd have to wait until fuel cell technology caught up. If fuel cell technology evolved to the point where we could use it to power a car, then hydrogen would be more practical, but until then we need to look at other technology that's in the less-distant future.
If you ate a lithium battery, it would probably be bad for you, yes. But our bodies can easily eliminate it, so it doesn't build up in our system like lead or other heavy metals.
They do it all the time in industry, since pollution standards are a lot higher than they used to be. It's certainly possible to reclaim useful stuff from toxic waste. But as for lithium batteries, there are plenty of good reasons to recycle that have nothing to do with toxic waste, after all, lithium is valuable and we wouldn't want to throw it away right?
Not foolish at all. There is a certain amount of carbon circulating in our environment. Plants take it out of the air, and other living things put it back. The problem with fossil fuels is that using them increases the total amount of carbon circulating in the environment, which then increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It slowly makes its way out of the environment as it's buried in sediment or in peat bogs, but we're adding it faster than it's removed by a lot.
Solar panels don't have a very long lifespan. 30 years if you're extremely lucky. And with their level of pollution, they're far from being a clean energy source. Dams have a very good lifespan, and wind turbines are somewhere in between. But still, all of these have finite life spans, so every time they're rebuilt, they pollute the environment, which means they don't produce pollution just once, but every time they're built. Anyway, check out this article:
That's really interesting about the new solar technology. I kind of wrote it off a few years ago as being too expensive to be practical in most situations, but they look like they've made some impressive advances in recent years.
