water powered cars?

[Gabrielles blades]

So i found this strange website dedicated to cars that are powered by water in a more direct manner than fuel cell cars....
http://waterpoweredcar.com/1978camero.html
And while i kind of feel it must be a hoax, it really does make one wonder if its really true or not. Of course from a scientific standpoint i feel that it is entirely possible and quite simply just not understood at the moment because of our perspectives being against the very idea.
So does anyone know anything about it?

[SpiritWarrior]

I am not sure about water, although I have seen alot of talk about. But, I do know they can run on air as I have seen it on a friends car. He drives around with a converter under his car and never visits the gas station. Water may be possible, I know that Hydrogen peroxide is.

[SecretMaster]

A water powered car isn't feasible at all. A water powered car (with current technology and understanding) would have to run via an electrolysis unit. Basically you'd run an electrical current through the water to break up the hydrogen and oxygen (2:1 ratio as there are 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom in water; H2O).

The problem comes down to EROI; Energy Return on Investment. Basically how much energy you put in versus how much energy you get out of the process. You aren't really netting any energy from splitting the water and then using the hydrogen to power your car. Secondly throw in the laws of thermodynamics. You are going to be loosing energy when you decide to split the water, and then when you transform the energy into various phases.

[Gabrielles blades]

One of the articles said that the person was using deuterium to get more power out of the system than being put into it.
I wish someone with some genuine knowledge of the subject would not just say because of law xx or whatnot its impossible, and instead prove it is not possible using math and emperical data.
For example,
how much energy does it cost to convert the water into the gases?
how much energy does burning said water create?
how efficient is the conversion of that buring gas into mechanical energy?

Oh, and i was reading some about the hydrogen booster thing that you can add to your car - NASA did a study and found that hydrogen added to gasoline made the engine run cleaner as well as more efficiently so long as the equivalence ratio was below .75 also only works with certain kinds of engines; they were using a different method of producing the hydrogen however; instead they had methanol around the exhaust pipe for the heat produced to catalyse the creation of the gas.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Gabrielles blades So i found this strange website dedicated to cars that are powered by water in a more direct manner than fuel cell cars.... http://waterpoweredcar.com/1978camero.html And while i kind of feel it must be a hoax, it really does make one wonder if its really true or not. Of course from a scientific standpoint i feel that it is entirely possible and quite simply just not understood at the moment because of our perspectives being against the very idea. So does anyone know anything about it?

Does an air/water car remove the air/water it uses from existence as with petroleum? Or does it "recycle" it.
If the former, I can't think of a stupider fuel to use.

[Gabrielles blades]

from what people seem to be saying is that when you burn hydrogen you arent really burning it; it is just releasing energy when the bonds form it into water (really confusing!). Makes me kind of wonder if when that huge blimp the hindenburg or whatnot blew up if there was a rainstorm from it.
I asked something about the gasoline burning on the myth busters website and someone said that the energy required to recombine the exhaust from a car back into gasoline would be the same as what the energy was when we ignited the gasoline. So i guess that means that no matter was destroyed to create that energy?

[Bungleau]

The laws of conservation of matter and energy state that there is a fixed amount of both in the universe, and that you can convert one to the other and back. I don't remember the science behind the conversions or anything like that... been too long.

I believe that converting the Hydrogen into water won't happen... otherwise the Hindenburg wouldn't have been an issue. It would have put itself out.

I'll leave it at that....

[Firestormalpha]

Strange, I was always under the impression that the waste from a hydrogen powered car was in fact, water.

[Bungleau]

Hmmmm.... well, before I make any other statements on this, methinks I'd better check some physics and chemistry texts....

Just ignore what that guy said a couple of posts back... at least for now.