Not in a vehicle though. Storing electricity in batteries to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen so you can use a fuel cell to generate less electricity than you started with in the batteries would be silly.

It's not clear whether the claims are missing out vital facts or just made up, but they clearly aren't true as presented.

If it's a hoax, BOOOOOOO!

So yeah, I'm suspicious but I yearn for it to be the good thing it looks like: Cheap, abundant energy. Yum.

I really hope this gets widespread press notice; that more coverage out there, the more pieces to try to put together how it works and what the catches or nasty side effects might be.

The power is low enough to believe that they're working with essentially a battery (3w/cell), and that the water is essentially an electrolyte.

3w is nothing not even charge a laptop range. Hell, 120w is well within reach of most cyclists.

As for the power source to split the water up into its components--could an alternator/generator be involved here, running off the driveshaft? You'd need a battery to start the reaction, but could generate more electricity to run the reaction once the engine was running, the same way a gasoline-powered car re-charges its battery and runs such accessories as lights &c. Of course, this would mean heavier fuel use, just as running the air conditioner in a car affects fuel use now, but it might be one explanation.

Well, yeah - the fact that water is *far* more abundant on this planet than any sort of burnable fuel. Therefore, *if* this device worked exactly as advertised (and I'll note that it claims to work with salt water the same as fresh, which sounds like a nifty if unlikely trick), then no, it wouldn't really introduce any concerns about 'using up all our water'.

On the other hand, we can be sure it either doesn't work, or they left out some important details like something being oxidized or otherwise used up in the converter. It will *always* take more energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen than you can ever get back by burning them, no matter how you gussy the description up. That extra energy must come from somewhere else, whether it be electric current or the consumption of some other energy/substance in the converter.

The only way you could conceivably be getting more power from the hydrogen than you're putting into the electrolysis or catalytic water splitting is if you were using it for some other kind of power generation, like cold fusion. However, these guys don't seem to be claiming to have invented Iron Man's arc reactor, so that's out.

* You can't win.
* You can't break even.
* You can't even leave the game.

If they ran an experiment in a room provided by someone else, where the total energy released (over any time period) exceeded the energy that would be available from the initial weight of the equipment in, say, gasoline (they're allowed to add all the water they want), then I'd believe.

If all they did was a press conference showing it "generating" power for 15 minutes or so, it's way too easy to hide the real power source.

* You can't win.
* You can't break even.
* You can't even leave the game.

If hydrogen fuel cells work, and they do, then a system to recharge them from cracking water ought to make them work better. The cracking system is clearly a consumable, if it's based on a metal hydride method, as it says.

Yes, this is most certainly true; but water is also very poorly distributed, and there are places in the world where water scarcity is a meaningful problem even today... and they're not all in the deserts of Africa, either. (I'm thinking of all the construction in Las Vegas with certifications of 20-year water supply. And what happens after THAT, one might ask?)

That said, I'm with you that it's probably a non-issue due to those important missing details. Though it remains an interesting mental exercise either way!

"In the demonstration, the 120W fuel cell stack was first supplied with water by using a dry-cell battery operated pump."

How long did this take? How much power did the pump consume?

Doesn't really matter though -- any tiny chance that this could be for real is destroyed by the manner of presentation. In other words, if you just created the most amazing advance in energy technology ever, and you're about five seconds from getting rich and saving the planet, do you unveil your miracle at a press conference in Osaka that is apparently attended by (judging from the number of differently phrased reports that were quoted in various minor venues) two guys? No, you do not. If you are a brilliant inventor and you know that everyone else with a shred of scientific training will assume your announcement is a joke, do you take a few moments in your press release to acknowledge that this sounds ridiculous and at least hint at some kind of significant new principle you've discovered? Yes, you do.

These articles are the equivalent of a guy calling up the Arcata Eye and a bird-watching magazine and saying "I have the ability to fly, entirely under my own power. My technique is more effective than previous attempts at unassisted human flight because I've managed to get my body fat down below 1%."

This looks kinda real. How much more do we know, or can we guess? Also, would I be correct in assuming the system throws off oxygen? That could get exciting.

Sadly no. If this is real, what you have is the separation of water into O and H2. The power to run the car would then come from their recombination into H20. Your exhaust will be water vapor, which is actually a very very problematic thing in cases with high vehicle densities.

If it really is a case of lysing water, then it doesn't have to break the laws of thermodynamics. Water is, as all chemicals, in a constant state of equilibrium between various different possible combined state (OH+H, O+H+H, O+H2, and H20 and about a dozen other sets). If they've found a way to catalyze the transition reactions from H2O to the other possible forms and then sequester/capture the H ions or the H2 molecules, then you can run it without an extra (non-environmental) energy source (A catalyst will let you run a reaction further into energetically unfavorable realms than you could do otherwise for a given set of conditions.) It is probably an endothermic reaction series, so you'll need a heat exchanger to keep the water warm enough to produce reasonable amounts of H2, and it wouldn't work in places where the temperature was too low.

The reason this invention can't work is that there is no possible source for the energy, unless there's something they don't mention in their publicity statements.

One of the nice things about science is that it saves us the bother of wasting a lot of time on scams. If somebody has found a way around the laws of thermodynamics, I'll find out about it by some method other than some corporate PR.

Ah, so that's where the energy is coming in from, assuming this isn't a con. Should be fairly simple to cost out production of the chemicals needed for the reaction, and get some sense of how easy they are to mass produce.

Albatross has it. Smart bird.

Andrea @ 23: Note again that the company claims the thing can run on sea water. There is certainly no shortage of that, and if the system can handle that kind of salinity, you could probably pee in the tank for similar results. What there is sometimes a regional shortage of is *potable* water.

samuel @ 21: What makes for new discoveries is *repeatable* experimentation. Until these folks tell others how the process works and let them try it out for themselves, there's every reason to be skeptical, even if the claimed results *didn't* contradict literally hundreds (well, almost two hundred going back to Carnot) of years of experiments and observations to the contrary. Observing that something appears to be a natural law is not a matter of closing one's eyes or mind, it is simply a statement that a whole lot of evidence to date supports that viewpoint. And pray tell, exactly what kind of energy do you think water contains so much of? Chemical energy? Not so much; although there are certainly exothermic (heat-producing) reactions involving water, they uniformly consume something else that is in more limited supply - limestone and sodium come to mind. Nuclear? Sure, if we can lick the problem of controlled fusion. Mass-energy? Certainly, but then so does every substance, and we're even further from direct mass conversion than we are from practical fusion.

Batteries in the car that they aren't talking about and also aren't showing to reporters?

This really fits under 'too good to be true'.
I'd bet that the reporters have no real knowledge of physics and chemistry, either, so they couldn't ask the right questions.

- the actual energy source is contained in the fuel cell membrane assembly. If it's really capable of storing much more energy than a tank of petrol before it needs replacement (as the articles imply) then its energy density must be utterly staggering for a chemical compound. We have a word for chemical compounds with a staggering energy density: 'bomb'. That they're not ringing this about with warnings implies that they're not actually worried about people damaging themselves, which makes me think that all is not as it seems.
- the energy source is contained in the fuel cell membrane assembly but is not chemical. There aren't many other possibilities: it could be kinetic (no flywheels so I don't think so) or nuclear (even more unlikely, and even more dangerous: what else does it emit? slow neutrons? ;) )
- these guys are scammers or deluded.
- these guys have found a way around the law of conservation of energy. Note that this law is much more fundamental than it first appears: it's based off Noether's theorem, which (roughly speaking) describes the necessary emergence of conservation laws in systems with any kind of symmetry. The symmetry from which the law of conservation of energy emerges is time-translation symmetry. You *can* violate the law of conservation of energy, but only *at the moment that the laws of physics change*. Otherwise, free energy is impossible. (If you think otherwise, learn some math first and find a mistake in Noether's proof.)

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps these guys have really invented a fuel cell based on constantly changing the laws of physics. But I doubt it.

It does however require one little bit of chemistry knowledge to recognize it, which is not a priori obvious. For the people who don't have a chemistry background, the reaction 2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O releases energy; in other words, hydrogen + oxygen burns to make water.

That means to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, you must add energy. The standard way to do this is with electrolysis (add energy via electricity) but you can also do it with reactive metals. For instance, add sodium to water - the sodium will react with water and release hydrogen. Once that reaction is done, it's now at a lower energy state and nothing happens until you get more sodium or add energy in some other way.

In other words, the actual fuel here, the energy source, is not the water, it's hidden in the "fuel cell" in the form of a metal, a previous charge, or something else. Very possibly they're using sodium; it's relatively cheap and available, and as reactive metals go it's relatively nontoxic. Alternatively, what they've constructed is actually a variety of battery, and is being charged before being put out for "demonstration".

Oddly enough, I was just noting a day or two ago on Charlie's blog entry on cons and frauds that all of the fuel-saving hoaxes and cons are coming back with the high fuel prices.

P.S. If they'd made a good bidirectional water-based fuel cell - i.e. one that could cycle freely in both directions without depleting the electrodes - that would be an interesting achievement, but it wouldn't be free energy.

Try this patent on for size. Word of interest: nanocrystalline
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6572836/fulltext.html
Note: The patent was issued June 3, 2008

Very cool, ... my electric boat will never need refueling. You could drive in a rain storm without stopping... I wonder if you could suck water out of the air...say for planes...

No. A catalyst may let you bypass energy barriers between states. It can't affect the overall energy balance for the net reaction.

Samuel: what's your connection to Genepax?

Read the patent; did you? It seems apparent that the metal or metal hydrides mentioned are all *consumed* by the chemical reactions mentioned, in most cases by becoming oxides or being converted from hydrides to oxides. That is, the magnesium, lithium, sodium, or whatever in use is the real source of the energy, just being used more efficiently than in past applications if the patent is correct; in fact, the patent even says, "Such a comparison makes it obvious that, for use as non-rechargeable energy source, the metal hydrides used in the method according to the invention have much higher specific and volumetric energy densities than conventional batteries."

Note that they're non-rechargeable (e.g., if the Genepax MEA is the same thing, you need to swap it out for a new one eventually), and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that these nanocrystalline structures take a fair amount of energy to produce in the first place; probably considerably more than they ever provide for hydrolysis and running the engine.

I read about one in the editorial and letters columns of Scientific American circa 1850. Some clowns were filling lecture halls with suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H potential investors to hear about their cold steam engine. Rather than using expensive coal to turn water into the vapor that drove the pistons, they did it mechanically! Imagine the savings! Imagine how this would benefit the country! But the politicians and the powerful coal trust don't want us to succeed!

Same old story, new details.

Somewhere along the line, phone calls will go unanswered, an office will be found empty except for a baffled secretary whose paycheck bounced, and some people who got in on the ground floor will quietly fume.

Also: I can't tell if samuel orr is genuine human or canned meat. Anyone have a Turing test handy?

Basically, it would be a potential answer for greenhouse gases, but not for the energy crisis as a whole, because you'd need to plug it in to "recharge". Just a better electric car... But I'd be worried about impurities in the water.

Naturally, if they really are claiming to generate energy from the water itself, then... they're all wet.

Hmmm... now I wonder how long this does go back.

"Uggh show Ogg! Now Ogg no need hunt good sticks, dry grass, pull firebow to make red flame. Uggh invention let Ogg get flame from stream in meadow! Easy! Uggh sell to Ogg for only 3 bearskin and two deer carcase."

"Ogg - what that word? - suspicious. How come Uggh always start red flame before showing to Ogg? And how come it look like burnt sticks hidden under water skin?"

This process may well exist, but it destroys the metal hydride---the hydride isn't a catalyst, it's a fuel.
You do not, however, a car fueled by water and producing exhaust water. You have a car fueled by water, oxygen, and metal hydrides, and producing exhaust water and metal oxides.

There are lots of ways to "produce hydrogen" with water: try, for example, adding water to some metallic sodium. You'll get hydrogen gas out (which you can run through a fuel cell) --- and, by the way, enough heat to run a small generator. This is not a water-fueled car with a water exhaust, it's a sodium-fueled car with a soda lye exhaust.

At best. At worst, you have a car powered by a carefully-hidden battery or fuel tank, which runs just until it's out of sight of its gullible investors/press, then stops until recharged.

Actually, rereading the 'Fuel Cell Today' release, it's worse than that. Quote: "In the demonstration, the company powered the TV and the lighting equipment with a lead-acid battery charged by using the system."

Got that? They didn't even run any decent power drain on the system, they said "take our word for it that we charged a battery from the system."

FAIL.

I demand a better grade of swindler!

1) the energy source for cracking the water could be the heat in the water--anything at room temperature always has some energy in it.
2) the rate at which the water is cracked would depend on the temperature, and in particular it would happen slowly at low temperature.
3) the temperature of the water (and then the equipment) would drop pretty quickly as the cracking proceeds, by conservation of energy.
4) without intervention the cracking would slow down to an impractical rate, basically waiting for the water to warm up a bit in order to crack the next few molecules.
5) so you have to keep the thing warm. Maybe run in it a hot place, like the desert in the daytime.

Maybe one could use some sort of mechanical/optical device to focus heat? The old magnifying glass trick?

(j h w: [choke, splutter]! Of course, I'm sure you know that Rictus Hep has invented a perpetual energy source - it's run on the keystroke energy generated from blog commenters.)

All yur hydrogen r belong to us...

(I'm trying to not sound whiny and defensive. It's a famous scam.)

It wouldn't surprise me to see Reuters fall for a water engine story. What puzzled me about this one was the presence of reporters from a couple of technical publications that were both taking it at face value, and the absence of debunking articles.

Michael Phillips (25), I was in junior high when I learned that you can split water into oxygen and hydrogen, then recombine them (BANG!). It was entertaining and educational. I've never studied transition reactions, though, and they sound like the pertinent issue, so I'm glad you know about them.

The reason I wondered whether this thing was throwing off unconsumed oxygen was because the reports were going on about how much hydrogen it produced, and barely mentioning oxygen at all. I figured that if they were only playing with the hydrogen, the oxygen would have to be going somewhere.

Of course, if they've figured out a clever way to sequester hydrogen atoms, the whereabouts of the oxygen is still an interesting question.

Scott Harris (29), thank you for explaining that to Samuel Orr.

Steve (34), you are in violation of the "You guys" rule, but thanks for the link. What's a "metastable nanocrystalline metal hydride," aside from the best rubber-science phrase since the invention of unstable molecules?

Tom Scudder (36), Samuel isn't a shill or an astroturfer. He's someone who's bought the story.

2. What if, as a friend of mine suggested, the MEA is made from the trapped souls of an alien race?

Think about it!

"Why, I do know about unstable molecules. Take the ones in my head."
(The MoleculeMan, when the Fantastic Four were roasted and toasted.)

If not...what reporters?

"Metal hydride": a compound of metal(s) and hydrogen. These tend to be reactive with water and oxygen. "Nanocrystalline" describes extremely tiny crystals; i.e., the crystal grains are very small. Since most of the material is therefore on the surface of crystal boundaries, it's more reactive than it might otherwise be.

"Metastable", in this case, describes the chemical composition (according to the patent). The high-energy mechanical process on tiny particles results in a composition that's not "normal" for the materials involved, and if they were left to sit long enough (or if the temperature was raised) there would be some kind of recombination or separation into several more stable compounds, mixed together. In other circumstances, it might refer to the nanocrystalline structure, since such things would tend to recrystallize to give fewer larger crystals.

I was surprised at the thought you wouldn't know that one, because you are clearly a fellow fan of great cons and hoaxes.

Digressive rant:

Journalism has always had a problem with science knowledge, and so has the general public (cf C.P. Snow) but it seems lately as though there is a growing portion of people in technical-related fields who are completely ignorant of even the most basic science ideas.

I recently noticed that Boing-Boing Gadgets has been pounding on the apparent trend of beautiful, elegant, clever "design prototypes" of electronic gizmos and devices that could not possibly work.

For instance, there was the desk light which would be powered by a small sliding weight, needing to be lifted only once per day. A little math showed that it could not even put out enough electricity to light a small LED. More egregiously, there was the recent "design prototype" dumbbell which would allow you to simply dial in the weight you wanted and would somehow generate the appropriate mass by swirling some ball bearings around at the right rate. (What?!?)

As product designs go, these are up there with my siblings and my childhood drawings of our catalog for magic lamps. (Out of which a genie would pop, with his turban color-coordinated to the gem on the lamp. See, design value!)

Guy turns water into fuel using sound. Demonstrates it with a welding torch.

Guy turns water into fuel with a magic ingredient. (Possible similar to this metal hydride.) Demonstrates it with a welding torch.

Gadget which pumps hydrogen into your car's fuel injection system, miraculously increasing mileage. (Where does the power for the electrolysis come from? How much better performance do you get?)

Just search YouTube. People fall for this crap over and over again.

No, it couldn't.

Uh-oh, re-reading in context...

Before I feel the need to fall on my sword here, can I just make it clear that was not meant to go with the first part of my post, and not meant to imply Teresa among that group? Blood is so hard to clean out of the carpets. I shut up now. kthxbye.

Didn't we go thru this with cold fusion?

Jim, I'm still waiting for what to do when the inevitable zombie uprising occurs. The Max Brooks book sucked.

The underlying forms of fraud, on basic taxonomy.

Follow the money, on PublishAmerica and similar enterprises.

Gadget which pumps hydrogen into your car's fuel injection system, miraculously increasing mileage. (Where does the power for the electrolysis come from? How much better performance do you get?)

This is the one I've been looking at "most closely". Without spending money to snag any plans, nor being able to find a patent, I think I figured out how this one is supposed to "work" on conventional gasoline-fueled spark-ignition engines. They don't just dump the hydrogen in, IIRC, at least the simpler ones don't - they dump the intimate 2 to 1 mixture of H2 and O2 into the intake. Common ducted products of electrolysis - much simpler to build the device. (see Brown's Gas, et al.) The key is where they mention having to mess with the O2 sensor. Hydrogen has a much lower "lean burn limit" than gasoline, so it will ignite even when running a lot leaner than stoichiometric. What these guys do, I think, is sell you a gadget to make the fuel injection computer lean the engine out (inject less gasoline per unit of air taken in) by fooling with the 02 sensor signal. This alone will increase your MPG (less fuel in = less fuel used) but the H2/O2 mixture present presumably allows you to run even leaner mixtures before you get too many misfires/rough running. The additional leaning-out is what I think "covers for" the thermodynamic losses in the engine to alternator to electrolyzer to engine loop.

There's a catch, though: Running the engine in "lean-burn" mode when the fuel injection and emissions control systems are not designed to do so properly leads to higher emissions - chiefly NOx, a primary contributor to "smog".

Diesel engines already run lean up until they start smoking from over-fueling. It's possible that having some "ready to burn, pre-mixed homogeneous charge" in the cylinder helps with turbulence or flame front propagation or radical formation or other ways to burn the fuel in a shorter period of time. I've no reliable data available to validate the idea, unfortunately.

Overall, though, the vast majority of these "gas saver/replacer devices/fuels" either don't work or have adverse effects or cost more than they save. TANSTAAFL, YMMV.

later,
-cajun
(who used to drive a vehicle that got 12mpg, so was very interested in gas-saving devices and did much research on the subject many years ago)

from the patent mentioned in #34 (that is simply an example of what is possible)

"The calculations were made assuming that part of MgH2 in a separate
tank would be reacted with water vapor and the high heat generated by the
reaction would be used to desorb the other part of MgH2 stored (in
another tank). The MgH2 in this other tank would actually be a
MgH2 --V composite and would work as a reversible metal hydride (in
this case, the reaction temperature should be at 573° K or above)."

So, without getting into the exact details of material science, there is a possibility of a reversable metal hydride. Granted some will be consumed, but what you are not getting is the H2 distribution network issue is solved with this technology. Before this announcement, the country would need a H2 filling station on every corner for the Hydrogen economy, now buying a few pounds of metal hydride will do the trick or whatever consumable the Genepax generator will need.

And no the energy is not in the hydride; it is in the chemical bonds within the water and the hydride.
Energy/mass is not created. So, what we look for in a new energy source is getting easy access to enough energy to do our work. I say a generator consuming water and some powder or whatever is far better than our current setup of sending Trillions of dollars outside the country to the oilmen.

Based on one patent, this technology appears to at least be possible, practial after much engineering work.

One part of what you are saying might be correct, if the magnesium hydride pans out into a fully reversible fuel cell reaction. (Or if the aluminum/gallium alloy mentioned in another comment does the same.) Essentially it would become an very-high-efficiency battery, which could double as a hydrogen generator for hydrogen fueled engines. (Alas, an issued patent is no indicator that the science is right or that the engineering is workable.)

However.... it will generate no power. Let me repeat that:

It doesn't generate any power at all; it only stores, or transforms, power generated via other means. Where's the power to make the metal hydride going to come from? Power plants, mostly burning oil or coal.

Therefore, if the claims for it are true, the oil usage it could displace would be the efficiency difference between burning gas or diesel in an internal combustion engine and burning oil to generate that power in an electric power plant. (Minus whatever weight overhead is associated with the fuel cell.) That would still be a Good Thing, but nothing like what's being claimed for it in the PR, or up-thread, or in your last couple paragraphs.

The only big gain would come if all our electric power plants were running on some non-polluting source such as wind or hydroelectric power. (I won't get into the whole solar vs. nuclear debate here.)

...if the magnesium hydride pans out into a fully reversible fuel cell reaction. ... Essentially it would become an very-high-efficiency battery, which could double as a hydrogen generator for hydrogen fueled engines.

Or in layman's terms: "fully reversible" = a battery that can be charged and discharged over and over again ad infinitum.* Great if the energy density is high enough.

In the case of this invention, like lots of other fuel cells, it's also a way to get around the problems of storing hydrogen aboard a hydrogen fueled vehicle. Hydrogen has the disadvantage of being both tiny and chemically active. Tiny is a particular problem, because fittings and whatnot that are adequate for storing bigger stuff become leaky, and have to be engineered to resist Hydrogen's tendency to want to stick it's one electron to everything in creation. Exchanging that for storing water** instead is helpful.

*impossible in practice due to entropy, etc, but "close enough" would be kinda cool.

**a rather thoroughly solved problem, but I have this invention...

With this device John Worrell Keely harnessed the power of the ether back in the 19th century. He gave amazing demonstrations of etheric force, collected a great deal of investor capital, but (fearing his machine would be used for evil) never described how it worked. The secret died with him.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely

Stirling engines are my most recent infatuation. these guys (big corporation actually) have come up with a 25 foot diameter reflecting dish that focuses sunlight onto a stirling engine, which drives an electric generator, and produces about 25 kilowatts of power in New Mexico.

They're currently extremely expensive, but they're also first generation. I think if you give it another generation or two, and the cost will drop to something competitive.

Unless they come up with some new fangled semiconductor that does a better, cheaper job of converting sunlight to electricity, I think I'd put my money on good old fashioned thermal engines.

25kilowatt, damn.

Even if it was 2x or 3x of grid electricity, I think I'd buy one if I had some place to install it. Just to be able to get off the grid.

If I could just buy a fricken stirling engine, I would think I could build my own. does no one make stirling engines in the ten kilowatt range?

And they make megawatt windmills, for crikes sake. One windmill powers about 500 homes.

the 120W fuel cell stack was first supplied with water by using a dry-cell battery operated pump.

Although that's more useful than nothing - if your local power grid is powered by Niagara Falls, then you'd effectively have a car powered by Niagara Falls, which is a big improvement on a car powered by the Carboniferous Period. Because there isn't all that much Carboniferous Period left, but Niagara is an indirect form of solar and we're good on fuel for that one for a couple billion more years. (Actually, the Carboniferous Period is an indirect form of solar, too, but the recharge process is really inconvenient.)

And someone, who is a professional scammer, who makes their living scamming people, thought that this would fool enough marks to be worth the effort of distributing it.

But that's not even the best part - it says in the message that their processing center is in Spain. They *built in* to their *own scam* an allusion to the original Spanish Prisoner! (Knowing, of course, that the targets would never get the reference. Which ought to make it less funny, but somehow doesn't.)

Connecting the two threads is easy - there's always someone with an *almost* finished invention that will revolutionize some industry or other as soon as they get the bugs out, and for just a few hundred dollars you can get a significant percentage of stock in this company... It works because people know about companies like Apple that really did start in a garage, but they don't know about the million other companies that started in garages and promptly went bankrupt. (Or if they do know, they're sure that this will be one of the successful companies.)

"Doctor, have you figured out how the miracle device, now deployed across the entire globe, works?"

"Yes, Companion, I have! It doesn't run on water at all--the energy source is human joy!"

"Gasp!"

"Mwaha ha! Now that the hu-man race's will to resist has been sapped by my insidious device, there will be no one to stop my CONQUEST OF EARTH!!!!! MWAHA HAAAAA!"

Maybe it's just my lowered reading comprehension, or enthusiasm overriding clarity in the first one. Did anyone else get this feeling of a jarring change of personality?

a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water—rain, river or sea—was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).

I'm surprised nobody has commented on this yet - anyone who thinks that 80 km is a *speed* ...

It can do the Kessel Run in under 80 km!

I was sorely tempted to retcon this lapse by saying "what do you expect for an article edited in India from a translation to English by a Japanese speaker?" The truth, of course, is that I didn't notice it because my brain neatly filled in the missing "/hour" as I skimmed through.

To me, this is just a coordinated scam with some possible intention to lure and steal money from some unawarre naive investors.

"I'll explain later."

The claim that any kind of water (salt/fresh) can be used argues against this -- but that, too, is second-hand or worse.

Exactly what I was thinking. There seems to be a pattern on Doctor Who, lately, of "too good to be true" ubiquitous new technology being, well, too good to be true--coming from aliens with an ulterior purpose. If this water thing worked, this publicity would clearly be the first off-screen stages of the aliens' side of a Doctor Who plot.

I do like the "human joy" idea, though. (Tanj--now I really want to see/read this episode....)

I note, for what it's worth, that the two messages have different values for "Address, comma, email, comma, yours".

(Similar values, so it may not be worth much; but different values all the same.)

There was a film some years back that turned out to be about an alien civilisation that survived and thrived by harvesting human joy. They made a point of creating new joy to skim off, though, rather than just taking whatever just happened to be lying around, so it was a winning situation for everybody.

Contrariwise, the current Buck Godot: Zap Gun For Hire storyline involves an alien menace that deprives humans of their joie de vivre; but it's not harvesting anything, it's working toward a sinister purpose that happens to require a large number of depressed and/or apathetic humans.

Plus the solar film roofing products...

I was just being pretentious trying to disguise the fact that it's not really about "human joy" so much a general loss of interest in all the enjoyable things of life.

(*) Fake or real, although it's sometimes hard to tell the difference because, when she speaks in English, my French friend Elisabeth sounds like Inspecteur Clouseau of the French Sureté.

Jules reminded me of the magic keyword - if you google for "over Unity power", you should find a ton of free energy scams. (Well, not all of them are scams; I think a lot of these people actually believe what they're peddling.) And here you go - they're tapping free energy from the vacuum!

Rainy season comes
bringing with it a fresh crop
of nutball scammers

(And yes, the company claims right up front it "produces electricity and heat from water")

Oh, thank you for that link; I needed a good laugh. Just reading the abstract of that paper is a hoot.

Such systems were arbitrarily omitted from Maxwell's theory by curtailment.

He's got the rhythm and cadence of academic language down pat; it's only the words that don't make any sense. Here's another gem:

Closed current loop design of present power systems insures that Lorentz symmetrical regauging is self-applied by every system.

The paper itself is even better; I've just skimmed through it, but at one point he develops a theory of longitudinal EM waves. I guess he never understood Maxwell's equations very well. In fact he does mention Maxwell, as above, but just to disparage his work. And he makes no mention of gyro-magnetic momeraths, or of hexapodia.

Given the nature of this scam, I wouldn't expect them to ever produce a consumer product for anyone to buy, since the devices would fail immediately -- this isn't like the gas-line magnets and laundry disks and similar placebo gadgets that people can fool themselves into thinking that they work. These people appear to be looking for investors to rip off.

This one, on the other hand, feels like a scam.

Other problems appear when you look at, for example, a lithium based economy vs. oil economy.
One expert noted that it would take 100 years of present day lithium production to convert all cars to lithium batteries.

Another big problem with metals and hydrogen itself is that none of them even come close to the
energy density of oil. Gasoline has an energy density of approx. 14,000 wh/kg. Lithium is approx. 300 wh/kg. So think about the practical ramifications of this: If your car has a 10 gallon gas tank, the equivalent lithium fueled car would need to carry almost four thousand pounds of lithium! The situation is just as bad considering hydrogen: pure liquid hydrogen (just like they fuel the space shuttle) has only one-fifth of the energy density of gasoline!

Cute Name Stories

Sodium and potassium were both named and discovered by Sir Humphry Davy, who was having fun running electrical currents through things.

It must have been a real Science Wonder Stories moment when caustic soda turned into little bits of metal (sodium), and potash yielded potassium.

I think today's lunatic fringe inventors are looking for something like that. An E.E. "Doc" Smith moment where a techie runs a current through a metal plate only to have it fly through the wall. They wrap wires around carburetters, spin disks next to other disks, fiddle around with superconductors, and the most they can hope for is for a desperate junior reporter to stumble on one of their press releases and give them fifteen minutes.

A friend in college had a saying which I think sums it up: "Neat shit like that never really happens."

Well, if you have an in with Davies, by all means! I'm willing =)

Hob @ 110: "Were there two characters or three in that scene? I really hope it's not the Doctor saying that last line. I'm not sure I trust him to run the world."

Clearly there is also a false Doctor sub-plot going on. This is Who, after all.

Hm, if those prices are in euros, then that seems a tad expensive for a kilowatt generator.

Q. Water really only a generation?

A. Power generation. Again, the new external energy is not used. There is the theoretical explanation.

... Which is about the quality of translation that I'd expect, but is sufficient for me to say: scam.

Sounds like they say they don't use the new energy source that's believed to be
non-existent, so no electrolysis adding free energy - or whatever you want to call it.

At which point I respond with "b*ll***t" and explain that distilling enough alcohol to allow your vehicle to get more than one tank of fuel is going to use a LOT of grain, not to mention all the rubber tubing is going to turn into goo, and your fuel efficiency is going to suck too.

Then they respond with "but, but, but, alcohol fueled racing cars! Nitrous oxide!".

Some people have no clue. We'd be better off right now if, instead of people looking for "quick fixes" like water based fuel systems (probably got the idea from the water injection systems used in WWII fighter planes, but they STILL used aviation fuel), we invested in synthetic oil programs similar to what Germany used during WWII to produce nearly all their oil from.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/16/autos/honda_zev.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

No gas involved.

I have, actually, read the original dead-tree version of the story.

My recollection is that apathy is all that is required to serve the alien menace's sinister purpose. The chosen method for inducing apathy will incidentally result in far worse in the long run, but that's (as far as the alien menace is concerned) beside the point; by the time it comes to that, the purpose will have been served and the aliens will have moved on.

Our office has a fleet of LNG fueled cars. They are always the LAST ones taken when a car is needed, because even though the state has LNG refueling stations in the largest cities, they have no storage whatsoever and limited range. Hydrogen fueled vehicles aren't that different.

But, driving slower (even if it's from 75mph to 65mph) will save you gas; some drivers will tell you their time is worth the extra fuel they use, though, even when the difference in travel time is miniscule.

I sat through it twice and never noticed.

There's also the much-more-common person who drives ten, maybe twenty miles to work. For that guy to get on the freeway and do anything more than 60 is just silly.

The energy gimmick in Chain Reaction involved producing nuclear fusion through cavitation (the implosion of bubbles in liquid), an idea suggested by the weird phenomenon of sonoluminescence. Turns out that fantastic temperatures and pressures are reached in cavitation. It was an unlikely road to fusion that has been investigated seriously.

I judged it more than plausible enough to support the plot of a technothriller. It's a little less fantastic than the palladium-electrode cold-fusion scheme of 1989. (Plus, hey! chase scenes at Yerkes Observatory! Argonne National Laboratory! And the drawbridge right beside the Chicago Worldcon hotel!)

Alas, the people chasing tiny-bubble fusion in the real world don't seem to have replicated results. There may be "no royal road" to fusion.

Also, that 30-40mph efficient speed is at a constant velocity; city driving is anything but that, with signals, stop signs, other traffic, etc. I wouldn't recommend travelling 30mph on an interstate, or any rural road that had a posted speed limit above that...

Meanwhile, over in Europe, George Bush is expressing his irritation at those short-sighted legislators who wouldn't allow the oil companies to drill for oil and gas in places like ANWR and the California coast, because yanno, we just wouldn't have this problem if the oil companies had been able to do that.

I drive a Honda Insight, so I'm keenly aware of the mpg vs speed tradeoffs: the Insight has a constant readout of the mpg you're getting at that instant, and calculates mpg over trips and over the lifetime of the car. So I play a game of maximizing my mpg on the Bay Area highways, with a car whose main mpg savings come from being light and having extremely low air resistance, with a bit of the energy lost in braking fed back into acceleration via the electric aid system (instead of having a separate electric propulsion system a la the Prius). It's a car more like most cars on the highway than Toyota's hybrids.

The trouble with driving below the speed limit is jack-sses on the road... NorCal drivers have a real problem with passing people on the left. A significant percentage will go around on the right on a completely open highway with two lanes open on the left and only the getting on/getting off lane on the right. A significant percentage will ride the bumper of a car for miles before tossing a coin to decide whether to pass in the wide-open lane to the left or the right. Since I came from a state where you passed on the left like a person maximizing safety, the right-passers come off to me like people out to consciously be jerks... So driving below the speed limit requires a lot of zen to not get pissed off and become in anger a worse driver or a worse person, and the tailgaters make it a more dangerous proposition than going the usual 68ish of the highway.

#140 John L: I doubt there are cars out there that get their best mpg per speed at 70, and even 60 seems unlikely. Air resistance is a huge factor at the high speeds.

Some of the hyper-aerodynamic sports cars may get their best fuel efficiency at 65+mph, but then they aren't getting really good fuel efficiency in the first place.

My Saturn SL2 gets 30+mpg, but I try and avoid traffic signals when possible and drive a steady speed on the freeways. It helps that my commute is 6 miles one way, too. My wife's commute, OTOH, is 50 miles one way, but at least she's got an SL2 with similar gas mileage.

It reminds me of that perpetual motion machinet that some company in Dublin claimed to have invented.

DAmmit, PaulA at post #100, you just gave away Buck Godot- I'm still reading it. Next time you could you please Rot13 it or warn of spoilers.

The impression I have gotten the past few years, is that a lot of ostensibly technical or technical related publications re run by either cheap journalists, or people who don't know much about anything outside their own speciality.
This sort of thing almost makes me want to take the sociologists who witter on about the social construciton of science, seriously. By presenting their scam in the correct way, they have managed to create a different reality, at least for long enough to fool people.

Why, then, ever refill the water tank? Instead, simply point the exhaust into the tank, and recycle the water endlessly. A closed system generating energy!

By the same principle, one should be able to run a generator windmill indoors, by plugging an electric fan into the current and letting it blow air at the windmill vanes.

Heck, leave off both the windmill vanes and the fan blades, and eliminate the energy lost in misdirected air flow: set a generator and electric motor side by side, plug the motor into the generator, and have the motor crank the generator. Simple, efficient, and compact.

Do you think these ideas would be as easily marketed, or is the flaw a bit more visible to the general public when it involves mechanics rather than chemistry?

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080616/153301/

At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, I don't think I can have given away all that much. My description at #100 encompasses only a very small fraction of what goes on in the current storyline.

http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Industry_News&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=63705

Hydrogen generation made easier, cheaper

A new technology that can produce hydrogen may soon be able to power vehicles from golf carts and cars to submarines.

The technology produces hydrogen by adding water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium. When you add water to the alloy, the aluminum splits water by attracting oxygen, liberating hydrogen in the process. The work now is to develop a method to create particles of the alloy that could go in a tank to react with water and produce hydrogen on demand, said researchers at Purdue University.

The gallium is a critical component because it hinders the formation of an aluminum oxide skin normally created on aluminum’s surface after bonding with oxygen, called oxidation. This skin usually acts as a barrier and prevents oxygen from reacting with aluminum. Reducing the skin’s protective properties allows the reaction to continue until all of the aluminum generates hydrogen, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

Since they unveiled the technology in May, researchers improved a form of the alloy that contains a higher concentration of aluminum.

Because the technology could generate hydrogen on demand, the method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen, which are two major obstacles in creating a hydrogen economy, Woodall said. In addition, the gallium component is inert, which means they can recover it and then reuse it.

“This is especially important because of the currently much higher cost of gallium compared with aluminum,” Woodall said. “Because gallium can be recovered, this makes the process economically viable and more attractive for large-scale use. Also, since the gallium can be of low purity, the cost of impure gallium is ultimately expected to be many times lower than the high-purity gallium used in the electronics industry.”

As the alloy reacts with water, the aluminum turns into aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminum. The recycled aluminum would be less expensive than mining the metal, making the technology more competitive with other forms of energy production, Woodall said.

In testing, engineers rapidly cooled the molten alloy to make particles that were 28% aluminum by weight and 72% gallium by weight. The result was a “metastable solid alloy” that readily reacted with water to form hydrogen, alumina, and heat, Woodall said.

Following up on that work, researchers discovered that slowly cooling the molten alloy produced particles that contain 80% aluminum and 20% gallium.

“Particles made with this 80-20 alloy have good stability in dry air and react rapidly with water to form hydrogen,” Woodall said. “This alloy is under intense investigation, and in our opinion, it can be developed into a commercially viable material for splitting water.”

The technology has numerous potential applications. Because the method makes it possible to use hydrogen instead of gasoline to run internal combustion engines, it could work in cars and trucks. Combusting hydrogen in an engine or using hydrogen to drive a fuel cell produces only water as waste.

“It’s a simple matter to convert ordinary internal combustion engines to run on hydrogen. All you have to do is replace the gasoline fuel injector with a hydrogen injector,” Woodall said.

The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of developing alternative fuels that possess a “hydrogen mass density” of 6% by the year 2010 and 9% by 2015. The percent mass density of hydrogen is the mass of hydrogen contained in the fuel divided by the total mass of the fuel multiplied by 100. Assuming they can recover 50% of the water produced as waste and cycle it back into the reaction, the new 80-20 alloy has a hydrogen mass density greater than 6%, which meets the DOE’s 2010 goal.

“This technology is feasible for commercial use,” Woodall said. “The waste alumina can be recycled back into aluminum, and low-cost gallium is available as a waste product from companies that produce aluminum from the raw mineral bauxite. Enough aluminum exists in the United States to produce 100 trillion kilowatt hours of energy. That’s enough energy to meet all the U.S. electric needs for 35 years. If impure gallium can be made for less than $10 a pound and used in an onboard system, there are enough known gallium reserves to run 1 billion cars.”

Researchers said for the technology for work in cars and trucks, a large-scale recycling program would be required to turn the alumina back into aluminum and to recover the gallium.

“In the meantime, there are other promising potential markets, including lawn mowers and personal motor vehicles such as golf carts and wheelchairs,” Woodall said. “The golf cart of the future, three or four years from now, will have an aluminum-gallium alloy. You will add water to generate hydrogen, either for an internal combustion engine or to operate a fuel cell that recharges a battery. The battery will then power an electric motor to drive the golf cart.”

Another application is for emergency portable generators that will use hydrogen to run a small internal combustion engine. The generators are likely to be on the market within a year, Woodall said.

The technology also could make it possible to introduce a non-polluting way to idle diesel trucks. Truck drivers idle their engines to keep power flowing to appliances and the heating and air conditioning systems while they are making deliveries or parked, but such idling causes air pollution, which has prompted several states to restrict the practice.

The new hydrogen technology could solve the truck-idling dilemma. “What we are proposing is that the truck would run on either hydrogen or diesel fuel,” Woodall said. “While you are on the road, you are using the diesel, but while the truck is idling, it’s running on hydrogen.”

The new hydrogen technology also would work for submarines because it does not emit toxic fumes and it fits in confined spaces without harming crew members, Woodall said. “You could replace nuclear submarines with this technology,” he said.

At one point, researchers thought making the process competitive with conventional energy sources would require the alumina be recycled back into aluminum using a dedicated infrastructure, such as a nuclear power plant or wind generators. However, the researchers now know recycling the alumina would cost far less than they originally estimated, using standard processing already available.

“Since standard industrial technology could be used to recycle our nearly pure alumina back to aluminum at 20 cents per pound, this technology would be competitive with gasoline,” Woodall said. “Using aluminum, it would cost $70 at wholesale prices to take a 350-mile trip with a mid-size car equipped with a standard internal combustion engine. That compares with $66 for gasoline at $3.30 per gallon. If we used a 50% efficient fuel cell, taking the same trip using aluminum would cost $28.”

For related information, go to www.isa.org/manufacturing_automation.

Unless you have solar cells on your roof or a windmill in your back yard. Or if your town runs on hydroelectric, or has a tidal power system offshore.

Electricity can be generated in many, many ways.

If this fuel cell system is at all efficient, a home-bound version could store your windmill or solar panel's juice for use at night.

New info here. The car is a pre-existing electric model with large battery capacity built-in. The Genepax device is providing a few percent of the total energy.

That was actually a very popular technology back around the turn of the century (umm, the previous century, that is, not this one).

Of course, it wasn't used to generate energy, but, rather, to convert one form of energy into another (AC to DC, multi-phase AC to single-phase, high voltage to low voltage and vice-versa) and to provide line isolation.

They were quite popular with electric trolley systems for converting the multi-kilovolt AC from transmission lines into the ~600v DC that the trains generally used.

Movie studios also used them to convert incoming AC supplies to the flicker-free DC power required by early carbon-arc spotlights.

These days, motor-generator sets have mostly been supplanted by solid-state rectifiers, transformers, and other more modern tech, though there are some specialist applications that still employ them.

From what I've read, cavitation doesn't sound like a path to fusion either. When they say "fantastic temperatures and pressures" they're talking about 35 to 40,000°C; even at a few hundred thousand atmospheres (unlikely, I'd think, but let's be generous) that's not enough to get even a rich deuterium-tritium mixture to fuse. It would need 3 orders of magnitude more temperature.

(I remember doing a "science in the news" article on this idea in the 8th grade, but nothing else that was "5-10 years from now" back then has panned out...)

Update from Genepax; they stand behind their claim of perpetual motion:

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-6-20/72135.html

I just spent four months [admittedly, four somewhat slack months] trying to learn about/work on/invent alternative energy sources. I rejected 18 ideas, and they were ALL better than this one. Even my worst one, which turned out to be a perpetual motion machine.

I have one "non-disproven" idea left, but it isn't quite cost-effective at current fuel prices. And I can't even build a tabletop prototype because it uses flammable gasses at high temperatures. My back yard is small, and "build bomblike objects that don't explode" isn't in my skillset.

Anyway, these people are stupid and I wish them obscurity and poverty.

Well, you can if you're a Kim Stanley Robinson character...

There's a couple of variations on this, and yes, they are mostly true, and no, they are not commercially viable yet. The usual issues of scaling up production from tens of mL to thousands of L is where the problem is. Getting large vats of homogeneous bacteria/algae/grey goo to not spontaneously die off or mutate to a useless form is hard. Getting them to quickly process raw feedstocks like raw cellulose -> ethanol in a single step, also hard.

They have that last one down to two steps now, I understand, but that's still twice as much intervention as you'd want. More human intervention = more energy overhead = further from large net energy gains.

There's reason to hope for this engineering method.

"The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form."

After reading this, all scientists with any training in this topic (i.e. chemists, physicsists, and many engineers) start laughing.
Unfortunately plenty of people seem to believe it.

However the wheels began to come off when they did a public test in a gallery in London. Yes, thats right, the best place to test a perpetual motion machine is in a gallery, not a lab. Of course it didn't work, allegedly the lights were too hot. Of course, as I pointed out, it wouldn't take more than 30 minutes to nip out and buy some cheap cool lights rather than hot halogen lights. Not to mention the fact that were it a real working invention, the engineers involved would have tinkered the hell out of it, and it wouldn't break down when tested.

To summarise- Orbo are a bunch of scammers, and anybody who is taken in by them is an idiot. But then there are lots of idiots about. You can be intelligent on one or two topics and an idiot on others.
I really want to find out what is going on though. Unfortunately it seems that kidnapping the personnel is probably the only way, and of course that is illegal. Its not like their claim is possible anyway, the question is whether, like Tony Blair, they actually believe what they say.

It's appalling to think that so many comments poking justified fun at a perpetual-motion engine can go by, without a single snicker at John Galt's atmospheric electricity engine in Atlas Shrugged.

the questions are, how much of IT do we have, how long does it last, how much energy is consumed in preparing it, what will it cost to replace, and where in the world is it located?

If you are referring to Genepax, the original subject of the article, you're just wrong as to their admitting it. See here, for the latest article quoting their PR manager, for example:

Genepax's system extracts hydrogen from water more effectively than any other known method. As long as water is added to the system, hydrogen is continuously extracted.

"Our technology needs no outside energy to split hydrogen and oxygen from [water]," explained Onishi. Onishi said that an authorized third party will produce data to backup the company's claims. When the results are ready media will be invited to attend a presentation. A press release will also be issued soon.

As to your third question, that was discussed exhaustively up-thread - strong reducing agents can not normally be found in pure form in nature, only in oxidized form. As a consequence, any material which could be used to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen thus requires a greater-than-equal investment in energy to prepare it. It's that simple.

By the way the Genepax site is now updated in English. This graphic still seems to claim perpetual motion; it shows Water and Oxygen In and
Water and Oxygen Out! Plus Energy !! 8^)

http://genepax.co.jp/en/mechanism/system.html

[W]e have yet to overcome the many obstacles we face in the current world, to bring our systems to market. Moreover, the costs of development have become very large. As our resources are very limited, we need to retrench and reassess our resources and our development plans at this time, and we are accordingly closing our website. ... February 10th, 2009

Attempts to find it on the internet were unsuccessful.