In 1769, the very first self-propelled road vehicle was a military tractor invented by French engineer and mechanic, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot (1725 - 1804). Cugnot used a steam engine to power his vehicle, built under his instructions at the Paris Arsenal by mechanic Brezin. It was used by the French Army to haul artillery at a whopping speed of 2 1/2 mph on only three wheels. The vehicle had to stop every ten to fifteen minutes to build up steam power. The steam engine and boiler were separate from the rest of the vehicle and placed in the front (see engraving above). The following year (1770), Cugnot built a steam-powered tricycle that carried four passengers.
In 1771, Cugnot drove one of his road vehicles into a stone wall, making Cugnot the first person to get into a motor vehicle accident. This was the beginning of bad luck for the inventor. After one of Cugnot’s patrons died and the other was exiled, the money for Cugnot’s road vehicle experiments ended.
Steam engines powered cars by burning fuel that heated water in a boiler, creating steam that expanded and pushed pistons that turned the crankshaft, which then turned the wheels.
Steam engines powered cars by burning fuel that heated water in a boiler, creating steam that expanded and pushed pistons that turned the crankshaft, which then turned the wheels.
Said fuel being coal or wood or whatever. . .not water.
When your alternator fails most cars will go about 20 miles before they give up completely. Mind you that is with the battery powering the ignition system. If a single battery had to operate an electric motor too I would guess at not much more than about 5 or 6 miles. It would depend on a lot of factors such as weight, efficiency of the motor, size of the battery, friction on the tires, etc etc.
When your alternator fails most cars will go about 20 miles before they give up completely. Mind you that is with the battery powering the ignition system. If a single battery had to operate an electric motor too I would guess at not much more than about 5 or 6 miles. It would depend on a lot of factors such as weight, efficiency of the motor, size of the battery, friction on the tires, etc etc.
The electric vehicle I built has 24 6V batteries at 220Ah each. That was over 600kg of lead acid batteries. It had a range of 100km.
It ran at 144V, and you need the higher voltage to minimise the I^2*R losses, ie the higher the current draw, the more you lose.
If you tried to run your car off just your starter battery(at 12V, and around 10kg), you’d go slower than an electric wheelchair and barely make it to the first street corner before your battery died.
I do like the way google has placed ads for this system on some of the other threads while on this thread it placed the ads for sites debunking the theory.
You guys obviously don’t know much about cars or chemistry. IT WORKS. The chemical formula for water is H2O. They separate it to HHO. H=Hydrogen=a combustable gas. A combustion engine gets its power from combustable gases combusting!! It makes perfect sense but you guys have your head too far up your asses to realize it.
And you apparently haven’t read the rest of this thread…
Robin Bobcat - 20 May 2008 06:00 AM
Translation:
Use the car’s battery to break the water into two Hydrogen and one Oxygen (aka HHO), via electolysis. This can be burned, converting back to water vapor.
The trick is, it’s a *wasteful* method.(...)
Charybdis - 20 May 2008 08:06 AM
Topic on main site, complete with much defending/debunking.
Basically it boils down to ‘yes you can run a car on hydrogen, but it’s far more expensive than running it on gasoline’.
You guys obviously don’t know much about cars or chemistry. IT WORKS. The chemical formula for water is H2O. They separate it to HHO. H=Hydrogen=a combustable gas. A combustion engine gets its power from combustable gases combusting!! It makes perfect sense but you guys have your head too far up your asses to realize it.
I don’t think that anybody here has said that you can’t make combustable gas from water. The problem is making enough combustable gas without resorting to complicated and costly and energy-intensive processes.
The energy necessary to separate 2H2O into 2H2 + O2 is theoretically equal to that produced by burning those elements. In reality, there are losses in the chemical reaction in the battery to make electricity, in the resistance of the wire, in the heat produced in the electrolysis, and the heat wasted in combustion, not to mention the losses in the belt to turn the alternator, the alternator itself (windings, bearings, rectifiers, regulator), the wires to the battery, and another chemical reaction to store the energy.
It’s a mini perpetual motion machine, and it doesn’t work.
