I’ve been kind of busy with real life again in the last few days so I haven’t has as much time to research or write for the blog lately. However, I have got some interesting results from a little water research I was able to do.

I discovered that the most efficient way to break the Hydrogen and Oxygen bonds in the water molecule is actually with light, this process is called Photodissociation. This is actually happening all around us all the time, it is the process known as photosynthesis and it happens in plants every time the sun comes out and hits green plants. The sun light enters into the plant cell and some of these light rays hit Chlorophyll molecules. “The chlorophyll donates an electron into a series of molecular intermediates called an electron transport chain.”

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

Basically the light energy is transfered through electron doners down a chain of complex protines. The energy eventually participates in a complex biochemical reaction that breaks CO2 and 2H2O releasing 2O2, and using the remaining atoms to form cellular structures that are used to build additional protines, cells and cell structures. Thus the plant grows and consumes CO2 from the air releasing O2 for the rest of us to breath! All this talk of scrubbing CO2 from the air, and you would think that people would have consider to use what nature already does best with sunlight. But NOOO us humans are gready and this process isn’t fast enough for us! We want it on an industrial scale!!! Note: Carbon-Hydrogen chains comprise the bulk of our oil needs, otherwise known as fossil fuels taken from decayed plant matter that has thus formed into oil.

So I did some more research into the absorbtion spectra of water, and I found that water has a STRONG photo absorbition below 100nm. nm stands for Nano Meters, or one billionth of a meter:

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

So this puts light absorbition for water at the strongest into the deep UV range, which is why so many harmful UV rays are blocked out from the sun by our thick atmosphere around the Earth. Much of our atmosphere contains a great deal of water vapor, this does the job at blocking a good deal of the UV radiation coming from the sun. The absorbtion wave lengths are at their minimum at the green and blue spectrum of visible light. This might have something to do with why our plants are all green. At the red end of the visible spectrum the absorbtion of light into the water molecule is many times greater. Absorbtion has several minor peaks in the infrared reaching a maximum at around 1000nm.

http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/es151/gallery/images/absorp_water.html

I dug a little deeper and discovered that different wave lengths contribute to different oscillation modes within the water molecule. I found that there has been plenty of research into the water molecule using X-ray spectroscopy and neutron diffraction. I discovered that there are 6 major different types of oscillation modes in the water molecule, and some of these vibrational models contribute to thermal heating of water more then other oscillation modes.

First of all, if you don’t know what the water molecule looks like, then I suggest you find out:

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

I learned that the Hydrogen atoms can oscillate away from the oxygen atom in a symetric stretching of the Van Der Waals Hydrogen bonding length, or a similar stretching of the bond length in asymmetric stretching. These are known as V1 and V3.

V2 oscillation is a bending of the bond angle between the hydrogen atoms.

Additionally the water molecule can spin on 3 different axis, one axis bisecting the Hydrogen bond angle but in the same plane as the Hydrogen atoms, the other axis being perpendicular to the previous and also in the same plane as the Hydrogen atoms, and the 3rd axis being through the Oxygen atom but perpendicular to the plane of the Hydrogen Atoms. These last three spinning oscillations contributing much more to a thermal energy increase in the water. That is to say these last three oscillations increase the temperature of the water. The first three oscillation modes do also contribute to the thermal energy of the water although not nearly as much.

So it does stand to reason that it may just be possible to aid in the stretching and instability of the Hydrogen-Oxygen bonding in the water molecule by inducing these oscillation modes. I believe this is called increasing the bonding stress in the water molecule.

I also found that light wavelengths below 500nm contribute mostly to V1 and V3 oscillations. Light wavelengths around 836nm contribute to V1, V2 and V3 oscillations. Light wavelengths around 1000nm contribute to V1 and V3 oscillations.

http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/vibrat.html

 Apparently it is almost impossible to find a light source around 100nm, usually this is in the medical field, and rather expensive. Typically used in water purification pens with deep UV light.

It is however easy to find 1000nm Infrared laser diodes or LED’s for VERY cheep!!!

According to a source I listed in a previous HHO post:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7200/full/nature07079.html

This suggests to me that it is entirely possible to use light as an additional technique in optimizing the energy needed to break the Hydrogen-Oxygen bonds of the water molecule. Just something to consider when your building your next HHO unit.

Enjoy

~Seth

One of the things I noticed when I started playing with the Partition Recovery program I reviewed below was that such image backup and recovery is at the lowest possible byte level across the entire drive. When I recovered the image, it recovered all possible files that could have existed on that image including files that I had previously deleted and even after formatting the drive over top of those deleted files several times these files still appeared to exist after a full recovery of the drive image.

I quickly discovered the need for a file shredder. This is a software package that will write random data over the blank sections of your hard drive. You see when you delete a file in Windows is simply marks the file as deleted in the file system table. So the file data is still there but the pointer to that file no-longer exists. Thus Windows thinks the file is deleted. A file recovery program will search those sections of your hard drive and give you the opportunity to recover files that do not have any pointers to them but as long as the file still exists on the drive and has not been written over then these recovery tools can recover the data in that file.

This can be a security issue, because if that file data is still physically on the drive then there are other programs that could gain access to it, such as a worm or virus. Thus data that you intended to delete is now suspect to recovery from nefarious software that could be on your system.

A file shredder will of course, as I’ve described write random data over these empty sections of the drive that don’t have active pointers pointing to those areas. Basically it’s writing data over all the areas of your drive that may or may not have either blank data or data which you have previously deleted. It also means that recovery from a drive where the empty space as been shredded will not have any chance of resurecting any files from previous installs, or worse bringing to life a virus that was previously removed.

 The program that I found that does this is completely FREE and it really works wonderful!

http://www.fileshredder.org/

Enjoy! Surf Safe!

~Seth

Do you ever have those one of those annoying days when you suddenly find out your system is infected with a virus?

 I’m sure many of you do! Computer security is a pretty major thing these days. I’ve studied in college for my degree in Computer Science so I have a pretty good idea what is possible these days. Heck I even learned how to write a few viruses on my own just so I could learn about the in’s and outs of computer systems. One of them that I wrote is capable of disabling any computer system no matter how tough the anti-virus is! You would be surprised how amazingly easy it is!

Writing viruses is not what this blog post is about. Rather I would like to talk about how to recover from them in the fastest possible way. Because I have a pretty good idea of what is possible and the interesting techniques that virus authors are starting to use these days such as embedding their virus code inside an image file or a video file or an mp3, so I feel I’m pretty security conscious. This actually puts me a little on the paranoid side because I know what is possible I’m able to identify the security holes in my system much better then most ordinary people.

After all these years of working with Windows I can really say that I would rather not be connected to the Internet at all with a Windows computer. That is simply just how bad the security is on Windows machines.

It is so bad that I have a number of Anti-virus systems and anti-spy-ware software installed in my computer and I still get viruses and worms. I also avoid clicking on anything that is suspicious. I don’t click on banner ads or pop-ups. I don’t respond to e-mails from unknown people, I don’t open e-mails that I know are junk, and still I get viruses! I have 3 fire walls, 2 of them are software and the 3rd is hardware, and still I get hit with bot-net attacks and worms!

More to the point I’ve been hit twice in the last 2 months. Nice try guys but I’m smarter then you! You may have gotten into my system but you didn’t stay there because I know how to keep you out!

Most people install Windows, download all the Windows updates from the update manager, install all their drivers and configure their system, then finally install all the software applications that they use on a daily basis, and hope for the best.

While I won’t give away all my secrets in this post I will give a few techniques to get you started.

It typically takes me 24 hours to go through the process of reinstalling Windows, download the updates, install the drivers. Don’t forget about DirectX, Office, and Visual Studio. Then there are all the other applications, Photoshop, Winamp, Filezilla, etc…

Rather then taking all the time to do that I thought there must be a better way, such as backing up my entire C-Drive when I know it’s good and then every time I discover I’ve got an infection simply just doing a format of the Master Boot Record, then restore from the drive image. So I went out and got a removable Hard Drive, and purchased Norton Ghost.

I figured Norton Ghost was the natural choice for the job. So I installed it, created the backup and formatted my Hard Drive. I booted into the bootable Norton Ghost Windows restore tool and tried to recover my drive, only to find out that Norton can’t see my USB drive.

Ok so I thought this must just be a fluke. I reinstalled Windows and made another backup on a local drive with Norton. Again I formatted my drive and use the Norton Bootable recovery tool. This time I found the backup and tried to restore it. It said the file was corrupted, so again….this time a little irate, I reinstalled Windows AGAIN!

Then I ran CHKDISK on all my drive for 3 days straight. Not a single error, so I knew it wasn’t the hardware! This time I made 4 drive images on 4 different drives. Then I reformatted again and again tried to recover with the Norton Bootable recovery manager.

All 4 drive images were corrupted! And now I know it’s not my fault! Norton Ghost is really screwed up! Don’t even bother trying it!

I always figured Ghost was probably the only good product Norton was good for, but I guess they really screwed it up cause it obviously didn’t work for me.

By the way, the rest of the software from Norton is only good for people who don’t really care about security and don’t want to know or learn what could really be going on inside their computer system behind their backs. So if your a complete technophobia kind of person and want some kind of anti-virus that is easy to use and helps you sleep better at night then Norton is for you! Otherwise forget about it!

So I went looking for some alternatives. That’s when I found Casper from Future Systems Solutions. So I filled out the order form and submitted my order but the order form would not accept my order. It kept saying that my password was wrong. So I tried some different passwords, every single one of them was wrong. I am a new customer and I can’t even set a password? I can’t finish my order? What is this? I’ve seen order forms screw up because you can’t use the “#” in the address bar. Typically used to indicate apartment number.

I e-mailed their sales to indicate that there was a problem. At this point I was a little frustrated and maybe a little sarcastic in my post to their support. Shortly I got a response claiming that I was being rude and should simply shove off because nobody has ever reported a problem with the online order system in 22 years!

That’s when it occurred to me that considering the quality of the sales force, and the online order form, the software itself probably wasn’t even worth the cost.

That’s when I found this company:

http://www.Partition-Recovery.com

So I ordered the software, installed it and created 4 more images of my system drive. Then I made some bootable CD’s and finally used the bootable manager to format my main system drive. I then restored the Master Boot Record, restored the image and finally rebooted. Much to my surprise my system booted perfectly! Granted this bootable recovery manager still has problems discovering my USB drive, however it did do a full restore on my OS - Operating System.

Partition-Recovery.com is my top-pick for instant Hard Disk recovery! Never leave home without it!

Cheers

Seth

P.S. More to come on Hydrogen research later, after I finish installing and backing everything up.

For those of you who don’t know who the heck Dr. Robert Zubrin is you need to have a look at the Wiki on him:

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

 First of all, I’ve met Dr. Zubrin, he’s a good guy and a damn good engineer! He is most known for his book “The Case for Mars” in which he makes the case that humans could be on Mars in about 10 years for the same budget that NASA has now, using technology that we have now, Lewis and Clark style. I must say, in all honesty, he is right! This guy has definately done his math!! Even though the book was based on 1990’s technology it is still a damn good read and makes it perfectly clear to the reader just how much more capable we as humans are, above and beyond what we tend to think we are capable of. Dr. Zubrin owns his own aerospace research firm in Boulder Colorado called Pioneer Astronautics, and he is also best known as the president of the International Mars Society:

http://www.pioneerastro.com/

http://www.marssociety.org/

A few years ago Dr. Zubrin wrote an article about the Bush Jr. proposed Hydrogen economy. The forward to the article was a quote from Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (1874-5), “Yes my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable… When the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.”

Please don’t missunderstand my remarks on this article to be against Hydrogen as a fuel, if you read my other posts you will clearly see that I am not. What I am against is the perpetuation of false science, misconception’s and missunderstanding’s of what is real and what is imaginary. I’m against people who think they know it all or believe that they have every single secret of the entire universe worked out in equations buried deep inside the text books and scientific journals lining the walls of their office. I believe this is called Dogma and nobody knows everything!

You will find Dr. Zubrins article at one of these two links, someone please leave a comment if one or both of these links become broken and I will make sure to include the article directly on my website. You will find that this is a good article with a LOT of really good science!

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax

http://www.indiaonrent.com/view/t/the-hydrogen-hoax-by-robert-zubrin.html

Please bear in mind that this article is written from the perspective of the monolithic global energy consortia that continue to drive up energy prices and make life all the worse for the rest of us peons. Dr. Zubrin is commenting on the Bush Jr. proposed Hydrogen economy that would replace our ICEs - Internal Combustion Engines with Fuel Cell engines and Hydrogen combined with Oxygen to generate electricity that would then be used to drive our cars. This article is NOT about Hydrogen-On-Demand as it has become aware in the public consious recently.

A lot of people are talking about Hydrogen-On-Demand and Hydrogen fuel cells, I’ve made this comment before and from what I’ve seen online, I’ll have to make it again! An HHO system is NOT a fuel cell, it is an electrolyzer. A fuel cell takes very pure Hydrogen and very pure Oxygen and combines them passing the Hydrogen through a Proton Exchange Membrane producing electric current or power that is used to drive the wheels without any pistons or spark plugs. An HHO system uses electricity to crack water into it’s component atoms of Hydrogen and Oxygen. The two gasses are combined and passed into a normal car engine to increase efficiency. The two processes are completely OPPOSITE! So stop getting them mixed up you idiots out there! Neither does burning Hydrogen and Oxygen produce more Oxygen, please read my other posts and you’ll learn clearly what is really going on!

Some good points that Dr. Zubrin makes are the following:

1. “As hydrogen diffuses into metals, is also embrittles them, causing deterioration of pipelines, valves, fittings, and storage tanks used throughout the entire distribution system. These would all have to be constantly monitored and regularly inspected, tested, and replaced. Otherwise the distribution system would become a continuous source of catastrophes.”

2. “One could propose using (very expensive) lightweight carbon fiber overwrapped tanks, which only weigh about ten times as much as the hydrogen they contain. This would improve the transport weight ratio by a factor of six. Thus, instaed of a 13-ton truck, a mere two-ton truckload would be required to supply enough hydrogen to allow a service station to provide fuel for ten customers. This is still hopeless economically, and could probably not be allowed in any case, since carbon fiber tanks have low crash resistance, making such compressed hydrogen transport trucks deadly bombs on the highway.” (And this is before considering factor #1)

3. “In principle, a system of pipelines could, at enormous cost, be build for transporting gaseous hydrogen. Yet because hydrogen is so diffuse, with less then one-third the energy content per unit volume as natural gas, these pipes would have to be very big, and large amounts of energy would be required to move the gas along the line. Another problem with this scheme is that the small hydrogen molecules are brilliant escape artists. Hydrogen can not only penetrate readily through the most minutely flawed seal, it can actually diffuse right through solid steel itself. The vast surface area offered by a system of hydrogen pipelines would thus afford ample opportunity for much of the hydrogen to leak away during transport.” (See factor #1)

4. “The situation is much worse then this, however, because before the hydrogen can be transported anywhere, it needs to be either compressed or liquefied. To liquefy it, it must be refrigerated down to a temperature of 20 K (20 degrees above absolute zero, or -253 degrees Celsius). At these temperatures, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics make refrigerators extreamely inefficient. As a result, about 40 percent of the energy in the hydrogen must be spent to liquefy it. This reduces the actual net energy content of our product fuel to 792 kilocalories. In addition, because it is a cryogenic liquid, still more energy could be expected to be lost as the hydrogen boils away during transport and storage.”

5. I’ll leave for you to discover this one by reading the linked article, but I’ll give you a hint, it’s about the comercial viability of Hydrogen fuel cells, their cost, materials, and the purity of Hydrogen and Oxygen needed to fuel them.

While Dr. Zubrin does make a point about Hydrogen being burned as a fuel inside the Internal Combustion Engine, this view, in my understanding, does not take into consideration some of the possible Hydrogen-On-Demand production optimizations that have recently come into the public awareness. The next time I see Dr. Zubrin I will make it a point to inform him of this and I will be sure to have a functional demonstration model handy to make it abundantly evident.

Cheers, stay tuned for more.

~Seth

P.S. Yes I know your all waiting to hear my results from my next test and which system I prefer as best, I haven’t forgotten about you (my readers).

I just ran into another blogger online with some good information on the real science of Hydrogen gas and cars.

 http://www.reviewcb.com/autos/gaswaterhybrid.html

I’ve added the link to my blog roll:

http://9planetreviews.com/blog.shtml

And here is the recent blog post that I found. This post has a lot of good and real honest science:

http://9-planetreviews.blogspot.com/2008/07/unbiased-review-hho-or-browns-gas.html

 I hope you find this as informative as I did. I’m a firm believer in fighting fake science with the real stuff!

~Seth

Well I said I had more to say about HHO and so here it is.

First, HHO is most definately not Ho Ho Ohh. I nearly blew out my ears last weekend! If your going to work with Hydrogen gas then read my post on Detonation Velocity and know that it is a VERY explosive gas. It diffuses quickly but it can pool in your ceiling and form a flamable inverted lake of on the top dry wall of your domicile. When that happens something as simple as a light switch could set it off. The result would likely be fatal. Also any flash-back into either your bubbler or electrolyzer will likely cause it to blow appart. The resulting pieces will be moving at high velocity and could do damage to tender human flesh. You would do well to take many extra safety precautions! Wear safty gear, goggles, gloves and ear plugs. Do your longer running and higher capacity experiments out doors.

Second, HHO is NOT “free energy”! As I stated in a previous post, it is the production of Hydrogen and Oxygen by the application of a chemical catalyst and electric power (Current and Voltage). If you don’t know what these are I suggest you do a little research online or get an Electronics book for Dummies. Do NOT assume you know it all! Your likely to only get yourself hurt, ask someone if you need help or don’t understand what your doing or if you don’t understand what your dealing with. I’ll be more then happy to provide you links if it will keep you from doing dangerous tests that could cause harm to yourself or your family and friends. The production process of HHO is a regular run-of-the-mill exothermic chemical reaction, the result is an explosive mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen. It is NOT water, the burning of Hydrogen with Oxygen yields a by-product of energy and water. Energy in the form of Kinetic Energy and Thermal Energy. Hydrogen can bond with a lot of different elements. When it’s bonded with Carbon it is called a HydroCarbon otherwise called Fossil Fuel, Methane, Butane, Gasoline, or Petrol. When Hydrogen bonds with Clorine it’s called Hydrochloric Acid, when it(Hydrogen) bonds with Sulfer it is called Hydrogen Sulfide, when it bonds with Florine it becomes Hydrofloric acid.

In short Hydrogen in it’s most pure form is mearly a chemical energy storage mechanism. The process of breaking water into Hydrogen and Oxygen using electricity requires something known as the activation enthalpy, also described in Gibbs energy equations, also described by Eyring equations and Arrhenius equations. This is the amount of energy required to start the chemical process of breaking Hydrogen and Oxygen. You could think of it as having to drive your car up a hill to get it going down another smaller hill. Once you get over the top, the rest happens much easier. Thus we have to add energy to the system to make the chemical reaction break the Hydrogen and Oxygen appart. Once the atoms are formed as a gas then they are in a stable state. Again we have to add a small amount of energy (a spark will do) and the combustion of the gas returns the atoms to their previous stable state of water and since the reaction is endothermic the reaction can proceed spontaneously. This releases the energy that we used to break those atoms appart.

Thus adding electrical energy to the atoms and we get a gas, burn the gas and we get kinetic and thermal energy back.

The difference is we add a catalyst to help lower the activation energy for splitting the chemical bonds between the Hydrogen and Oxygen. You could think of the catalyst as little atomic welding torches that work for us helping to deliver the electric current to the water molecules and split them up. Electric current does not normally flow in plain ole water. Anything that creates an acid or acid-base pair in the water solution will act as a catalyst in such a reaction. Acids or acid-base pairs in a water solution form because the catalyst forms ions in the water. A perfect example of this is salt. The salt breaks up and forms negitively charged chloride ions and positively charged sodium ions. That is to say the Sodium atom has one less electron and the chloride atom has one extra electron. In a solution of water this is enough to allow electric current to flow through the water helping to break the water molecules into their seperate gasses. The problem with salt as a catalyst is that is also produces pure Clorine, and Sodium Hydroxide in addition to Hydrogen. Clorine and Sodium Hydroxide are both dangerious chemicals.

There are other catalysts that can help the electrolysis of water so lets have a look at some of them. Sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3)  breaks down into H2CO3 and OH-. This is a mild acid and thus helps with the production of Hydrogen in the electrolysis process. However it is a mild acid and won’t produce nearly as much Hydrogen and Oxygen for the same amount of electricity, there are better catalysts out there!

Sodium Hydroxide is a chemical used for clearing drains. It is also called Lye and when exposed to unprotected skin will cause severe chemical burns. If you’ve seen the movie “Fight Club”, then you’ve seen what it can do. It can be used in the production of soap from glycerin. When added to water it forms a strong base. Recall what I said about acid-base pairs. A base is the opposite of an acid. Because the base is so strong it will yield a MUCH improved electrolysis process yielding much higher Hydrogen and Oxygen gas for less electric power, but there are better catalysts!

Potassium Hydroxide is one of the very best catalysts in the electrolysis process. It forms a rather strong acid in water and promotes the electrolysis of water because it conducts electricity much better!

My next Hydrogen system will use Potassium Hydroxide.

Obviously we can affect the performance of electrolysis by adjusting the type and concentration of our catalyst. By using the word “performance” I mean the effiency of our reaction, more specifically allowing for more gas using less power.

Since we’ve obviously seen that the electric nature of our catalyst can affect our reaction is it such a stretch of the imagination to consider that the type of electric signal might also affect the performance of our electrolysis reaction? That is to say that maybe adjusting the type of electric signal we pump into the water might further increase performance by helping to tickle the atoms appart. In support of this idea, I offer this abstract from the Nature Journal: (Notice this is a recent report)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7200/full/nature07079.html

-Nuff Said!

It might just be possible to further optimize the production of Hydrogen and Oxygen gas through electrolysis, and some have reported success towards that end. I for one want to find out just what is possible! Don’t you?

-Stay Tuned

~Seth

Well I just finished building my first Water4Gas HHO system. I tested it with pure water first, then tried to add a single teaspoon of baking soda. Once I started to get bubbles they came at a moderately fast rate from the single jar electrolyzer. The gas production was a little more then I expected but it’s not as much as I am hoping to get, also I was running a lot more power then I thought I would need. It’s possible that additional baking soda could yield more gas for less power, however I’m pretty sure that this is not the optimizational pathway that I want to take.

 My system consumed 10 amps and about 22 volts of power which was the maximum for my tunable power supply. After just 30-45 seconds I had a good layer of bubbles on the top of my bubbler jar. I lit these and the bang was REALLY LOUD!!!

KABLOWY!!!!

I lost my hearing for a few seconds it was so loud! I’m glad I had my safty glasses on!

So I can see clearly why people are using the Water4Gas system to boost their car/truck/van with 2-6 or 12 gas producing jars, and I can see that it would have an effect on over all engine performance. I’d say the Mythbusters myth that Water4Gas is a myth is also busted! However I still feel that I want more! I want a better system and not just some jars. Since I no longer drive my car I feel I can go for it! This was just my proof of concept and now I’m ready for the big time!!! Next weekend I might price out some materials for my next plate system.

 First of all, in this post, I’ll address some missconceptions about HHO, Browns Gas, or Hydroxy Gas as it is called. I’ve had a friend request that I do a comparison on the energy content and energy density of this HHO gas. That is to say a comparison on how many BTU’s HHO has. I will make a statement in this regard.

A BTU stands for British Thermal Unit, it is a unit of energy measurement. Many people get this mixed up or don’t even know what it really is. Read the wiki:

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

It is a unit of energy measurement just like the Joule or Calorie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigajoule#SI_multiples

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

With that in mind determining the BTU of HHO would involve a great deal of additional data. The process of measuring thermal energy from HHO would mean using a Calorimeter. This is a device used to measure the heat density of a given amount of substance.

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

The measurements of heat density for a gas like HHO is very complex because it involves a great deal of parameters. Namely, Temperature, Pressure, Density, also partial pressures play an important part in the thermal energy capacity of the total gas. Since HHO is a complex cocktail of gasses made from Hydrogen and Oxygen, this means that the partial pressure and density of Hydrogen and the partial pressure and density of Oxygen play a critical roll in the over-all measurements. I’ve looked online for some good research material on this and the measurements are so wildly different that I really don’t know what to believe.

Add to this the more complex nature of HHO burning flames applied to different substances yielding different changes in temperature. For instance the recent reports I’ve seen on YouTube of HHO flames burning through a fire retardent brick at more then 16,000 deg. While I don’t completely believe the claims until they are proven and repeatable in the lab. The fact remains that this is a complex system that has not been well studied, researched and documented in the science community. Some of the effects even appear to go against conventional thinking in thermodynamic systems according to the 1st law of thermodynamics.

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

This lack of proper research could possibly be because many of those involved appear as free-energy crack-pots, or because it is really rather difficult to take good measurements, and possibly because there hasn’t been any major lab money invested to do the proper research.

Not any published findings that I could find anyways, although I’m open to considering some sources if anybody finds some. I would be more then interested to read any studies sent to me.

Because of this, I’m calling into question the validity any energy density measurements on HHO gas that I find online. I would recommend the same to you until someone can point me to a good reliable source for research material on this subject. As in a corroborated, peer reviewed source that has followed the scientific method in the testing process and provides full documentation and a list of publication sources.

 This blog post has gotten long enough and I’ve got more to say on HHO energy so I’ll continue it in another post.

~Seth

Some of you are probably already thinking to yourselfs, “How does this guy know so much about HHO?” or “Who does he think he is?” or “What is this guy coming from?”, etc…

Well to answer a few of those questions, I don’t know a lot about HHO, or Browns Gas, or Hydroxy gas or whatever it is you want to call it.

The fact is I payed attention in school, even if I didn’t get the best of grades I still payed attention, and I read the books. Maybe I didn’t get all the problems right but I got the concepts and the theory down pat. So now when I hear about something and I want to learn more I do this thing called “Research”. It’s where you go online or to the local library and you look for some real science on the subject. I don’t trust sources that are not verifiable so I search for material that I can trust and corborate from other trusted sources. That means finding multiple sources with the same or similar data and information or test results.

So I only heard about HHO a few weeks before I made my first post here on my blog about it, but a perfect example of what I did to research is when I heard in a YouTube video that the detonation velocity of Hydrogen gas is 40,000 ft/sec. I said to myself, “That really doesn’t sound right at all and I bet that number is wrong!”

Here is the YouTube Video that claims detonation velocity of Hydrogen is 40,000 ft/sec:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGX0bq9vUs&NR=1

Just because these guys got the detonation velocity of Hydrogen doesn’t mean the rest of what they have covered is incorrect. Rather to the contrary most of what they have said is correct. In fact almost every thing they have said is correct. The only other thing they didn’t cover is the ideal gas law and basics of thermodynamics (Although they briefly touched on it). I’ll give you a hint, if you don’t know what that is you can find some good wiki’s on these subjects. Also plenty of university websites with free information on these subjects. Failing that, you can always look in your kids Chemistry book. Incidently the entire series of videos made by these guys is really good and does cover a lot of good material! Appart from the wrong number of detonation velocity of Hydrogen.

More on detonation velocity. I did some research and found out a whole lot more about detonation velocity. First off, this is actually a measurement used in the field of demolitions. The detonation velocity is used to tell explosives experts how much rock or stone or building foundation a certain volume of explosives will move upon detonation. It’s not a direct measurement but there is a corelation that explosives experts will use when planning and setting up for their demolition event.

So I discovered that the detonation velocity of TNT is about 7000 meters/sec, do that math and that equals about 22,965 ft/sec.

I doubt very much that Hydrogen will burn faster then TNT!

On that note, C4 burns at a rate of 8,340 meters/sec = about 22,965 ft/sec.

Pentane detonation velocity is 1,680 meters/sec = 5,511 ft/sec.

Gasoline typically burns at a rate between  1,500 meters/sec to about 1,800 meters/sec = 4,921 ft/sec to about 5,905 ft/sec.

Propane detonation veolocity is about 1,824 meters/sec = 5,984 ft/sec.

So now the number you’ve been waiting for, compare that with Hydrogen which has a detonation velocity of about 4,000 meters/sec to 5,000 meters/sec = 13,123 ft/sec to 16,404 ft/s.

NOT 40,000 ft/sec!!! Are you flammin NUTS?!?! If Hydrogen burned that fast a single waft of it in your engine would likely send your piston heads into orbit!!! And I’m not joking here! Orbital velocity by comparison is about 17,500 mph = 25,700 ft/sec! slightly higher then half the detonation velocity they claimed for Hydrogen! A note about these numbers is this would be roughly an equal mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen, IE about the same mixture as HHO. I’ve seen Hydrogen burn when it is pure and unpressurized. It can actually burn very slowly! I’ve seen it burn so slowly that you could litterally watch the flame propagation. 2 liters of Hydrogen took a full 30 seconds to burn and it was the most amazing 30 second burn I’ve ever seen in my life! The only way to reproduce this was with a trash bag and very low pressure across the outside surface of the bag using totally pure hydrogen and no oxygen in the bag at all.

I think these guys in the video just got it mixed up between their units and not to mention off by an order of magnitude! An easy mistake that even NASA can make as clearly evidenced by the Mars Beagle Lander debacle. Maybe you forgot about that one? It was a lander built by an agrement between Britian, ESA, and NASA. ESA - European Space Agency for those of you who didn’t pay attention in school. This lander crashed on the surface or possibly bounced off that Martian atmosphere back into space because of a mix up in unit conversions.

I digress, in any event Hydrogen burns faster and thus transfers more of it’s energy kineticly rather then thermally. If you see Hydrogen burning hot it’s because there is pressure involved. Now I don’t claim to understand how an HHO flame can burn a hole through a fire retardent brick at more then 16,000 deg, but what I do understand is that when a gas burns it experiences expansion. If there is no place to expand then the energy is quickly converted to thermal energy in accordance with the ideal gas law. According to this law Pressure * Molar Mass is equal to Density * R is the universal gas constant * T for absolute temperature. That is to say P*M = D*R*T, or put another way T = P*M / D*R.

Let me make this really easy for you! If Pressure goes up through a chemical reaction then Temperature will also go up.

The only time this law is broken is under the conditions where the gas is a charged plasma and under EXTREAM pressure and EXTREAM temperature!!!! Say 100,000 atmospheres and about 20-30 million degrees Kelvin! That is about 100,000 times more dense then the air your breathing right now, and about 2,000 times hoter then the surface of the sun! These are the conditions inside what is known as a white dwarf star. This is a dead star with about the mass of our sun condensed into about the size of the Earth. I’ll leave this to another blog post on the subject of degenerate gas and Quantum Mechanics.

 Cheers

~Seth

There are a lot of people claiming that HHO is a complete scam, and there are a lot of people who claim to give mathmatical evidence as to why it cannot work, and they usually go on about how you can’t get something for nothing, how nothing is free and no such thing as a free lunch. On and on they go!

On the other hand there are a lot of people who claim it has worked for them and that producing HHO gas, Browns Gas, otherwise known as Hydroxy Gas continues to work for reducing their petrol consumption, on and on they go.

Let me tell you you’ll hear it from both sides! Then you search online and you find a ton of Youtube videos that show their car, motor cycle, or lawn mower running with an HHO attachement, ect… Many of them to loud to hear what they are saying, or the video is to choppy and blurry to make anything out. If you search for websites you find a ton of useless sites many of them asking for money and giving tons of promises about this, that and the other! Sound familiar? Let me remind you what you are being reminded of. Let me recall a few names to help you out, Equonix, PrePaid Legal, Xango, EcoQuest, Shaklee, LifeWave, Quixtar… Bringing back any memories? It’s called a MLM - Multi Level Marketing.

Just because a company or one thing or another is MLM or structures itself like an MLM, or markets itself like an MLM doesn’t make what they offer bad. It only makes the people who are offering it and they people involved in the offer bad, and not all of them are doing bad things intentionally. Many of them are well intentioned people, but Rome wasn’t built on good intentions, neither was Egypt or Greece, or any other country for that matter!

Things have changed and the theory of HHO is not something you can put in a shrink wrap and sell, not very effectively anyways, at least not yet. That hasn’t stopped people from trying and many of them from being very successful. Just because they are successful at it doesn’t make it a complete solution either, and many of you will remember from all your involvements with MLM’s.

My point is that if you want HHO to work in your car/truck/SUV/caddy/chopper or whatever it is that you have with an Internal Combustion Engine, then you need to do some research and understand the theory behind what these companies are offering.

Many of them are actually only selling you instruction manuals anyways. With a little ingenuity, some basic high school chemestry, a little high school electronics and some basic plumbers aptitude you can come up with a much better system then whatever it is you are about to pay or just have paid a hundred bucks for. I’ll make it easy for you and save you the hundred bucks and tell you up front what systems are a total waste, what systems are a good place to start, and why in each case, and I’ll follow up with what I think the very best system would be and again why. You’ll have all the information out on the table so you can decide for yourself.

First off: The Scams!

Hydro-Gen is a Hoax, this system will charge you some money and you’ll get a manual that describes the basics. You’ll get more information from your kids High School Chemestry book to be honest! The manual has some diagrams and instructions on how to build an HHO system but the system is made of PVC pipe a dinner fork and some metal electrical outlet wall plates wired together with plastic screws. There is a basic description of the theory, some safety precautions and a few other tips and tricks. If you pay for this system and build it you will not be satisfied and it will generate very little HHO gas. You’ll feel like yanking it out of your engine and chucking the whole thing right in the nearest dumpster, then you’ll kiss HHO goodbye forever out of anger and frustration. Trust me, this system is junk!

Hydro-Star is basically exactly the same system with a new name and some color photos. They renamed it so it doesn’t have the association of the old system, except these guys had a complete lack of imagination and used part of the same name. Trust me, this system is junk!

RACOW - Run Your Car on Water, this system is almost exactly the same as Hydro-Gen and Hydro-Star. They’ve added some technical detail, more photos, and a few extra tips. Still using PVC tube for the reaction chamber, and still just about as useless.

Water4Gas - This one is probably the most popular out there right now! I actually paid for this one, and I must admit this is about the best of the turn-key systems out there. If your going to go with a system this is the most comprehensive and will give you the most information for your money so you can actually figure out what you need to do, what to buy, how to put it together. However you still have to do the research yourself. Your not going to get this easy so be prepared to get the tools out and learn a few new things. Your going to have to put in some wrench time yourself. This system does have a large community of people to help you, learn, adjust your system, etc…

Hydrogen-Boost - This system is basically the same as Water4Gas, however they also advocate a package of systems similar to what is encouraged with Water4Gas.

Between Hydrogen-Boost and Water4Gas these are the best combination systems you’ll find however none of them offer a fully comprehensive, fully maxamized solution, and none of them offer a combination of systems that are fully optimized to maxamize efficiency and performance while minimizing costs and maintaince.

Now I will explain why none of these systems are optimized.

All of these systems use a series of plates or coils in a solution of water and some electrolyte. For those of you who didn’t pay attention in high school chemestry class, an electrolyte is basicly some chemical in water that breaks down into ions. Positive and Negitive ions. The ratio of Positive and Negitive ions in the water affects the PH level of the water. Meaning if the water is more acidic or less acidic also called basic. For instance Salt is an electrolyte, baking soda is an electrolyte, Lye is an electrolyte, Pot ash is an electrolyte, and all of these things when combined with electricity in water will produce Hydrogen and Oxygen. It’s the most basic chemestry you can get. Some of these electrolytes act as true catalysts and others act as semi catalysts. A true catalyst helps a chemical reaction to proceed faster, easier and more efficiently but are not affected by the chemical reaction itself. Semi catalysts also help the chemical reaction to proceed faster, easier and more efficiently but they are affected by the reaction. The best example I can think of is regular table salt. Salt does help with the reaction of the production of Hydrogen and Oxygen with the application of electric power, however the Sodium ions are reduced to gasious form and this is rather poisonous, like wise the Chlorine ions are also reduced to a gasious form and equally as poisonous. Sodium and Chlorine are both also extreamly reactive causing metal to galvanize, rust and otherwise deteriorate. Can also affect and consume most plastics.

Baking Soda otherwise called Sodium Bicarbonate, NaCO will form Sodium ions and carbon monoxide ions in the water. Carbon monoxide is not at all like Carbon dioxide CO2. Carbon Monoxide will bind to the oxygen receptors in your blood and prevent oxygen from being recieved by your cells that need oxygen to survive. This is called Carbon Monoxide poisoning and will result in death. You want to limit your exposure to Carbon Monoxide as much as possible!!

None of these above chemical electrolytes yield a very good Hydrogen production from electrolosys anyways, and in addition to their poisonous effects, it is recommended to avoid them completely!

The best chemicals to use are Sodium Hydroxide (Lye - NaOH) or Potassium Hydroxide (Caustic potash - KOH). Both of these chemicals are common to kitchen supply, cleaning supply, and production of soap. They are both rather dangerous and are poisonous if consumed, however their reactions in the production of Hydrogen and Oxygen do not yield any dangerious gasious by-products. Of these two Potassium Hydroxide is the best of them all!

That said, there is one basic principle of Hydrogen production you should fully understand in making your decision of which type of system you want to build. Almost every Hydrogen production system out there submerge some metal in the solution of water and electrolyte. The problem with this is the only electricity that actually produces gas is the electricity that has enough energy to break the water molecules appart, and usually that electricity is in direct path between the positive and negitive terminals of metal sitting in the water solution. The rest of the electric power goes into the water but does not produce gas, rather all this extra wasted electric power goes to produce heat. If you want to produce more gas then you need to reduce the amount of wasted electric power. This means using plates that are not submerged in solution but still deliver the electric power across the solution.

How can I do that? You ask….I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to wait till my next post about HHO. So stay tuned. <grin>

Hydro-Gen - Hoax (782kb PDF):

http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/Engineering/HHOSys/Hydro-Gen-Hoax.pdf

Hydro-Star -Hoax (2.25mb PDF):

http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/Engineering/HHOSys/Hydro-Star-Hoax.pdf

RunYourCarOnWater - Hoax (2.6mb PDF):

http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/Engineering/HHOSys/RACOW-Hoax.pdf

Water4Gas - Not-so-Hoax (7mb PDF):

http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/Engineering/HHOSys/Water4Gas-UserManual.pdf

NOTE: Water4Gas is a good solution if you implement all of the suggested systems, but there are better solutions and I will explain them and demonstrate them here at ZERO cost to you! Much of what is required to develop for a proper solution is truthfully outlined in the Water4Gas documents so this is not a complete hoax.

More to come later!

Cheers and Happy 4th of July! (Safe driving!)

Seth

All these parents are not complaining about the dangers at the air show, and how things were not properly handled. While I agree with these statements I think the blame should equally rest with the parents. After all these kids would likely not be playing under heavy industrial air conditioners if they were with their parents at their side.

When I was a kid if I went away from my parents side at a public place like an air show I got this punishment called a…..

…….

….wait for it….

….

Spanking!!! or a thump on the head from my grandpa.

And I didn’t do it again!

Now-a-days this is called child abuse and you get thrown in jail for it. Come to think of it I haven’t seen or heard of a kid getting a spanking in more then 10 years!

Doesn’t anybody get or give proper discipline any more? Or are we just a society so risk averse that we are afraid to bruise the bottom sides of our kids?! So we just fall into a life of medocrity where everything is ok as long as its in moderation?! Where punishment includes going to your room and play your PS3 and drink and smoke and take nude pics with your cell phone to flirt with at school at age 5 and form pregnancy pacts at age 10 and mass murder at age 12.

Comments? Anybody?

~Seth