since this shit is just gonna be buried in GD

....Archie H. Blue.

i'd heard about this guy a few times.. not much info around on him though.

there were rumours that Shell and BP bought him out... or 'combined arab oil industries'. either way, it never made it to production.

or as this random guy i found in google says-

"Yeah. Christchurch, NZ, man, died about 1991. Relations threw all his stuff onto the dump without realising its importance. Created stir around 1975 when he announced he & his mates drove a mini arouind Jersey Island @ 35km per litre. Allegedly offered $500 million by Arabs to buy and shelve his invention, he refused."

..i've also heard that it's been seriously tried but it's just super inefficient.. eh. anyway, ideas are always good.





here's a more in-depth article:

ARCHIE H. BLUE

Archie H. Blue is from New Zealand and obtained a patent on a very simple electrolyser that he claims will supply a sufficient amount of an oxygen/hydrogen/air mix to run an internal combustion engine.

His patent (US patent no. 4,124,463 was issued on November 7, 1978. It may be obtained from the US Patent Office.

A description of the invention of Blue as contained in a published article, is given below:

Almost all drivers have made the experience that the motor runs better when it rains. This is also a reason why our parents sprayed coal with water to make it burn better. Therefore it is no wonder that for years some drivers have used a kind of water spray injector, which is very simple. It is a container of plastic or glass, which can be closed airtight. A thin pipe with an aquarium valve leads through the top cover down close to the bottom of the container. A second pipe enters only about 5 cm into the container from the top cover and is connected with the carburettor or the air filter. The container is filled with water to just below the level of the second pipe. The suction of the carburettor pulls air through the water in the container and so adds hydrogen and oxygen to the gas mixture, which results in a lowered consumption of gasoline.

This simple mechanism was improved by the New Zealand inventor Archie Blue with some additions so that the water vapor alone can run an internal combustion engine, without gasoline. It runs about 40 km with 1 liter of water.

His american patent (number 4 124 463) is so simple that anyone with mechanical skills can produce it. On the non-metallic air pipe that enters the container, are mounted at equidistant intervals eight corrosion free round metallic plates, which have been perforated with numerous holes. They are electrified alternately with positive and negative DC voltage from the car battery (12 Volt, 2-3 Amp).

The resulting electrolysis separates the water into oxygen and hydrogen which attach to the metal plates in small bubbles. The air bubbles forced through the water by the suction of the carburettor take those small bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen with them to the top of the container. The energy thus obtained is three times that of gasoline per weight. No poisonous exhaust gases are produced because the end product of combustion is water vapor.

The air needs only 4 % of enrichment with these gases to burn hotter and faster than natural gas.

Warm water is easier to electrolyse and therefore a heating element is mounted in the bottom of the container.

_________________

there's an ASCII diagram on the site too

from
http://www.hasslberger.com/tecno/tecno_3.htm



hmmm.

...like in a conspiracy - murder type thing. Could be confused with someone else though.

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i knew it was a mistake the second i threw it into the feeding frenzy though

*plop*

big corporations can own it, and make money is the question. If we can get the right corporation behind it, we might actually see it come to fruition.

otherwise?

it'll go the way of the dodo.
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If it costs more in parts and labour to make the engine, let alone run it, then we'll have to wait until petrol gets even pricier. It's like producing petrol from coal (definitely possible), it's an option that only becomes attractive once crude oil hits a certin price.

off of a renewable resource like that. The incentive should be there, no?
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Let's suppose, contrary to popular belief here, that the water powered engine is viable. You still have to build it, and get the batteries (and how do ya charge the batteries) etc... If the raw parts are roughly equivalent to an ordinary engine, then cool, it's on, but if it's way more expensive, when do you catch up?

It's a bit like the petrol/diesel argument, in our country anyway. Diesel doesn't get taxed anywhere near as much, so it's cheaper, except that diesel vehicles have to pay seperate road-user charges, and the engines cost more, so where's the pay off? Ditto the hybrids (at the moment anyway), you end up having to drive a lot of kilometres to justify the added cost, kilometres you'd perhaps not normally drive, but, having bought one, you feel you should.

it mostly comes from the 'really easy to make' part of the description.

if it's that easy.. and people like me know about it.. why isn't it being built? why haven't i seen it?

i mean, this is different to hydrogen fuel cells.

i'm just not... sure.
but i'd really really like it if it worked...

If you're planning to keep them corrosion-free AND run hot-water through 'em. The more I read it, the more it sounds a little mad eh, does an idea have to work in order to patent it?

i mean.. is e=mc squared, patented?

hmm. he did work in a patent office. *scratches chin*

The energy has to come from somewhere. If you put in water, and you get out water and energy, you're violating all sorts of fundamental laws of physics.

His engine does work, in a sense. That's why he was able to patent it (perpetual motion machines are summarily dismissed by the US patent office these days). But the energy doesn't come from the water, it comes from the "12V DC" that's barely mentioned but clearly in the diagram. The 12V DC electrolyzes the water (splits it into H_2 and O_2), and then the engine burns these back into water.

But the energy you get out of burning the H_2 and O_2 is always less than the energy you had to put in to split them in the first place.

This dude has simply built a very complicated, inefficient, electric car.

thanks for breaking it down for us non-physics minded people

(but if you ever want the geographical features of a glacier described, i'm your man...)


it's a shame, because i really wanted it to be possible.. but yeah, i remember seeing electrolysis at high school, those bubbles ain't gonna get you far

>thanks for breaking it down for us non-physics minded people

Sure thing. It's rare that my particular kind of education is relevant to anything in the real world. I gotta jump up on those occasions.

>(but if you ever want the geographical features of a glacier
>described, i'm your man...)

I'll keep that in mind. We don't have many glaciers to deal with in LA, though.

>it's a shame, because i really wanted it to be possible.. but
>yeah, i remember seeing electrolysis at high school, those
>bubbles ain't gonna get you far

Yeah, I mean safe, renewable energy is going to be a huge problem in the coming decades. And people just don't see the impending trouble. There was a joint US, EU proposal a few years ago to study controlled thermonuclear fusion. With that technology, one could indeed use ordinary water as fuel, and the only waste would be pure helium (very small amounts of it, even).

Nevertheless, the US government killed it when they saw the $10 billion price tag. Meanwhile, we've spent $90 billion and counting on a missile defense system that will never work, and wouldn't be useful even if it did!


And on top of that, people just won't calm down about fuel cells. They don't ask where the hydrogen would come from. Again, it has to be electrolyzed from water. So again, the energy doesn't "come from" the hydrogen, it comes from electrolysis plants, burning fossil fuels!

fuck that

if we had worldwide tide-powered generators, windmills, and environmentally neutral hydroelectrics, then it wouldn't be so bad.

but nuclear, oil and coal are making most of our electricity.. so how's them big ole' batteries gonna be better?

and that $10 billion should've been spent, damnit

You put in tidal generators, then you affect the coastal profiles, altering erosion patterns, ecological habitats etc... The materials for solar panels gotta be mined (and that ain't that friendly). Hell, I've (believe it or not) just started a PhD (in Tamaki to rhyme (Tah Mah Key)) on an environmental problem associated with binary geothermal powerstations, which are meant to be almost as clean as you can get (but it turns out everything got it's own problems). Even wind farms, I can't help but feel that if you take the energy out of the air, you'll pay somewhere downstream, it's the nature of the beast.

Oh yeah, and water vapour happens to be one of the strongest (read: worst) greenhouse gases. If you don't beleive me, compare the temperature on a clear night compared to that of an overcast night (you'll notice the difference best in summer naturally). Water's not currently modelled in greenhouse models though, it's just way too complicated mapping it.

just a guess, but I thnk electolysis takes a lot of power

by the wayside if you have the money and influence.
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How much energy does it need to get going? It's like space rockets, they're really efficient once they're in space, but getting them there is a bitch. It might be the same for this too.

Hydrogen cell technology has been in the offing for a while, but like all technology, the market present technology must be exhausted before the alternative is introduced. Look at CD players. They were invented years before they were brought onto the market to replace cassettes players. Even then they were extortionately priced, thereby creating consumer desire. The same applied to DVD players.

It is likely that this new technology will not be mass produced until the last drop of oil is spent. I'm sure car company owners go to the same dinner parties as oil company owners...

Look at this link. BMW are already onboard with this kind of technology, as I'm sure many others are. However when these cars are mass produced at an affordable price is another matter.

http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/fuel_cell/06/

it looks like industry focus is gonna be on them-- i guess that if they made cars that you could just fill with water, nobody would be buying anything from the energy industry... and obviously the car industry and energy industry are deeply linked.

it's fairly easy to convert to vegetable oil, or methane drawn from rotting organic matter (you just need to compress that.) but these technologies are getting ignored as well, in favour of the technology -heavy option.

...cow poo and human poo. Check out this other TopGear link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/series_4/prog_6/

it's just the compression that you need

and it didn't smell like shit either, ba*doom*tchh

I reckon some on this site would get 80miles per gallon with the shit they produce..

I made "free energy" from magic cookies once.


go here and post this article and see how fast it gets rrip apart:

www.peakoil.com

interesting

- Homer Simpson


The only way you'll get a car to run on pure water is through thermonuclear fusion. If someone invents an engine that can do that, we'll know.

Right now they on ethanol

live on Cspan.

I forget their web addy...it's either .org or .com


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