Fox News and Water Fuel Cars
Posted on August 12, 2008
Filed Under Articles, Scienza |
And someone says Physics is not important. And someone thinks journalists should be competent. Please note, the video below is something like a scam.
Nowadays, there is a silly competition in offering green solutions. General Motors, just before dying (yes it is dying: I just discovered the company’s three-year bonds are traded at half their value), says its SUVs are green because are the greenest of their kind –and then you discover they use 1 liter of fuel every 6 km (14 mpg). That is slightly less than a Ferrari! If you want to be green, you better don’t even buy a car. Whatever the car-makers try to show in their ads, cars are not green. They are big and heavy –an electric bicycle is green, not a one-ton car.
If GM is acting like a Far West charlatan, real charlatans have to scream even louder, possibly with the help of established media, like Fox News (same group as The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, by the way).
In the video above, Fox News breaks the news: a revolutionary attempt to separate Hydrogen and Oxygen in water, with the use of electricity. Electrolysis is actually 200 years old (see my beloved wikipedia), but ok, at that time there was no Internet, and Fox’ editors are just coming a bit late.
What is amazing is that they say you can use electrolysis to get Hydrogen, and put the Hydrogen back in your car, and be green!
Now, the reality is that if you use Hydrogen, extracted through electrolysis, in an internal combustion engine, you actually waste energy. [The maximum (ideal) efficiency of an engine is given by the gap between the temperature of the environment and the temperature of the combustion chamber. The higher the gap, the higher the efficiency.] In today’s engines, if you produce 5 HP of heat power burning fuel (let it be gasoline or hydrogen) you can only use 1 HP of power for moving the car.
That is why Hydrogen cars are good only when they use fuel cells: the Hydrogen is “burnt” at low temperature, and the electrons moving from it to the Oxygen are used as electric power source. Something like a reverse electrolysis, nothing to do with internal combustion engines. Here the efficiency is extremely high, almost 90%. Only an incompetent would then use electricity to separate Hydrogen and Oxygen, and then burn them in a combustion engine: much better to use the electricity directly to move an electric engine.
In the video above, they say that the American congress and the Army are examining the invention. There are many studies showing that education in the US is not as good as it used to be. Let’s hope congress-people and army-people are from the old good school.
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