This has been known about since 1967 but still has not made it to market. Purdue University Professor Jerry Woodal has found a way to use Aluminium and Gallium to split water. No electricity needed!!! Well, except for the energy required to extract the metals from the earth and form them into the composite in the first place… Jerry is most excited about the possibility of using it as a fuel multiplier so in conjunction with a plasma spark plug or plasma fuel reformer the hydrogen could be used to increase the efficiency of the gasoline used in hybrid or standard ICE cars. What’s the delay?
2,7lbs of Al will produce the same amount of energy in the form of hydrogen as 1lb of gasoline. i.e 19K BTU
It takes 20 gal x 6.5 lbs/gal = 130 lbs gasoline to drive an average car for 350 mi or 350 lbs Al
At $3/gal for gasoline and $0.8/lb for Al the trip costs $60 using gasoline and $280 using Al
If an Al recycler is built next to a nuclear power plant with and on-site power cost of $0.02/KW-hour Al can be recycled from alumina back to Al for 9 kW/hr/lb x 350lbs x $0.02/kW-hr = $63
Here’s an interesting little promo for a book from Hypnow.fr chronicling water engines over the past century. Worth a read for anyone who doubts the long term research that has been suppressed or otherwise delayed from getting to market.
Here’s a lost Revizal video showing him running his generator on an 80:20 water:gasoline mix using the plasma spark and the Geet system. Recall that Robert Krupa also claimed upto 80:20 ratio for the Krupa sparkplug too.
When is this tech going to make it to market? Surely the remaining oil is worth more to us as a long term resource and we should conserve as much of it as possible now that it is running out since we passed the worldwide peak in 2003/4. What makes the oil companies think it is a good idea to use it all up as fast as possible? Is it just greedy shareholders that demand they make as much money as possible as quickly as possible? If that is the case why is it publicly acceptable for this to happen let alone legally possible.
Where is the governmental oversight? They can print money as much as they want but they can’t make new oil to replace the dwindling reserves. Surely it is in everyones interests for the oil reserves to last as long as possible than it is to consume it all as quickly as possible?
What ever happened to the Arvin Meritor Plasma Fuel reformer? It was billed as the revolution to help meet 2010 emission standards. Now it seem to be almost completely shelved if you look around the internet.
This product has all the promise of the plasma spark plug but with the backing of a large well respected automotive parts manufacturer and MIT science too boot.
Initial development of a Plasma Fuel Reformer required as much as 2,000 watts of electrical energy to operate. A measure of the progress is that today’s unit uses an average of less than 100 watts. Full production systems are likely to be even lower. Early systems took many seconds to produce hydrogen from cold exhaust, an important disadvantage in real-world use, as emissions are highest at this time. The latest versions are running in less than a second. And the first prototypes only produced hydrogen at just one flow rate. Today’s prototypes manage transient or varying flow demands equally well.
Almost the same principal as the plasma spark plug concept really. Strange that this hasn’t made it to market yet. You would think people would be very interested in having it on board to cut emissions and save on consumption.
The Plasma Fuel Reformer stems from work done by and licensed from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center . Seven years in development, the Plasma Fuel Reformer — or Plasmatron as MIT called it — could have an enormous impact on emissions and fuel efficiency. From MIT in 2003:
The team is finding that the device could make vehicles cleaner and more efficient, with a potentially significant impact on oil consumption.
“If widespread use of plasmatron hydrogen-enhanced gasoline engines could eventually increase the average efficiency of cars and other light-duty vehicles by 20 percent, the amount of gasoline that could be saved would be around 25 billion gallons a year,” [Daniel] Cohn [one of the leaders of the team and head of the Plasma Technology Division at MIT’s PSFC] said. “That corresponds to around 70 percent of the oil that is currently imported by the United States from the Middle East.”
The Bush administration has made development of a hydrogen-powered vehicle a priority, [John] Heywood [John Heywood, director of MIT’s Sloan Automotive Lab] noted. “That’s an important goal, as it could lead to more efficient, cleaner vehicles, but is it the only way to get there? Engines using plasmatron reformer technology could have a comparable impact, but in a much shorter time frame,” he said.
The work was funded by the Department of Energy’s FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program and by ArvinMeritor.
The researchers and colleagues from industry report that the plasmatron, used with an exhaust treatment catalyst on a diesel engine bus, removed up to 90 percent of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the bus’s emissions. Nitrogen oxides are the primary components of smog.
The plasmatron reformer also cut in half the amount of fuel needed for the removal process. “The absorption catalyst approach under consideration for diesel exhaust NOx removal requires additional fuel to work,” explained Daniel R. Cohn, one of the leaders of the team and head of the Plasma Technology Division at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). “The plasmatron reformer reduced that amount of fuel by a factor of two compared to a system without the plasmatron.”
Over the past few months there have been many great steps forward. There are now a couple of people building replication Krupa plugs and distributing them to the other experimenters for testing. Without even using the plasma circuit there was a reported 6% fuel efficiency increase over 1051 miles of driving.
Several people have also been testing fuel/water vaporizers. In combination with the new spark plugs we are starting to get somewhere that the large companies in the auto industry have been unable to or unwilling to pursue.
There is also a report from gmeast of massive improvements in the timing mechanism. He is actually running at 5 deg retarded …
I set the timing to 0 deg TDC and it was better and then 5 deg retarded and it feels great there. – gmeast
New PCB’s have been designed specifically for the circuit and distributed to various experimenters.
There is a new video from Ash at panacea.org outlining developments.
How ever it appears that there are now semi commercial interests in the name of Aquapulser involved in making the circuits for sale which appear to have taken a lot of their lead from all the hard work done by people at the energetic forums particularly gmeast’s defining work.
Gmeast after all his hard work on the vexus circuit switched to using the firestorm replicas and concentrating on the water vapor/geet principals. With a standard ignition and timer and beryllium-copper plugs he is seeing 40.5 mpg compared to 25mpg in his VW bug. There is also very little wear on the plugs after serious road testing which was a major problem with the vexus and standard plugs. The best he got with the Vexus was 35mpg. There is little reason to combine the vexus and the firestorm replicas together is that there is no increase in efficiency as the firestorms are capable or producing the plasma required on a standard circuit.
He was working with only water vapor and was getting the results that everyone expected.
Unfortunately due to the economic environment Greg has had to close shop and sell all his equipment in order to survive.
A couple of people are now working with water vaporizers in addition to the plasma spark and gasoline mix. the initial results are very encouraging with gmeast and his vexus circuit getting 13% improvement on factory mileage specs and 43% improvement on previous best results without the plasma circuit installed.
Another interesting development is the across the board switch to Champion L76V plugs non-resistor type marine spark plugs due to them having a non bridged tip which lets the spark radiate in 360 degree angle around the tip and causes less overall wear as well as greater efficiency.
Here’s a nice simple overview for the plasma spark circuit from smw1998a. As another person has said it’s simply electrolysis inside the engine. In other words just directly splitting water/gas to get access to the hydrogen for added boost.
Vexus and the original circuit both disruptively discharge capacitors across an arc created by a HT coil. The only difference is Vexus uses a storage capacitor specific to this purpose where the original circuit used the capacitor that also provided the energy source for the primary winding of the ignition coil.
There was a post aimed at me about spark duration. (I have been inactive for several months) The spark duration of an inductive ignition coil is around 120uS to 140uS (micro seconds). This is true whether you inductively charge the coil as designed with points and condenser or in my circuit dumping 300v across the primary from a 4uf capacitor (without the HV diode). I’m not sure, but I think modern CDI is around 60uS because the coils are constructed differently.
Anyway, the addition of the HV diode in my circuit reduced the spark duration from 140uS to 10uS. Not because of the plasma in the discharge, but because the energy stored in the capacitor discharging across the primary winding went short circuit via the HV diode the instant the arc formed. Thus, creating the plasma effect and instantly robbing the primary winding of all power and terminating the arc.
IMHO this was the advantage of the original circuit. The abrupt end to the arc allowing me to produce the effect with very little stored power. The problem with increasing the stored energy or capacitance was that only so much of it shorted across the arc. If the duration of the arc ends before the energy in the capacitor is spent, you get a curve at the bottom of the vertical discharge trace at around 50v. This is the remaining, stored energy bleeding off via the resistance of the primary winding. I considered this wasted energy. If you have energy on your capacitor after the disruptive discharge, it is wasted (this may not apply to the Vexus circuit).
It is the stored energy of the capacitor shorted across the arc that produces the effect. The more energy you can dump across that arc the more violent the effect. For bench purposes the lower the capacitance and the higher the voltage, the higher the frequency and the shorter the spark time. It all leads to some interesting effects. But this is not what is required for the ICE.
The advantages of the Vexus circuit are clear. It offers an almost bolt on or piggy back approach to implementing the circuit in a vehicle. This can only be a good thing but there are drawbacks. The spark duration will be that of the normal ignition system. It may SEEM to require greater capacitance to produce the effect but the more energy you dump across the arc the greater the wear on the plugs and distributor (unless you dump directly across the plugs). As the spark duration could be up to 14 times greater than the original circuit, Increasing the capacitance even further could be possible at the risk of very rapid plug wear.
There is a conundrum here. A greater effect can be produced with less power using the original single, low value capacitor circuit. Less energy will be required from the charge pump, higher frequencies and less wear at the plugs. Difficult to implement or piggy back onto a standard ignition system.
The Vexus circuit is easier implement but larger capacitance and longer spark duration create more wear on the plugs and require beefy charge pumps. There will have to be a trade off with the Vexus circuit between a powerful effect and plug wear. Capacitance need only be great enough to prove beneficial to fuel consumption and running. Too much capacitance and circuit supply, reliability and plug wear will reduce the gains of the system.
gmeast has made several improvements to his circuit by using a new design for the oscillator as suggested by pmonk and also adding vaporized water into the mix 2/3 drops per second. He is now reporting mileage results of 13% improvement on original factory specs for his vw bug and 43% improvement on previous best results without the plasma circuit installed.
jstadwater has now installed the mods to his v8 with the updated vexus circuit. His next step is removing the wall supply and running from the battery…
