05-28-2006, 01:08 AM
Quote:Atomic filter seperates the hydrogen and oxygen, hydrogen is burned as fuel, car burps out pure oxygen out of its tail pipe.
Water is a molecule. You can't just "filter" out the hydrogen like you can filter out rocks from a pile of dirt. It takes a reaction to seperate them. In this case, it would take an endothermic reaction because it requires energy. Furthermore, you wouldn't be emitting oxygen, you would be emitting WATER - the product of burning hydrogen. So what we have is an engine that starts out with water, eventually to produce water - and since no process is 100% effiecient, you would just be losing energy. In fact, even if it WERE 100% effiient, it still wouldn't matter because you would be getting nothing more than what you put in.
If you had an engine that seperated the hydrogen out of a given amount of water, then used that hydrogen as fuel for the engine to seperate more hydrogen, it would not have enough energy even to process the same amount of water as before - let alone get enough energy out of the process to do actual work - like moving a vehicle down a highway at 65 mph.
Quote:And speaking of water powered cars, I think steam might make a bit of a comeback. I was reading not to long ago how some student from one of those big colleges, might have been MIT or Mellon, made a steam engine that could run on average 100 miles per gallon on biofuel. Biofuel powers a small engine, which powers a small copper wire wrapped motor, which produces electricity, which in turn runs a boiler. Along with coasting and a flywheel mechanism that I fail to understand, the motor uses electricity to keep the water boiling.
Laugh out loud. That makes absolutely no sense. First you lose energy creating mechanical power from chemical potential, then you lose more converting the mechanical to electrical, then you lose more converting electrical to heat, then you lose THE MOST converting heat into mechanical energy! If you notice, we already had mechanical energy in the second step of the process! Do you have any idea how "hard" (i.e. energy intensive) it is to boil water? It has one of the highest energy/temperature ratios (called specific heat) of all compounds.