HHO Conversion
Fuel economy-boosting HHO (hydrogen-hydrogen oxygen, a.k.a. "oxyhydrogen") generators are a hot and bitterly contentious topic on today's fuel economy scene. Debated with equal ferocity by garage tinkerers, teenage students and physics professors alike, the arguments over HHO generators bring to mind those regarding Chinese acupuncture; it shouldn't work, but often does.
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Purpose
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HHO generators produce a gas known as oxyhydrogen (composed of hydrogen and oxygen). They do it by passing huge amounts of electricity through water (in a process known as electrolysis), which breaks the water molecule apart and forces its hydrogen and oxygen atoms to separate and bubble to the top. When ingested by an engine, the oxyhydrogen burns as a self-contained fuel, supplementing and replacing a certain amount of gasoline. Large HHO generators have been known to provide enough oxyhydrogen to allow the car to idle without using any gasoline at all.
Function
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A simple HHO system is comprised of nothing more than an HHO cell and the requisite plumbing. The HHO cell contains a stack of metal plates (with every other one connected to a positive or negative battery source) submerged in water. As electricity tries to bridge the small gap between those plates, it must pass through the water and break its molecules, producing oxyhydrogen. The oxyhydrogen passes through a tube connected to the engine intake, where it's siphoned off by engine vacuum.
Parts
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An full HHO conversion kit can contain a cell (your engine size and needs detrmine the size), a spark arrestor (which fits in the line to prevent engine backfires from igniting the oxyhydrogen in the cell), an engine controller (which allows you to manually control the engine's air fuel ratio to compensate for the oxyhydrogen) and possibly a larger alternator to run the HHO generator.
Opposition
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HHO generators shouldn't work. Gasoline provides the power to produce the electricity needed by the HHO cell. Because the oxyhydrogen gas produced by the cell doesn't contain as much energy as the gasoline used to make it, HHO opponents claim there there is physically no way for them to increase fuel mileage. On paper, HHO opponents are absolutely right; the math just doesn't add up.
Explanations
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While the HHO generator's effectiveness is proven in many applications, its proponents are faced with the sticky question of how you can get more energy from a fuel than you put into it. One explanation is that alternators make an excess of power, and that the generator only utilizes what's wasted, but there are two better ones. The first is that because oxyhydrogen gas is simpler in construction than the gasoline molecule, it burns faster and acts as a catalyst to ignite the gasoline sooner and more completely. Another is that the mixture's pure oxygen content allows more of the gasoline to burn, which also increases efficiency.
Future
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HHO's future will have been secured once engineers have cracked the code to figure out exactly how it works. Science relies on repeatable results, which are impossible if no one adequately tests the principle to collect data; testimonials don't count. Its future is purely speculative, but (if history is any indication) it may be some time before HHO is fully accepted by the mainstream.
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- Photo Credit ocean image by Yulia Volodina from Fotolia.com
