Refuting the idea of water powered cars
A line-up of cars is seen on a road.—Reuters (File Photo)
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about water powered cars in the media. Understandably, it is difficult for people to make up their minds about such reports of grand technical achievements as to whether the claims are true or not, despite the common sense dictating against believing in such claims. After all such things must involve complicated technology which is not for everyone to understand. But the problem with many claims of such kind, and certainly with this particular one, is that they are in direct conflict with basic physics and chemistry. You do not need to go into details of the technology involved. The basic laws of physics and simple facts from chemistry categorically deny the possibility of using water as a fuel. Anyone who can recall their high school science correctly can refute this idea.
The reason this car cannot work is simply the law of conservation of energy, the most basic idea of physics that energy cannot be created, or destroyed, but can only change forms. You never create energy, only use some stored form of energy by converting it to your desired form (energy of motion, in case of car). This is also known to engineers as the first law of thermodynamics.
So let us look at the claim of the inventors about how this water kit works. It is a well-known fact that energy is released when you combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. It is this energy that they claim to be using to run the car. But the problem is that you need a supply of hydrogen to make this work. The inventors claim to use water itself to get this supply of hydrogen. This is where they go absolutely head on against the law of conservation of energy.
Suppose you have a process in which some energy is released. Say some substances A change to substances B and energy is released. A simple consequence of the conservation of energy is that if you run the process backwards, tuning B back to A, you will have to supply exactly the same amount of energy. For if it were not the case, and say you needed less energy to go backwards, you could repeat the cyclic process of going from A to B and then B to A repeatedly, at each turn saving some extra energy. This way you could produce as much energy as you like. But this is against the law that you cannot create energy.
Therefore, the conclusion is that you need to supply exactly the same amount of energy to turn B back to A, as you would obtain by turning A to B. This fact is sometime stated as perpetual motion machines are impossible.
According to the inventors, the kit works by breaking water, a molecule consisting of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, into its parts, namely hydrogen and oxygen. When you combine thus obtained hydrogen back with oxygen to make water, energy is released which is used to run the car. Sounds simple. But the trouble is that you need to provide energy to break up the water molecule in the first place. Further, as stated above, according to the law of conservation of energy you need to provide exactly the same amount of energy to break up the water molecule as you would get when recombining hydrogen with oxygen.
This is not just a conclusion based on theory but a routinely tested fact of chemistry. So whatever energy you get out of this device, has to come from somewhere in the first place, and not from water itself. Water is not the fuel or source of energy.
The inventors claim that the water molecule is broken down using the electrical current from the battery. This process is well known and is called electrolysis. A battery has some fixed stored amount of energy which it can release as electrical power through a current. So by breaking the water molecule and then combining it back, you are just channeling this battery power to the car. When this source battery will die out, the car will stop working. As a matter of fact you will be better off connecting the battery directly to car’s motors as each additional step that you introduce wastes quite a bit of energy.
The two processes involved, electrolysis of water and recombination, in this supposed generation of energy from water are well known in chemistry and can be found in class X chemistry book. So you may wonder why no one thought of using these for power generation. The reason is simple. They knew it is impossible.
There is really no way around it. It is based on the basic fact of conservation of energy and the fact of chemistry that energy is required to split a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. Then how do the hydrocarbon fuels work? The difference is that the chemical reaction involved in burning those release energy which is used to run the cars. When we run out of this fuel we replace with more supplies of the fuel that are available in nature. In other words the nature has stored supply of energy in hydrocarbons which we use. In the case of this car, it is the burning of hydrogen with oxygen which releases the energy. So the counter part of the fuel in this case is really free hydrogen and not water. We do not have a source of free hydrogen available here. In the case of hydrocarbons, we do not regenerate the by-products of hydrocarbon burning into the original fuel again. It is quite possible to do so. For example, one can make methane out of the final products of its burning i.e., water and carbon dioxide. Ever wonder why we don’t do this? Because it will cost more energy to do this than we will get back when burning again. If we could really do that without providing external power, it would constitute perpetual motion. These people are doing exactly this with water and hydrogen, regenerating the fuel, from by-product, which is water in this case, without any external source of energy.
Now then what about the hydrogen fuel cells? Don’t they work, you may ask, on similar principles? Well they do work by using the recombination of hydrogen with oxygen to make water. However they have some external supply of hydrogen available as a fuel. That is why they are called hydrogen fuel cells. They do not generate hydrogen internally as they go using the self-generated energy.
So as long as we believe in the law of conservation of energy, and the basic chemistry of hydrogen burning, we can safely assume that this idea is completely bogus. Water can never be used as a fuel source either to run cars or generate electricity. Any such claims, no matter where they come from are wrong.
One also hears of opinions that may be the laws of thermodynamics are being violated. After all new discoveries are made in science every day. However, one has to keep in mind different realms of discoveries. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not change applicability of Newton’s mechanics for everyday speeds where it is tested and works perfectly fine for last four hundred years. Similarly, no new discovery will change the applicability of laws of thermodynamics to the chemistry of water molecules, where they are tested on a daily basis thousands of times in chemistry labs around the world.
Interestingly, this idea of using water as a fuel, though completely fraudulent at the most elementary level, is not new. Entrepreneurs in California have claimed in the past to have used water as a fuel for cars and taken some scientifically challenged investors, who did not have the good sense to trust a real engineer, to cleaners. Of course, the idea was shown to be fraudulent pretty soon and the same investors then ended up suing them for the invested money.
without knowing its complete process we cant claim that that guy is wrong…be practical guys…
There is an absolute abudance of clean energy ready and waiting to be tapped, and we already have the technology to be able to harness it. There is no longer any need to rely on dirty carbon fuels. We must do this for our childrens sake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnRyVK7HqJE
i dont get it….. if a car is running on water….so why is it been stopped…. v should work on it…
some ppl are saying tht the engine oil will lighten up, he eh eh!! thts non-sense to me….
I myself am testing this water fuel process to check that to what level it is harmful or any thing dangerous…. n if i vl found it so i myself vl show its harms n dangers on vdo shared on YOUTUBE…
i think this guys should come out in public and demonstrate the functionality. thats the only rational way forward.
The system works, I have built 4 cars and one truck, they dont run completely on water its used as a hybird system, the amount gained is 15-32 mpg. yes theres energy loss but also a gain in performence and its cleaned all motors, IE even more effecient. to run a car completely will take a large system with reengineered components.
The demon of ignorance is on us. Run for your life (i.e if you care enough for it)!!
Small minds obviously think alike. A wise man once said " if you close the door to knowledge you open the door to ignorance." Gentlemen think about it , we need to get with the changing technology and times. They don't call it " fossil fuel " for nothing. A car that runs on generated fuel from water with the assistance of a little bit of electrical current to aid in the process. How about that!!
Mass can be destroyed, coverted to another form, to creat energy. It happens in nuclear fission and fusion reactions. Let this madness go on, let there be claims and counter claims. Someday, somewhere, somebody, some mad man, will think out of the box, and a simple process of fusion will be discovered along with taming and harnessing the enormous amount of fusion energy released and then energy problem will be solved.. . . . Amin!
Who is Amin?
The water fuelled car by pakistanis has only exposed the ignorance of the so called pakistani scientists, media persons, and political leaders. It just brought embarrassment to Pakistanis for not understanding a grade 10 science lesson. Even the national Pakistani hero Mr.A.Q. Khan invited doubts towards his own knowledge by endorsing the water fuelled car in one of his interviews.
Did this article needed to be printed. As an engineer and someone who knows high school physics well, it did not add anything to my knowledge, although I read it in anticipation, that it might, and secondly this cannot change the minds of the believers of fairy tales.
This article certainly needed to be printed to clear the doubts of people who are not engineers like you Mr. Sidni. This was meant to ADD to your knowledge but to explain to laymen why it is not possible to use water as a fuel. Knowledge has to be spread to those who don't know and this article is an excelent effort in that direction.
People please research somethings yourself. Take some time out from your lives to learn something about the way the world/nature works. The world is watching and this is the sort of thing we run on TV and people are actually arguing for this guy. This person is not running his car on water. He is using electricity to break down the water and then burning the Hydrogen. Hydrogen cars already exist and have for a long time.
The initial electricity is coming from an external source due to the battery already being charged beforehand. The reason his car stops after a certain number of kms is not because of the water running out it is because of the battery running out. It is a very simple process, you put in energy to break up the water, after which you burn the converted energy (hydrogen) in the engine from which you run the car and also recharge the battery but due to energy losses you can never get the same amount of energy back therefore the care stops as the battery runs out.
I really liked the artcile. The author has explained the whole physics behind it in a very simple way that a layman like me can even understand it.
Instead of being negative, we should be really proud that a Pakistani has done something innovative! What a refreshing change!
Aayeen?
This is a scientific project that Mr Aga has undertaken. He has shown some results which has captured our imagination. Scientfic community should work with him to understand the process and clarify to Mr Aga and the world at large if there are misconceptions. In this ill trodden society of ours, if there are people still working on scientific projects on their own, it should be rather encouraged, if not this one, who knows, we may discover some thing else, may be some better processes just as bi-products. Please, we should not be egoistic in our apporach. Appreciate his efforts and clarify if there are short falls and encourage him to do better.
The only way water can produce energy is Cold Fusion, all the world's leading technological powers have been after that for the last 50 years.
You are absolutely right. A few years back two scientists Flieshman and Pons claimed that they had succeeded in creating a current using heavy water ( HO ) on the principle of cold fusion. They insisted that they had been successful despite the entire scientist community disagreeing with them. Several confirmation tests were conducted in labs across the world but Flieshman and Pons were left dishonoured by their peers.
Sorry to disappoint you people! Ramar Pillai from India had invented such a car long time back. He used some herbs to covert water into energy fuel. It later turned out that the water that he used was actually a coloured form of petrol itself. So best of luck! If the car really runs on water, India will demand joint patent on the car on the grounds that we share a common history and are brothers. We in India will build more dams on our rivers running into Pakistan! No sane country will let energy flow from its country into somebody else's country, brothely or otherwise! By the by, will salt water from the Idian ocean work?
it does not matter how the engine is running on water..for a common man as long as it runs his car its ok for him. who cares the thermodynamics laws than?