Quote:
Originally Posted by heartdisease
Hey is there anything to that HHO stuff? Does it really help millage or is that just smoke haha. Would it kill o2 sensors? I have heard of it but always figured it was like magnets on the fuel lines or the "Tornado" throttle body insert, that is to say gimmiky junk.
|
Truth? Delphi (formerly a division of GM) intended to introduce a hydrogen gas generator for use by GM. They took out a patent on it.
http://delphi.com/manufacturers/dti/...en_enrichment/
I heard that a problem with the process is that it raises pollutants beyond those of the Tier II limits. Delphi dropped it for US use.
Let's take a look at a combustion chamber during the compression phase....
A mixture of fuel droplets, oxygen and traces of vapors off of the cell walls are swirling around inside. The valves are closed and the piston is rising upwards.
Chemical processes occur more easily as the pressure rises, since this increases the "enthalpy" (internal temperature) of the gas mixture and reduces the space between molecules (compression) per the Universal Gas Fomula...
PV=nRT
Where P is pressure, V is volume, n is the number of moles, R is a constant that depends upon the characteristics of the gas and T is for temperature, absolute temperature (our commonly used temperatures are measured from the freezing point of water or ethyl alcohol).
Reduce volume, increase the pressure and temperature. Obviously the space occupied is less so the number of moles (a measure of the number of molecules) per volume also is higher. This increases the likelihood of a chemical reaction.
At some point or another the spark plug "fires", ejecting either ionized air, plasmas formed from plug material, sputtering from the plug (bigger chunks of the plug material than a plasma) or a combination of two or all three into the swirling clouds of gasoline vapor suspended in air pluswhatever trace crap is swirling around from engine oil, what wasn't scavanged from the last combustion run, and so on.
The resulting combustion of all of this crap is NOT instantaneous, though it is very very fast. The mixture burns outward (should burn outward) from the spark plug. The point where combustion begins is known as the Flame Front. Since the mixtures are not "homogeneous" - equally spread everywhere inside of the chamber - there will be points where ignition will be much later, sometimes never.
Where Hydrogen comes into play is that it helps to spread the Flame Front more efficiently, since hydrogen gas is more easily combusted than tiny droplets of gasoline suspended in air. You don't have to depend upon combustion products and radiation, instead the hydrogen gas conveys the flame front.
Hydrogen really helps with "lean" mixtures, since the hydrogen gas spreads the flame front between fewer droplets of gasoline.
So there is definitely something to this hydrogen gas thing, if you have the right amounts of it, at the right time, under the right conditions.
Gene
