Comments on: Water-powered car scammers through history

By: B. Peasant

B. Peasant — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:09:00 +0000

Having a water tower on your car might have a detrimental effect on stability. Or do you have an alternative method of pressurizing the water?

By: Omar Hauksson

Omar Hauksson — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:06:00 +0000

This intrigued me quite a bit back in the day, it’s not mentioned in this article but after reading it I’m pretty sure this is horse crap as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ3juM6vHwg

By: considermore

considermore — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:11:00 +0000

More than one comment saying water is almost non-compactable. Quite. That’s not to say non-pressurizeable though. Consider the water in the ocean depths – at almost exactly the same volume as water on the surface you’d still certainly want several inches of tough rounded steel between yourself and its force.

A bit of a failure of imagination from acerplatnoldes. In a water pressure driven world, why not have a pressure hose (that securely screws into the tank I’d imagine) instead of a petrol bowser at the refilling destination? No need to have it at high pressure all through the network or pipes connecting the car to the Dam.

Besides, ‘better’ isn’t the challenge here. It’s whether its ‘scientifically crap’ (from the article title) i.e possible at all, able to be build as a hobby machine

An example of a proposition to use the hydraulic force of water as a storage medium on the energy grid:

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/revolt/unconventional-%E2%80%9Chydraulic-hydro-storage%E2%80%9D-system-offers-energy-storage-for-the-grid-on-a-grand-scale/

By: Stooge

Stooge — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:22:00 +0000

Of course, if you replaced the water with alcohol and fed the ‘steam’ into the furnace then the working fluid and fuel would be one and the same, which could make for a wonderfully efficient engine/omnidirectional projectile.

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:15:00 +0000

At least Saudi Arabia actually needs those plants. We pay for bottled water even though we have clean tap water (which we pay for already).

By: OoerictoO

OoerictoO — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:13:00 +0000

my car is powered by dinosaurs and plants

By: acerplatanoides

acerplatanoides — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:50:00 +0000

only if you -heat- the water, which this engine apparently compensates for.

By: wysinwyg

wysinwyg — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Where would we be now if the Wright brothers hadn’t proved the possibility of heavier-than-air flight by inventing birds?

By: wysinwyg

wysinwyg — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Kind of a stretch to call a hydrogen fusion-powered car a “water-powered car”.

By: wysinwyg

wysinwyg — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

You’ve never seen a mail truck? They almost all run on CNG. The buses in Boston run on CNG; IIRC so do the ones in Austin.

By: robcat2075

robcat2075 — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:09:00 +0000

even if you found an economical way to separate the hydrogen out of water and burnt it for fuel… isn’t water vapor a greenhouse gas? And wouldn’t this turn our cities into overly-humid hothouses?

By: BombBlastLightingWaltz

BombBlastLightingWaltz — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:52:00 +0000

The ‘maybe’ is part of the joke.

Any how, years back my ex-father-in-law was telling me about a great water powered welding machine that makes great welds using water for power. He was serious.

A few years after he told me this, I was in a trade school for advanced welding and told the instructors I heard about a water powered welding machine. They laughed their butts off.

By: ponzicar

ponzicar — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:39:00 +0000

But you’d also need to dilute your car. drop it into the ocean and shake vigorously.

By: SamSam

SamSam — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:25:00 +0000

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but the energy that can be extracted from a steam engine most certainly does come from the fuel that is being burned.

This is why we call nuclear power plants “nuclear power” plants, and not “water power” plants.

By: scav

scav — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:18:00 +0000

Not directed at you personally, but note that if anyone proposing a novel energy source makes mention of the Wright brothers, you can generally count that as 5 bozo points.

By: scav

scav — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:16:00 +0000

Pressurised air may have been *looked into* as a serious method of propelling cars, but if so it was then conclusively rejected. The main problem is it’s super inefficient. When you compress the air, it heats up and you turn a lot of the energy you are trying to store into heat that radiates off the container and is lost. When you release the pressurised air to do work, the container drops rapidly in temperature, reducing the effective pressure available.

You’d be much better off with a big steel spring.

By: Dv Revolutionary

Dv Revolutionary — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:04:00 +0000

Liquid water is for all intents and purposes non-compactable. You can not squish it. Pressurized water would just be heavy and perform zero work.

I’ll say never on pressurized water.

By: Trevor Luscombe

Trevor Luscombe — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:25:00 +0000

Actually the power comes from the entropy of the water entering the steam engine, not the heat consumed by burning fuels to heat the water which is then fed into the engine. The Hs diagram of a water heating cycle would be a straight line unable to extract any useful energy, actually sorry, it would be a trapazoid consuming energy. For science!

By: acerplatanoides

acerplatanoides — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:23:00 +0000

Well, the pipes linking the car to the dam might limit mobility.

Here’s another example of water motors in action:
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/34866-massive-engines-london-tower-bridge-video.htm

By: acerplatanoides

acerplatanoides — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:21:00 +0000

What happens if I dilute a single drop of gasoline into the water, and then dilute that several more times.

That’s bound to work!

By: howaboutthisdangit

howaboutthisdangit — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:14:00 +0000

Just spell “Evian” backwards.

By: for_SCIENCE

for_SCIENCE — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 11:25:00 +0000

Steam engines don’t run on water, they need a combustible energy source to produce steam from water.

By: EvilSpirit

EvilSpirit — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:45:00 +0000

By this reasoning, current-technology cars also “run” on water, when they use it as a coolant.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:30:00 +0000

Didn’t Howard Hughes kill a design for a steam powered car because he was freaked about about possible scald injuries? Seems a bit odd.

By: Matt Fisher

Matt Fisher — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:22:00 +0000

Sadly these scams often get uncritically reported by the mainstream press. Want a boat that runs on water? Knock yourself out:

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-14/news/30515128_1_hydrogen-boat-engineering

By: Frederik

Frederik — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:46:00 +0000

The power comes from the fuel that is used to heat the water, not the water itself.

By: Trevor Luscombe

Trevor Luscombe — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:36:00 +0000

Water powered engines are not a lie, they have existed for years! Steam engines anyone?

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:17:00 +0000

Considering it’s a liquid and will simply pour out if the tank is punctured, yes I am more fine with it than a highly compressed gas.

By: Frederik

Frederik — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:07:00 +0000

Cars that run on air actually exist today because air is a compressable gas. You can putt allot of it in a small space and the act of the gas expanding powers the car. Water is almost incompressable, so it cannot work.

A car running on hydrogen it extracted itself from water also doesn’t work as the act of getting the hydrogen out of the water cost more energy then you would get from it, so it can’t run the car.
Hydrogen extracted outside of the car via other means obviously does work, but that isn’t a car powered by water. It’s a car running on hydrogen.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:57:00 +0000

A ton of vehicles would be like… one of them? Until recently I lived in Philly, and I saw one NG truck, owned by the gas company. Actually saw it a few times, so they may have 2 or 3 of them. Now I live in a smaller city, and I’ve seen none at all.

But I’m pretty sure the oil companies will not ever permit government to build alternative fuel infrastructure. It will happen when oil becomes prohibitively expensive, which will probably be within 10 years, and then it will be the same oil companies building it. With Federal subsidies.