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Japanese Company Says Laws of Physics Don't Apply — to Cars
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 14, 2008 01:45 PM
from the transparent-hucksterism-meets-subtitles dept.
from the transparent-hucksterism-meets-subtitles dept.
Fantastic Lad, among many others, points out another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry. What's scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters of such extraordinary claims quite unbacked by extraordinary evidence. "Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology. The snippet Reuters is carrying says "Jun. 13 — Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it." Fantastic Lad, deadpan, goes on: "Check out the Reuter's story and accompanying video. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of conservation of energy thing happening in the whole 'separating hydrogen from water' game? I wonder what the real story is on this. Investment fraud? Magic?" Show your work; bonus points if you use Haiku.
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Screw water (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screw water (Score:5, Interesting)
Strangely, having built and designed air conditioning units for some time, and having done a LOT of installations, I have a few ideas on how the laws of physics can be exploited to use LESS energy to accomplish a job that normally requires MORE energy. Air Conditioning is only one of the visible uses of compression and decompression as well as radiation of heat in order to transfer heat for a much smaller energy cost than the standard peltier technology once used for "extreme cooling" in computers.
Refrigeration technology is OLD and works admirably well. Until I see a proof and more than just a "not possible" debunking, I will remain skeptical of the claim and of its eager debunkers. Just my 10 cents.
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Re:Screw water (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use less energy to accomplish a job, but you can't use no energy. That's what these cars (apparently) seem to claim-- they are running on NO energy-- they (use energy to) split the water into hydrogen and oxyen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen to get the energy to split the water, and have extra energy left over. This is not "refrigeration technology"-- this is magic.
With that said, let me say that I wrote "apparently" in the previous paragraph, because I haven't actually seen the Japanese text, only the news articles, and I know that news articles often miss a key point, or two-- for all I know this may actually be a perfectly functional car, and the reporter screwed up the article. It could be a fuel-cell car, for example, powered off the grid (which could be said to "run on water", although not in a perpetual-motion closed cycle.)
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Re:Screw water (Score:5, Informative)
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Running cars on water? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Running cars on water? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Running cars on water? (Score:5, Insightful)
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haiku (Score:5, Funny)
water runs your car
rain, tea, and cool gentle mists
maybe piss does too
uunnngh (Score:5, Funny)
Would purchase a water car
And fuel it with sperm.
Haiku (Score:5, Funny)
Spins turbine blades to release
BS upon world
This car has no trouble running on water... (Score:5, Funny)
Summer (Score:5, Funny)
bringing with it a fresh crop
of nutball scammers
Deep thoughts..... (Score:5, Funny)
car runs on water
being fooled is never fun
want to buy a bridge?
Haiku (Score:5, Funny)
In this house we all obey
Thermodynamics
Water car haiku (Score:5, Funny)
driving in a desert.
Which way do you go?
How it works (Score:5, Informative)
So water may not be the only thing fueling this car. They use a chemical reaction to crack the water, and then use the hydrogen from the water and oxygen from the air to run a fuel cell. The real questions are: What is in these membranes? How long do they last? What does it cost to renew the membranes?
Re:How it works (Score:5, Informative)
It may be related to a 2005 discovery [sciam.com] published in the Scientfic American [sciam.com] that combine organosilanes [wikipedia.org] with water in the presence of a rhenium [wikipedia.org] based catalyst to produce hydrogen.
Parent
Haiku (Score:5, Funny)
but sometimes they don't make sense.
Refridgerator.
You don't even need water! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously now, I see serious posts here about things that "we don't know / don't yet comprehend" like "zero point energy" etc. Guys, perhaps if you take a couple of physics courses you will both "know" and "comprehend" and in addition you will be able to discern obvious scams.
Unless they are using a nice tiny fusion generator here. In that case when you pour water, it would be taking the deuterium out of it. Then I imagine they will tell you to throw in some old lithium batteries you have lying around, so that tritium can be generated. So, with your deuterium-tritium fuel you can power up Mr Fusion and have all the power you need!
Seriously people...
Poor education -- haiku (Score:5, Funny)
Poor education
Drool from your lips runs the car
Reporters buy it
Some links ... (Score:5, Informative)
WES system [google.com] (Google-translated)
Genepax homepage [genepax.co.jp] (English)
Tea? (Score:5, Funny)
Nooklear Wessels (Score:5, Informative)
There is exactly one way by which you can make hydrogen extraction from water a net power gain: if the hydrogen extracted is used for nuclear fusion. Assuming any remotely efficient fusion (i.e. worth bothering with), the energy gain from fusion should vastly exceed the cost of splicing water, separating out deuterium, etc. For combustion in oxygen, no... water is already the ash of that process.
You could theoretically burn hydrogen in a fluorine atmosphere and get more energy out, but that assumes a ready supply of elemental fluorine (doesn't exist) and something to do with the hydrogen fluoride that results (HF will corrode glass.)
Re:Whats the problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
> to claim it doesn't work because what it proposes to do is impossible.
Conservation of Energy says that what they are claiming is impossible. Water simply cannot be the fuel source for a hydrogen fueled energy source. When you burn (i.e. oxidize) hydrogen you get water as the result. Since no machine yet devised by man is 100% efficient the machine can't even sit and spin, to say nothing of produce enough excess energy to move a vehicle.
What they are claiming is more fantastic than a perpetual motion machine and the Patent Office stopped bothering to examine perpetual motion applications decades ago. Used to be every generation of half educated 'scientists' would learn just enough about magnets to get convinced there just 'had' to be an arrangement of them that would create perpetual motion, totally ignoring conservation of energy. Now the fetish seems to be moving to the water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> water cycle.
Now the claims of some in this thread that they are actually getting the energy from an Aluminum + water -> hydrogen + ? reaction is possible, but that isn't what they are claiming. And if they did it would be an Aluminum powered vehicle and we would be asking how many miles per pound it gets.
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