Scientist: Tata dreams of cars running on water | Hacker News Reader

Scientist: Tata dreams of cars running on water

economictimes.indiatimes.com

10 pointsbakbak12 comments

Genius! because if their cars do get fire* there's always some water to douse the flames

*http://indianautosblog.com/2010/11/tata-nano-recall

At the risk of stating the obvious for most readers here -- the energy put into cracking water will always be more than any reaction you would receive from combining the results (hydrogen and oxygen) back.

While the electrolysis car is the realm of snake-oil salesmen, there is some legitimate research going on in the field and a few that are promising, all that are promising use a third consumable catalysts like aluminum to aid it breaking the bond with lower energy input. The reality is that cars are already a net loss for energy you just have to get the net loss of water energy to be equal to or less than that of petrol. There is also energy that goes into creating these catalysts so it's not like they give you a free pass it is just a alternative way to bank energy to be used for motion. As I said there is real research going on in this field, they are far and few between but given that the researcher is out of MIT and it is Tate investing, I would assume that this is one of the more legitimate efforts.

Batteries have the same drawback, however.

That's true, but batteries are for storing energy. Separating water into Hydrogen & Oxygen is for producing energy. You'd need to have a battery on board to do it and you might as well use it to run the electric motor since it'd be more efficient.

Actually, people have been talking about the "hydrogen economy" for a long time, and whenever it's about electrolysis of water, it's about hydrogen as a way to transport and store energy.

You put electrolysis near a "stranded" source of energy (a hydro dam in BFE where costs/losses to run electrical lines to users is high), produce hydrogen, then ship it out. One of the more interesting (kooky or technologically interesting, your choice) is "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion" (OTEC), where differentials in water temperature at different depths are exploited to generate electricity, which then is used to make hydrogen, which is then exported from a platform in the open ocean to users elsewhere.

I think there are a lot better ways to get hydrogen than electrolysis (right now, steam or kvaerner processes, and eventually, a biological or biocatalyzed process), and I'd prefer current liquid fuels to hydrogen, but it's not utter kookiness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy

I find it inspiring if someone in a position of power in the economy like Tata is actually talking about things like that, although cynically I guess it's probably just feel-good posturing.

I'd like a world in 2050+ with 50-100x more energy production, and all of that from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, etc., with a mix of electrical consumption and synthetic fuels for transportation.

I wouldn't expect anyone thinks it's a good idea to do the separation in the car. You'd do it at a plant somewhere to take advantage of economies of scale.

In which case why call them cars that run on water?

attention, yet another hho-gas scam!!!

but tata isn't the first one who believed that crap. hho-gas scam has a long history, try googling for hho-gas, rhodes gas, browns gas, free energy, overunity ...

every once and a while somebody with lots of money believe's that crap. (i got interested in this free energy/overunity crap after my father got scamed, i was blown away how many believe that)

this just can't work, see laws of thermodynamics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics#Laws_of_thermody... german speakers may be interested in that: http://www.esowatch.com/ge/index.php?title=HHO

I'm confused. Splitting water takes energy. The hydrogen can be supplied to the car and a hydrogen fuel cell recombines it to produce energy.

So surely the cars would be running on hydrogen?

Or else, how does one get energy from water (without fusion)?

But what we'd really like is to be driving their cars that run on air.

You can get one of those:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFDqcu8oJ4

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