can a normal engine be converted to run on water?

Question

I saw this on tomorrows world in the 80's never heard of it again did the government kill him

Answer 1

I believe the conversion you refer to was one where the petrol engined car ran on one gallon of petrol to 4-5 gallons of water and separated the oxygen molecules into the air and used the hydrogen to run the engine... I did hear that this idea (copy rite) was bought by the fuel companies and has been lost on a back shelf somewhere.

Answer 2

A combustion engine cannot use water as a fuel, because water is the PRODUCT of combustion. Water is a waste gas.

That being said, you can electrolyze water to liberate hydrogen gas, and then run a fuel cell on that. NASA has been using hydrogen fuel cells for decades. However, don't think the energy is free. It always requires more energy to create the hydrogen than you get back when you react it in the fuel cell. The second law of thermodynamics states that you can never break even.

Answer 3

if you convert the water to hydrogen yes. During the second world war lots of vehicles had 'Balloons' fitted to the roofs to hold the converted fuel. A 'petrol' engine can run on anything that burns with little modification and a diesel engine anything that explodes under compression

Answer 4

I don't think you can convert an ordinary engine to run on water. Basically to get energy out of water you need to use electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen.
Could be dangerous!
Check out browns gas on the internet, this bloke called yul brown was fascinated with the same idea and tried to sell his working machine all around the world but no one wanted it.
I think the chinese bought the idea and use it to power submarines, and I also believe that texas instruments, those semiconductor chappies use it to purify silicon.

Answer 5

No. A normal engine runs on hydrocarbon (gasoline, diesel) fuel. Water would have to be converted to hydrogen and oxygen, "outside," "elsewhere," then fed into a not-so-normal engine to burn the hydrogen.

Answer 6

no - water is not combustible - a normal engine relies on combustion of a fuel air mixture either from a spark or from heated compression - water would first have to be split into its component elements hydrogen and oxygen which if then recombined could be used to produce a combustion reaction - hope this helps

Answer 7

Water can be separated into hydrogen & oxygen.
But it takes huge amounts of electricity, so inefficient.
Then you have to compress the hydrogen to store it.
On top of that it's dangerous, in case of accidents.
So there are a lot of technical problems to work out.

But why would you think the 'government' would kill it?

Answer 8

if you could find a way to get enough current through water without shorting the supply you could use electrolosis to get hydrogen but it is near impossible to do so. Or in theory you could tinker with the enginge and turn the car into a steam engine.

Answer 9

I would say most likely not because all the fluids used as fuel must be able to ignite by spark or what ever other means and there is no way you can get water to ignite, at least not yet

Answer 10

I dont think so.

Sounds like you are talking about a hydrogen cell. It is powered by water which is seperated into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is burned and the oxygen released.