QUOTE (soldierspy @ Nov 2 2007, 03:48 PM)

Well,it has been more than a few days...and still no "debunking" going on...why?I have to be honest,i havent heard ANYTHING about this guy being a fraud.Too many scientist that have checked him out,and they have found his invention works just fine.The govt,LMFAO,They want to know everything about it,and have offered him Big bucks for patent rights.I think you could be looking for a very,very,longtime.I wont hold my breath waiting.
Gah, I apologize. I've had a lot of crap going on the last couple days and checking up on forums has been the least of my concerns.
Anyways, a summary of the problems with this guy's deal:
All this person is doing is normal electrolysis, creating a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas. This technique has been known for a LONG time in the welding industry and is known as Brown's Gas. The fact that it got on the news is more a testament to the gullibility of reporters than the technology.
The term "HHO" means nothing. I wish i could say more about that, but saying he is making "H2O into HHO" has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. I can't even say its wrong. At best, I suppose we can assume it refers to a 2:1 mix of H2 and O2, which is what you get from electrolysis.
CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Confirmed by more experiments than can be counted. Here is how it applies to electrolysis: when you break water, you are putting the electrical energy into the potential chemical energy of the new mixture of H2 and O2. When you then burn the H2, breaking the HH bonds and making HO bonds, the HO bonds are a lower potential energy and the difference is released as heat (or some electricity as well as heat if you're using a fuel cell). However, this is the SAME ENERGY DIFFERENCE that must be overcome to take the lower energy H2O and make it into higher energy H2 and O2. This means that the exact same energy you put into the water when you split it is put out again when you burn it. More generally, any process that has the same substance as its initial input and final product will have no net energy gain - the same amount of energy will go in as goes out. THE ONLY THING THIS DEVICE DOES IS TURN ELECTRICAL ENERGY INTO CHEMICAL ENERGY.
I submit the idea that this "gas/water hybrid" is nothing more than a car that runs on gas and uses some of the electricity it generates to split water and then inject the resultant gas into the cylinders. It probably does this very little, thus only requiring very little water but about the same amount of gasoline.
I have no idea where the claims about the flame changing temperature comes from, other than the suggestion that it probably has something to do with the way the news always gets science news wrong and sensationalizes it.
A side note on physics being a series of corrected mistakes: i would call it more a series of successively more improved understandings. Before radioactivity was discovered, the output of energy from radioactive materials would have seemed to violate the conservation of energy. Eventually it was discovered to be related to the transmutation of elements, and it was proposed that this was causing the release of energy. By looking at more and more examples the relationship between the atomic decay and the energy released could be understood. Conservation of energy has always worked out in every circumstance in the end. I find it hard to believe that one particular chemical reaction out of trillions of possible ones would violate it, and furthermore if it were truly this simple real scientists would have found it and studied it.
References:
http://anti-rant.blogspot.com/2006/05/simp...-and-water.html While a blog and nothing professional, this person articulates all the relevant points and explains it in a very concise and easily understood way. Here, the writer assumes the term HHO refers to a mix of H2 and O2 gases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown%27s_gas#Brown.27s_gas The entry on Brown's gas (a 2:1 mix of H2 and O2). Refers to "controvertial claims" made regarding its properties, and its long use in welding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics The laws of thermodynamics.
and finally: critical thinking.