Latest Reports: What is Maximum Theoretical MMW? To access this report, please click here.

Purpose: To promote good quality research into the science and technology of HHO or Brown's gas.

What is HHO? That is the basic question that we are trying to answer. HHO is generally produced by means of a water electrolysis cell. The two gases that make up water: oxygen and hydrogen are generated together within a stack of electrically charged metal plates immersed in an electrolyte solution. Most chemists will insist that this is simply a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. However, when the mixture is fed into the intake manifold of a diesel engine, a significant increase in efficiency occurs. This is not particularly surprising in itself. It has been known for years that hydrogen will increase engine efficiency. A number of gases will do this, even water vapor. What is surprising is that when you calculate yield in the additional energy per gram of hydrogen injected, this value is hundreds of times greater for HHO than it is for hydrogen from a compressed gas cylinder. This testing has been done on diesel engines running on engine dynamometers in several labs at different colleges and universities. The engines are run at controlled speeds and loads under controlled conditions. Click here for a white paper pdf file describing this analysis in more detail.

Where does this energy come from? That is something we are trying to determine. Some possibilities are:

Increased combustion efficiency. Combustion efficiency of diesel engines is very high, over 99%. It can be approximately estimated from emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and particulate matter. These amounts are very small and do not account for the yield factors that are typically observed.

Increased thermal efficiency. Thermal efficiency is different from combustion efficiency. Thermal efficiency refers to the amount of energy released by the combustion that gets converted to mechanical energy. It is almost always less than 50% for any type of heat engine, although it is comparatively high for diesel engines. Is it possible that the kinetics of the combustion could change in some way that increases thermal efficiency? This can be done by various means to some extent. It can be studied by monitoring instantaneous pressure in the cylinder as a function of crankshaft angle. This is a technique commonly used by automotive engineers. At some point, we hope to use this method to evaluate effects of HHO on combustion kinetics and thermodynamics. It has been used to study effect of hydrogen gas injection from compressed tanks in spark ignition engines, however the yields were only 15 kilojoules per gram of hydrogen, far below yields typically observed for HHO.

Other explanations. If the above two options are discounted, then it may be necessary to refer to non-classical physics in order to explain the HHO effect. Until very compelling experimental evidence indicates this to be the case, it is probably better to say no more.

These dynamometer tests that we referred to are not definitive. More careful work should be done. That is the current stage of our work. At this point, we are trying to determine the effect of HHO on engine thermodynamics. A lot of people will question whether there even is an HHO effect. If a mathematical model of the effect of HHO on Diesel cycle/Otto cycle/Rankine cycle is developed, this would help validate the effect and it would give some indication as to its nature.

Some HHO proponents might worry that if HHO ever goes mainstream, then Big Money interests will try to muscle in on their domain. Perhaps they prefer to be on the edge of scientific respectability, just under the radar.

For details on the analysis described above, please click here.

Do you have comments, questions, ideas, etc.? Please email us at: contact@hho-research.org