So if you have an intermittent power supply, you can electrolyze the urine when you have power, and not kill yourself with CO when you burn it later. These girls were solving a problem that was relevant to them and their community. They rock!

The generator shown is a manual start unit aprox. 4000 watts. I have the same unit. The 4 gallon gasoline tank will run the generator for 4 hours at 50% power (~2000 watts) There is no way a quart of gasoline, let alone electrolyzed urine would run it for more than seconds, if at all.

There would be nearly NO PRESSURE developed to “store hydrogen” in the pressure tank, let alone a pressure regulator to drop the stored pressure back down to 4″ – 6″ water column pressure needed to feed the engine. In addition, low pressure gas needs large pipes of tubing to supply enough volume to run an engine. There is NO WAY the 1/4″ or 3/8″ poly tubling could carry enough 6″ water column pressure hydrogen to allow the engine to run beyond a burp before starving for fuel gas.

The “expert” who runs Brown gas generators (yea, right) is so far off the mark it is humorous to read his ramblings. So too is the other “expert” who would mix oxygen with the hydrogen before introducing it to the carburetor/mixer is also quite whacked.

The plastic filter housings do nothing, perhaps if they had dip tubes on the intake, they would do extremely rudimentary filtering, but not to hardly any effect. The author of the original article is correct in that a hallmark of whacko devices is to hang parts off it to attempt to baffle us with BS. The whole idea looks to be the invention of two middle school girls who haven’t thought out their science project very well. Oh wait, that IS what it is!

That the “Browns gas” true believers out there try their best with half facts and poorly conducted experiments in an effort to not appear quite as stupid as they truly are.

This is so stupid in so many ways that anyone looking at it without bursting out laughing is an idiot.

The Wikipedia article on energy density says exactly what I claimed. I wrote “123 kilograms of hydrogen gas yields approximately 1 Megajoule of energy”. Take a look at this table (third line below the table heading): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials

But, like I was in the beginning, you are missing the main point; you can’t produce more energy as an output from this system because it takes energy to produce H2 (electrolysis) but the energy released by burning the H2 and fed back into the system will not be enough to make up for the energy spent in electrolysis. Again, just to clarify, I’m not making that up. You easily confirm that too on Wikipedia: “Water electrolysis does not convert 100% of the electrical energy into the chemical energy of hydrogen. The process requires more extreme potentials than what would be expected based on the cell’s total reversible reduction potentials” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficiency

I don’t think that the girls’ original claim was for a machine that could provide excess power, it’s more likely that the reporter misunderstood what the girls were saying (because the reporter isn’t likely to be trained in science – as is the case with 99% of all journalists). Scam? Probably no. But is it a practical energy source? Definitely not.

Read the NBC news article above, three comments up.

James: The wikipedia article on energy density says no such thing, so your follow on math is meaningless.

I’m just as sceptical as the next guy, but lets try and keep the debunking based on reality and not BS.

If the green bottle was actually full of liquid propane (and the incoming pipe was just blanked off), I imagine the demo would look pretty authentic if they could crack the valve just enough to provide gas at low pressure into the intake of the generator..

Regardless, these kids are now famous.

If you can get out more than you put in with this contraption – I’d be very, very surprised. So citing the amount of H2 in water is great – but you need a lot of energy to shake that loose – that’s always been the problem. Then you’ve got to transport and store it without it escaping.

So urine it might be a better way to produce hydrogen from the same amount of energy (because the H2 splits off urea more easily than from water) – but that’s not what this is trying to do – it’s saying that you can power the thing enough to be self sustaining AND tap additional power to run other things too. If you had it hooked up to a solar cell or wind turbine – then it might be a good way to store up the energy for use at night (if it can work to pressurise the H2 into that tank) – but that’s relying on a lot of extra energy in the equation.