A number of reports about water-powered cars and motorbikes have been reported on the internet recently. A pattern of these claims seems to follow the price of gasoline. When the price of gasoline is low, reports are low; when high, the claims come out of the woodwork.
Last week, Brazilian Ricardo Azevedo of San Paulo, a civil servant with a background in mechanics, claimed to have invented a water-powered motorcycle engine he calls Moto Power H2O. According to Azevedo, the motorcycle covers 310 miles (500 km) on one liter of water, or 1,171 miles per gallon! Azevedo’s story comes after a 2012 report that Pakistani engineer Agha Waqar Ahmad had developed a “water kit” allowing cars to run on pure distilled water. When Ahmad was expected to show his technology to a team of engineers, he suddenly disappeared.
There are many skeptics who believe this is also scam which is repeated over and over and that the bike actually runs on stored electrical energy from a battery, hidden somewhere on the motorcycle, perhaps inside the big black object just above the tank. Others believe the system could be possible but that it’s the equivalent of riding on a bomb. Finally, others joke that using polluted water from a water source in Brazil is likely to contain enough gasoline or oil derivatives to pass for fuel.
According to Azevedo, an electric current from a car battery is fed into a canister of water and a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) breaks it down into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The result is hydrogen, also called “Brown’s Gas,” oxyhydrogen, or HHO, which is used to power the engine.
Most scientists and engineers see the hydrogen engine built in this way as a “perpetual motion machine,” a fantasy, because the amount of power needed to extract energy from water is equal to the energy output. Some, however, believe that a process similar to that described by Azevedo could become part of a hybrid engine that would burn hydrogen, increasing fuel efficiency by 40% to 300% and reducing the amount of pollution emitted.
What’s your take?
The following video shows Azevedo getting his 15 minutes of fame:
