A Japanese company called Genepax has just intorduced a 300W water fuel cell called Water Energy System or WES. Is 300 watts enough to charge the battery? If so this would be great to have instead of a gas engine.. go over 40 to 50 miles.. start the WES to charge the battery and run the car on water! Genepax is also working on a 500W WES. :cool:

http://www.genepax.co.jp/en/energy/

Jason

Edit: So much for a gas engine replacement.. It takes 120,000 watts to power the Volt's motor.. but still interesting technology. I am assuming that their car has to sit and charge its batteries before one could drive it.

The vehicle must contain a compound that reacts with the water to release the hydrogen. That compound certainly must be replenished after a certain amount of time, so they should be clear on the vehicle's range.

Perhaps this technology could be used with the Volt.. it is a hydrogen engine that gets the hydrogen from water vapor (steam).. so it runs on water!

Note: the following link doesn't work well in Firefox.. made for IE only.
http://www.haw-system.jp/English/indexE.html

Jason

Edit: Now I read it uses hydrogen from a tank and not from water.. using two fuels hydrogen and water. I would use HHO instead of pure hydrogen. We can get HHO from the water with little power...that way there is just water as the fuel.

Genepax is a scam at the worst, and not telling the whole story at best. You can't power cars with only water. You will always need some kind of 'fuel'. But Genepax is trying to say that it runs solely on water. I'm thinking it's running on aluminum-gallium. Aluminum is a lot more expensive than gasoline, not to mention the 'fuel cell' would be a mess to clean out/replace once the aluminum oxidizes.

Haw sounds interesting, though. A steam/hydrogen car is certainly something new. But if it works, it still suffers from the same problem other hydrogen cars suffer from. Hydrogen is too expensive to store on a vehicle to give people the range they want, and because it's fueled under extremely high pressures, it cannot be fully rapidly-refilled without a large loss in range (rapid-refill effect). You would need the tank to be cooled to lessen this impact, and that in itself would require large amounts of energy.

I'm wondering, if at the pressure we are talking about, would it be simpler and less expensive to just store air in a 10,000psi tank, and just use that compressed air to power our cars?