Program Plan 2009

Optimization

2009 UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING COMPETITION

AquaAutoGen '09 is a college level engineering competition to construct the most efficient fuel gas processor possible, using ordinary water as its feedstock; each entry will power a 3Kw generator, demonstrating the use of water as fuel.

With this massive, high-profile public demonstration of water fuel technology, any lingering doubts of the scientific, academic, or financial establishments with respect to the viability or practicality of emerging clean energy opportunities will be laid to rest. Let the future begin!

Winners will be declared in three Divisions, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The Gold Division will process water by electrical means alone; its winning entry will be awarded the $1,000,000 Grand Prize. The Silver Division will consist of those entries which produce a Carbon-bearing syngas from carbonaceous liquid wastes, with its winner receiving the $500,000 Second Prize. The Bronze Division will consist of those entries employing catalytic chemistries to produce gas, and its winner will be awarded the $250,000 Third Prize.

It is anticipated that the competition will be covered live on a national cable television network, such as the Science Channel or other Discovery networks, and on the 24 hour cable news channels, and that the results will receive widespread global publicity. Representatives of major industrial and technology companies and venture capital firms will be present, empanelled as Judges to witness the competition, and technical presentations on each entry by the participants themselves.

The Competition

Competing Teams will demonstrate the production of combustible gases from water using a maximum of 10 Amps of current, at 12 Volts - or 120 Watts, the power of a single bright light bulb - sufficient to fuel popular modern 3 Kilowatt portable generator sets, the Honda EU3000is and the Yamaha EF30iSEB. The competition will be to determine which Team is able to operate these gensets the longest, powering a 2500 Watt calibrated 'Test Load', fueled by One U.S. Gallon of ordinary tap water.

The specifications and features of these genset models are nearly identical. Both offer an auxiliary DC circuit of 12 Amps/12 Volts in addition to their nominal AC service. The test Apparatus will be current limited to 10 Amps, with 2 Amps remaining available for optional accessories, which may include a water pump and/or a cooling fan for the condensation and recovery of the water vapor released as exhaust by the running system.

Each Team will make four trials with their Apparatus, twice on each genset model, and on different gensets for each trial, such that each Apparatus will be demonstrated on four different machines. The official competition time for each Team will be taken as the average of the four trials. In the event of a failure of the Apparatus or the genset during any one trial, the Team shall have the option to either repeat that trial or to drop it from the averaging calculation for their score.

Apart from the time trials which will determine the contest Winner and two Runners-Up, an additional prize will be awarded to each Team that effectively demonstrates "closing the loop", i.e. the complete recovery of exhaust water vapor and its return to the fuel tank. Finally, a prize will be awarded to any team able to mount the system on a self-propelled cart or vehicle, and demonstrate the use of water as a fuel for transportation purposes.

It is anticipated that each Team will spend approximately $10,000 on parts, materials, and fabrication to construct its Apparatus, not counting labor, although there is no minimum or maximum investment required of any entrant. The Competition will negotiate preferred hotel and airline rates for all registered participants.

Background

Numerous systems have been proposed to release combustible gases from water using pulsed high frequency electrolytic resonance, or to produce COH2 Syngas through the underwater plasma pyrolysis of Carbon electrodes or liquid wastes, or through catalytic processes in which various metals capture Oxygen from water to liberate its Hydrogen. Whereas conventional electrolysis is traditionally only 30% efficient at converting water to Hydrogen and Oxygen, these alternative methods offer phenomenal performance improvements for which a global market beckons.

When reduced to practical technologies and widely proliferated, such systems have the potential to end American, European, and Asian reliance on petroleum imports from the increasingly unstable Middle East, and to effectively combat global warming. The convergence of these geopolitical and geophysical realities with the advent of "Peak Oil" makes it essential that practical alternative fuels be quickly brought to the forefront.

The first approach, which would guarantee the universal availability of Carbonless, Hydrogen-based fuels, is an ultra-efficient resonant breakdown of water, which results in the production of several combustible gases beside Hydrogen and Oxygen, including Hydroxyl, Hydrogen Peroxide, and Oxyhydrogen - the HHO molecule, commonly known as "Brown's Gas". A unique species in which the 105o separation between two Hydrogen atoms in an Oxygen bond

Catalytic reactions using metals, metal oxides, or metal hydrides to release Hydrogen from water are useful, and can be safe and efficient under certain circumstances, The hydroxide compounds they are converted to during the hydogenic process are convertible back into the original form using low level solar thermal energy, and even release more Hydrogen during the recovery process. However, the quantities of refined Sodium, Magnesium, Potassium, Calcium, or Zinc required to implement these technologies on a massive scale are formidable, and the initial energy requirement to separate them from their natural salts is significant.

While the conventional DC electrolysis of water, as taught by the 19th century natural philosopher Michael Faraday, is widely used in industry and a common demonstration in chemistry classrooms nationwide, its energy requirement is always, in practice, greater than the energy value of the Hydrogen and Oxygen liberated and available for combustion.

Other approaches, which use less electrical current, but at greater voltages, or which pulse to create molecular resonance phenomena, or which employ the shear stress of magnetic fields to break down or reconfigure water into combustible fuels, have been known for many years as anomalous curiosities, inexplicable by the mainstream science of the times. Prominent research inventors, including Stanley Meyer and Dr. Yull Brown repeatedly demonstrated working devices - including cars driven on water - which contradicted Faraday's laws of electrolysis, and the conventional understanding of water chemistry, but their work was considered scientific heresy and alternately denounced and ignored by the academic establishment.

By the 21st Century, however a growing legion of maverick scientists, led by Dr. Randy Mills and Dr. Rugerio Santilli had fleshed out a newer and more complete theoretical understanding of the Hydrogen molecule, and the dynamics of its bonding with other elements. Given this contemporary knowledge, various approaches to high efficiency electrolysis which had previously been considered 'impossible' by the 19th Century paradigm have slowly come to be seen in an entirely different light.

Eligibility

The contest is open 1) to registered academic Teams representing the engineering, physics, or chemistry departments of any college or university, and 2) to ventures or community Groups unaffiliated with any academic institution providing they demonstrate robust student participation in their projects and address other special criteria.

To register, Academic Teams must -

Obtain the official sanction of their institutions to participate

Purchase (or receive via donation) a generator set of one or both of the authorized models for use during the development of their Apparatus.

Create and maintain a website on the Aqua-Gen Competition server, with at least weekly updates on their progress (although no confidential design details need be disclosed prior to the Competition) and featuring personal contributions by the various members of the Team. These pages may include such advertising or promotional consideration for the individual Team sponsors and their institutions as each may choose to provide. The use of video in these blogs is strongly encouraged.

Demonstrate their completed Apparatus on campus, and for the local print and television news media, to raise public awareness of clean energy technologies.

Deliver a detailed oral and written technical presentation before the Panel of Judges, immediately prior to the competition.

Compile a Licensing/Commercialization Plan, ideally with the assistance of their institution's school of business or management science department.

Pay the $500 Registration Fee.

The Prize

At the closing ceremony of the competition, the winning Team will be awarded a cash prize totaling $1,000,000, of which $250,000 will be distributed among the members of the winning team directly, and $250,000 will be contributed to the institution in support of specific additional institutional clean energy research, development, or commercialization, without overhead or indirect cost burdens. First and Second Runners Up will also be awarded, at $500,000 and $250,000, respectively, with similar prize allocation requirements. The Foundation will arrange for the three winning teams to demonstrate their devices on Capital Hill in Washington, D.C. before Members of Congress, Senators, and staff representing the appropriate committees of the House and Senate. A second public demonstration will be held for Wall Street, in the financial district in New York City, with the travel expenses of each winning team sponsored by the Foundation..

The Exemplar

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the production of useful amounts of electric power from ordinary tap water as fuel, converted to Brown's Gas through the Meyer Resonance, using a Newman Rotary Transformer, driving conventional (though high-end) portable generators, available off-the-shelf from Yamaha and Honda.

Recently, additional contemporary researchers have replicated the '70s-era findings of the original inventors, conclusively establishing, once again, that the gas will operate standard internal combustion engines, and that it can be economically produced using the HF/HV resonance phenomena as far below the Faradic current requirement. Moreover, the pulsed DC circuitry of the rotary transformer has again been verified to generate the desired waveforms, with minimal external current draw, and the physics by which it does so is finally becoming understood, having since been published in major peer reviewed physics journals.

Both the Honda EU3000is and the Yamaha EU30seb/b gensets offer a secondary, 12 volt/12 amp DC outlet in addition to their primary 120 volt/28 amp primary AC service. Using this DC port to 10 amps, the experimental apparatus will produce sufficient combustible HHO syngas continuously from water, using just 120 Watts of power to drive the 3Kw genset at its full load rating.

According to U.S. Carburetion, Inc., the manufacturer of the conversion kits and a Yamaha dealer, these gensets observe, in practice, an energy equivalence between LNG and Gasoline, on a gallon for gallon basis. One gallon of LNG produces 74.4 cubic feet (2,106.77 cubic liters) of Natural Gas. At full load, the genset requires approximately 0.68 gallons per hour, or 51 cubic feet of gas per hour to operate.

Since the energy contained in Browns' Gas is somewhat greater than that of Acetylene, which is somewhat greater than LNG, or Methane, a conservative assumption would be the rough equivalence between 1 cubic liter of Natural Gas and 1 cubic liter of Browns' Gas, in practice, less of the syngas may be required to perform the same amount of work, i.e. generate the same electric power.

This requires the evolution of Brown's Gas from water at a rate of 13ml of water per minute, or 780 ml of water per hour, at the nominal liquid/gas H2O:HHO volumetric conversion ratio of 1:1860, to produce the approximately 1,444 cubic liters of Browns' Gas required by the genset.

Since Browns' Gas has been operated in essentially unmodified internal combustion engines before, and for long periods, the only change to the gensets themselves will be the use of commercially available conversion kits for Propane/LNG operation, and the introduction of a Teflon-based cylinder protectant (such as TuffOil, Slick50, etc.) to the genset's lubrication systems, to offset any increased corrosion.

The Water Fuel Cell to be used is derived from the popular Joe Cell design, which offers certain advantages over the tubular Meyer configuration, or the original parallel plate architecture put forward by Brown himself. The use of concentric cylindrical electrodes enables the efficient packaging of the device, and makes use of the virtual electrostatic focusing (or "lensing") effect observed by Farnsworth. The apparatus is encased in 6" dia. PVC tubing, with sufficient insulative values as to prevent any unwanted electrical contacts with or discharges from the device, even when operating at high voltage.

The concentric electrode cylinders are fabricated from unremarkable commercial stainless steel flashing, however, they are degaussed or heat treated prior to installation. Only the outer (Anode) and inner (Cathode) cylinders are connected to the circuit, and there is no electrical connection to the interleaving [null] electrodes. A spacing of 1.5mm is maintained between the electrodes by means of Teflon spacers. An inlet at the bottom of the cell assembly permits it to be filled in continuous operation by means of a small auxiliary water pump, controlled by a level indicator resting on the water surface above the electrodes, which transmits through the top of the cell housing. The Browns' Gas leaves the cell under pressure from the electrolysis through a hose from the top of the cell, which connects to the Natural Gas adaptor port installed on the genset carburetor. The cell is equipped with a pressure relief valve and other measures to safely accommodate any unplanned combustion events occurring inside the cell during errant operation.

The pulsed high voltage, high frequency DC signal to the cell is provided by a rotary transformer, which delivers up to several thousand volts at pulse frequencies ranging up to several tens of kilohertz. The optimum voltage, frequency, pulse width, and duty cycle have yet to be determined, however, the rotary transformer is a power amplifier which requires very low current to operate. Average current to the apparatus from the genset's 12v/12a DC output is expected to average substantially less than 5 amps; total draw (including a water pump and cooling fan) will be fuse limited to 10 amps at all times. Ultimately, in a mature system, mechanical take-off from the otherwise unused excess torque of the rotary transformer will power the water pump and cooling fan directly.

The project will demonstrate autogenous operation with both the Honda and Yamaha genset models, in portable test rigs on wheeled carts for easy transportation and setup. Since no hydrocarbon fuels are involved, the demonstrations may be conducted indoors with no risk of Carbon Monoxide buildup. Since the fuel gas is produced in real time, only small quantities exist at any given time within the cell and the feed lines into the engine; there is no storage of any combustibles in the test rig. The system will operate off of ordinary tap water, through a commercial, off-the-shelf filter to remove chlorine, fluorides, and other contaminants.

The principal objective of the project is to present the demonstration - unsolicited - to the Small Power Projects office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. If DARPA can be convinced of the validity of the demonstration, a $250,000 contract will be solicited to develop an integrated Autogen power system for field deployment by the U.S. Military, and for large scale commercial introduction in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and certain selected allied countries..

The total cost for all components of the demonstration, including both gensets and Propane/LNG conversion kits, test carts, and two complete sets of all other elements will be less than $25,000, including labor. The two units will be constructed in tandem both to demonstrate the versatility of the process, and to ensure a useful demonstration even in the event that one genset is damaged, stolen, or otherwise fails to function as intended, and because there are certain economies to be obtained in building both units simultaneously.