Agha Waqar Khan’s Water kit Car: Fraud or Reality?

Just when the countries problems couldn’t be any worse, Hamid Mir along with a dubious engineer named Agha Waqar Khan descend as angels to proclaim the good news that all of Pakistan’s energy and fuel crises have been solved.

The media’s hype surrounding Waqar’s invention of a HHO water kit and the prospect of water-fueled cars in Pakistan is its latest attempt at minting money via dream selling and drugging an already dysfunctional and delusional nation.

Hamid Mir and Agha Waqar demonstrate the operation of the water kit car

A recent blog on ET exclaimed the irresponsibility of the media in reporting this event, however the author completely ignored the objectionable science being proclaimed by Waqar and his associates; and the long history of fraudulent claims regarding the use of water as a fuel for automobiles.

In 1980, Stanley Meyer claimed to have built water fuelled a dune buggy. He refused to give up his car for scientific inspection; later in 1996 after an investment scam, an Ohio court charged him $25000 and found him guilty of “gross and egregious fraud.”

In 2002, Genesis World Energy (GWE) also claimed a market ready water fuel device for powering automobiles. After laundering $2.5 million from private investors, the owner of the company, Patrick Kelly was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $400,000 in compensation.

Later in 2008, Sri Lankan media hailed an inventor Thushara Priyamal Edirisinghe who claimed to have driven a water fuelled car 300 kilometers in just 3 liters of water. Thushara even demonstrated his findings to the Sri Lankan government which pledged full financial support in commercializing his technology. Months later, Thushara was arrested on suspicions of investment fraud.

In the same year, Formosa Plastics sued Filipino inventor Daniel Dingel for yet another water fuel scam. Daniel had claimed  to have developed water fuel technology since 1969 and in 2000 the inventor struck gold by entering into a partnership with Formosa Plastics to further research and develop his technology. After a successful lawsuit, the 82 year old Daniel was finally sentenced to 20 years in prison for defrauding the company.

Can anyone spot the pattern in this series? Guess what comes next

Now our very own Agha Waqar Khan has also claimed to have invented an electrolysis water kit with many of the same attributes as the devices listed above.

I am only glad that we are all living in Pakistan; the law lacks force, no one is arrested and imprisoned and case hearings extend well beyond the life of the accused. Therefore, I believe that Pervez Hoodbhoy  has nothing to fear from his new lawsuit. The only laughable irony here is that who’s the plaintiff and who’s the accused. Unlike all the other countries, in Pakistan the conmen walk free while the scientists end up explaining Thermodynamics in courts.

No one has ever been able to substantially demonstrate that water can be used as a fuel by means of Electrolysis. In fact, all experiments affirm that using an electrolysis cell as an attachment to an internal combustion engine degrades vehicle performance and makes the engine response leaner. 

Simply put, Agha Khan’s water-kit won’t work and here’s why:

Agha Khan’s basic theme is that the car’s 12 V battery will drive an electrolytic cell which will break water molecules into its constituents Hydrogen and Oxygen. The combination of these gasses (HHO) will serve as combustible fuel and the engine will subsequently recharge the battery during its stroke cycles.

In this entire energy circuit, for the battery to not lose power, all of the energy it imparts to the cell must be returned to it by the engine. In other words  all of the energy is isolated in the loop, the car has become a perpetual motion machine and the engine is lossless. This off course is simply IMPOSSIBLE.   

According to aardvark, to maintain  a cruise speed of 65mph (~100kph), the engine needs to produce roughly 20 HP or 15 KW of power. Assuming that the cell has 100 percent efficiency (which it doesn’t), the 15 KW must be supplied entirely by the car’s internal 12 V battery.

To state the obvious, this means that an immense 1250A current will be flowing in the car’s external circuit! – This is sure to melt your wires any second.

It is also a well-known fact that your average IC engine has an efficiency of 30 percent, by itself the engine can only successfully return about 4.5 KW to re-charge the battery. Two thirds or 10 KW of the original power supply will be wasted in the mechanical and heat losses; at this rate the battery is also sure to to die any second. 

Agha Khan’s claim that he’s only using 1 to 2 percent of the batteries power totally contradicts the efficiency dynamics of any automobile engine we know about, it violates the Law of Conservation of Energy and the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. If his claim is taken to be true then Agha Khan’s engine is doing the impossible task of magically re-supplying the lost energy to the battery.

Either Agha Khan is right and the Laws of Thermodynamics are wrong;

or the laws are right and Agha Khan is wrong.

Even more abysmal is Agha Khan’s amusing request that ONLY distilled water must be used in the electrolytic process.

For electrolysis to work, the electrolyte must contain ions to conduct the electrical charges. Water’s proficiency as a conductor is directly proportional to the presence of impurities; it’s the ions from the salts and minerals that actually carry the charges and for this reason electrolysis is usually performed using salt or tap water.

Distilled water on the other hand has a very low ionization constant, the partial ionization via H and OH ions implies extremely weak conduction. The consequences for the given scenario are that the electrolysis and production of Hydrogen gas will proceed at a very slow rate, certainly not fast enough to power an automobile.

So then, why does Agha Khan want to use distilled water even when salt water would be a much better candidate for electrolysis?

In summary, according to our known laws of physics, the energy consumed (during electrolysis) to break the covalent bonds of H₂O molecules is always greater than the energy produced at the combustion of Hydrogen. Consequentially, the Electrolysis kit will always be acting as a permanent load that is constantly draining more energy than it can provide.

All things set aside, if Agha Waqar Khan has really found a violation to the Laws of Thermodynamics then his contributions truly merit a Nobel prize in Physics.