Yeah, that's the other issue. I wasn't sure how many amps my generator produces. I may have to switch to a heavier-duty generator or alternator. There's a guy on one of the forums who has one running in a type 1 but I'm not sure if he installed a different alternator. I'll have to post something about it
Regarding water use, I forget the exact numbers but it's something like a liter of water per 15 hours of use.
let's see hydroxy takes up something like 1800 times the volume of the source water, so one liter of water would produce about 1800 liters of hydroxy. If you're running the smack's booster which is rated at 1.7 L/min...say you get it to work more efficiently at 1.8 L/min to make the numbers nicer (and err on the side of conservativism), it would take 1000 minutes to use up all your water. Dividing by sixty (minutes in an hour) yields a theoretical duration of 15.66 hours. :)
of course, if your water level starts dropping below the top level of your electrodes, at some point it will retard your gas production, which is related to how much current you send through, and the efficiency of which is related to the total surface area of the electrodes. In my case, in the bus I'd have enough room to have a relatively tall canister with the electrodes in the bottom, so I could store more solution and not have to top off too often. The smack's booster design includes a water level indicator so you don't have to open the canister to see the water level. if you use the proper electrolyte (and you'd be rather foolish to use something else), you'll be using either NaOH or KOH, which act as proper catalysts and as such don't get used up in the process of the electrolysis (some foolish people use NaCl, table salt, which works but forms poisonous chlorine gas as a byproduct), so you just top off your water with DISTILLED water once a week or so depending on how often you drive. (using other types of water causes the impurities in the water to form a sludge in the solution, which can short your electrodes and possibly cause an explosion--bad idea, yet one which is surprisingly often tried. research is essential!)
oh one last thing regarding the amount of electrical draw: if you were using the hydroxy directly as fuel, the electrical cost to generate it would be too high (the process too inefficient between the generator's inefficiencies and the electrolyzer's inefficiencies if you're using a regular "brute force" electrolyzer). but with the relatively small amount of hydroxy (2L/min compared to the air intake of 1.6L engine at 2000rpm), the hydroxy acts as a catalyst to the gasoline burn rather than a fuel on its own, and thus dramatically increases the efficiency of the gasoline burn. I think I mentioned before that one effect of using a hydroxy booster is that your hydrocarbon (HC) emissions drop to near zero--a plus for the environment :). This means that more of your fuel is burning, and it's burning faster which means more of the force of the expansion gets transferred to the piston early in the burn cycle, for far more effective torque. less overall heat is generated, so the effect is that the gas you are using, you are using far more efficiently in terms of mechanical output. This makes up for the efficiency losses in generating the gas.
If you're interested there are some articles by JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) on hydrogen-assisted gasoline burning in ICEs that I could dig up for you
as an aside, the waterfuelforall booster is designed from the ground up to be maximally efficient (for a brute-force electrolyzer, which is the least efficient but easiest to make type) but requires a little more care in manufacture. The smack's booster is reasonable in cost and difficulty of assembly, but is somewhat inefficient and will probably overheat after a couple of hours of continuous use. the longest I drive in a single shot is generally less than two hours, so it's not too much a concern for me, and by the time I'm up to longer hauls I'm getting a waterfuelforall booster anyway.
I've done a lot of research on this so feel free to hit me up with questions. The stuff I don't know is engine-specific stuff like how weak compression will affect things...
..sky
