Just some commentary from a science nerd who's seen way too many such things in his life...
First, if you're unfamiliar with the terminology being thrown about here, this is a good starter on what's basically going on here and that it's generally scientifically fraudulent:
Oxyhydrogen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The most relevant sentence from there is:
Quote:
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The most common and decisive counter-argument against producing this gas on board to use as a fuel or fuel additive is that the energy required to split water molecules exceeds the energy recouped by burning it.
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However, it's pretty hard to shut down a project like this based on facts. It wouldn't surprise me if he could build an HHO-based system that did increase the MPG of a car very slightly in some standardized test. There are a lot of ridiculous inefficiencies in the design of a modern combustion-powered car that are difficult to eliminate. The most obvious is all the waste heat. Perhaps the guy is picking up his efficiency gains by using the waste heat pouring off the engine/exhaust to help reduce the electrical power needs for electrolysis? There's been legitimate research on that topic in the recent past, but the last one I heard about required temps in the 850C range to use heat to help power the splitting of water, so that one wasn't really appropriate for a car engine. Most legitimate research on any kind of waste-heat recovery system tends to report more like a 5-10% net gain in fuel efficiency, and almost none of those efforts involve using water electrolysis as a step in the process.
Just food for thought. My suspicions based on how these things usually turn out is that (1) He's exploiting an inefficiency like waste heat more than anything else, which is legitimate but doesn't legitimize the electrolysis part, (2) He probably can show a small gain on some test, but (3) It won't ever be a practical/viable system for real world use on a large scale, due to the cost of the technology, cost of some catalyst or wear-item component of the system, inability to provide enough gains to offset its own weight and manufacturing costs, etc.
But who knows, I could be wrong. You never know when the next seemingly-snake-oil guy has finally stumbled on something useful.