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Asked by jasbox1278986968 to Padraic, Aislinn, Fiona, Nathan, Sinead on 30 Jan 2015. This question was also asked by Jake Butler.
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Sinead Quirke answered on 30 Jan 2015:
Yes it can be done but the energy needed to break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen ( u need the hydrogen to run the car) is more than the energy you are creating to run the car so it is not a good solution at the moment.
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Aislinn Coghlan answered on 1 Feb 2015:
I actually did my final year research project on this!
Technically, cars could run on water. Sinead ,entwined the hydrogen fuel cell, which can power a car with hydrogen gas. A water molecule is made of 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen molecule. Water is especially hard to separate as not on is its outer shell full, making it very stable and up reactive, there is something called hydrogen bonding happening. This makes it very difficult the separate the molecules.
Gas separation membranes work like a coffee filter. They let some molecules through and hold the others back. Using active transfer, in which energy I’d used to force the molecules through, the hydrogen could be separated. However a material that can do this does not yet exist!
Another thing to think about is that hydrogen is very explosive. Storing it in your car could be very dangerous. We would have to engineer a way to store it.
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Nathan Quinlan answered on 4 Feb 2015:
Fossil fuels like petrol have molecules with lots of carbon and hydrogen atoms. When you the break the bonds between carbon and hydrogen atoms, in the burning process, a lot of energy (heat) is released. On the other hand, to break the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in water, you have to put energy in. So water will never be a fuel. You can use it as part of the process of powering a car, as Sinead and Aislinn have explained, but there has to be real fuel somewhere in the system.
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