Making the rounds with motorcycle enthusiasts over the past week has been a slightly unusual machine variously described as running on water or seawater. It looks like the so-called “Free energy fringe and certainly not at normal Hackaday fare, but it comes with pictures of a smiling teenager and what looks like a real motorcycle enough to have something behind it. So what’s going on? The answer is that it is the student project of an Argentinian teenager [Santiago Herrera], and while it stretches a little to say it runs on seawater, it certainly ran a conventional motorcycle on the oxygen-hydrogen mixture produced by the electrolysis of water. The TikTok videos are in Spanish, but even for non-speakers it should be pretty clear what’s going on.
Obviously the bike is more of a student demonstrator than a road machine, as we’re not so sure a glass jar is the safest container. But the interesting part for us does not lie in the electrolysis but in the engine. it appears to be a fairly standard looking motorcycle engine, a typical small horizontal single cylinder. It runs on a stoichiometric mix of oxygen and hydrogen, something that packs a lot of punch over a similar mix using air rather than oxygen. It would be fascinating to know the effect of this mixture on an engine designed for regular gasoline, for example does it achieve complete combustion, does it burn hotter than regular fuel and does it put more stress on the engine parts?
You can see something of the bike in the video below the break, and there are a few other videos in his TikTok account. Meanwhile, this isn’t the first teen motorcycle project we’ve featured.
@santyherrera01 #ciencia #salta #escuelaagricola #motorcycle #reciclaje #viral #clubdeciencias #argentina🇦🇷 #mecanica
♬ sonido original – santy herrera