Genepax

Genepax

Company type	R & D
Founded	October 10, 2006
Headquarters	Osaka , Japan
Key people	Kiyoshi Hirasawa, President
Products	Manufacture and sales of electricity generation systems R & D of electricity generation technologies
Total equity	43 million yen (approx. 400,000 USD)
Website	http://www.genepax.co.jp/en/

Genepax (株式会社ジェネパックス, Kabushiki-kaisha Jenepakkusu) is a Japanese corporation that claims to have created a car which can run on nothing but water. According to the company, a proprietary unit, a type of membrane electrode assembly (MEA), breaks water apart into hydrogen and oxygen using a chemical reaction, which provides fuel for a hydrogen fuel cell to run the car.

Currently, the Genepax product appears to violate the first and/or the second law of thermodynamics. Energy must be supplied to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen to produce the hydrogen fuel for the fuel cell. Oxidizing the hydrogen within the fuel cell can at best produce only as much energy as it took to break apart the water in the first place, leaving no energy left to power the car. Yet the company claims that water is all that is needed to make the car go.

Speculation

There has been much speculation about the process by which the vehicle extracts energy from water. Some speculate the car is actually powered by the stock electric system of this model of car, others speculate that it is a combustion based vehicle.

A report in TechOn magazine states that a "well-known process to produce hydrogen from water" is employed and that "This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water."

It is well known that certain metal hydrides will react with water to produce hydrogen—which could in turn be used to power the car. The problem is that the metal hydride is the "fuel"—not the water—because it is consumed by the process of reacting with the water. Eventually the car would need to be refilled with more metal hydride—and the first and second laws of thermodynamics guarantee that the energy cost of producing the hydride would be greater than the energy produced to drive the car.

An alternative process for producing hydrogen from water uses a Rhenium catalyst, but requires organosilane compounds as an additional fuel and produces silanol compounds as a byproduct. This also conflicts with Genepax's claims of water being the only fuel and the only product.

The corporation's Japanese website explains the chemical process as having water as both a reactant and a product. Furthermore, diagrams on the site do not reference any additional fuel source to power the hydrolysis process.

Press Releases

Genepax demonstrated the car in the Japanese city of Osaka on 12 June,2008. Genepax Claims that one liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water—rain, river or sea (even tea, stated the press release)—is all that is needed to run the engine for about an hour at a speed of 80 km/h (50 mph). However, their claims that a 300 watt (0.4 horsepower) engine could drive the car (the weight of which has not been specified) at this speed and for this duration despite wind resistance / Automobile drag coefficients and other energy-draining forces warrants further investigation.

The demonstration vehicle was a Takeoka Reva, a small electric car weighing between 740 and 960 kg whose manufacturer claims a range of 85 km running on its standard set of batteries, which take 8 hours to charge off the mains at 100 V on a 15 A circuit.

Should Genepax validate their claims, no infrastructure would be required to recharge the car's batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars. The vehicle will supposedly continue to run for as long "as you have water to top up with from time to time." . As the residual product of the engine is also water, this would in principle lead to the development of a perpetual motion engine, in which the exhaust product, water, could be fed directly back into the system as fuel.

Criticism

The claims made by Genepax that their product produces useable energy to propel the car, requiring only water as a fuel and creating only water as exhaust are fundamentally inconsistent with the scientific community's current understanding of the universe. The exhaust product could be routed directly into the fuel tank to power the car for an indefinite time period with no further intervention until a mechanical breakdown of the car occurs - until parts of the car wear out.

This direct violation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics would effectively make the Genepax product a perpetual motion machine and would have probably granted the developer a well-deserved Nobel Prize.

See also

• Water-fuelled car

External Links

• Genepax Co., LTD. (Japanese) Accessed June 15, 2008.
• Genepax CO., LTD. (English) Accessed June 15, 2008.
• Video Link of Genepax's Water Powered Car from Reuters. Accessed June 15, 2008.
• Genepax unveils water energy fuel cell system From Fuel Cell Today. Accessed June 15, 2008.
• New Fuel Cell System 'Generates Electricity with Only Water, Air' From Tech On. Accessed June 15, 2008.
• Japanese company Genepax unviels car that runs on Water Accessed June 15, 2008.
• Epoch times, Japanese Firm Tests Water-Powered Car Accessed June 20, 2008