Multi-Fuel Truck tested in the 1970's!!!!

My new partner and I work for a company in the chemicals department. We recently got to talking about our past work experience. He use to work for Texaco in the 70's. He was personally involved with testing a multi-fueled vehicle. The research fab bought and old UPS truck and retrofit it with several holding tanks. One for traditional gasoline, propane, natural gas, cooking oil, used motor oil, and water! Yes WATER!. He told me that it was his job to ride around town and record data from the aray of sensors mounted into the dash board. The onboard computer logged speed, driving conditions, temp etc. He would have a swith box wich allowed him to change fuel sources on the fly. He would actually swith from say Propane to Water while driving down through town with no hesitation or reation from the engine! The secret was in the engine head. Some guy designed this revolutionary intake maifold that could burn almost anything. He would send the daily data out every night. He had pre addressed envelopes and mailed them at the end of his shift just like a bank deposit. After testing it for a few weeks the government came in and took all the data and shut down the program. He also personally tested a carburator that combusted gasoline near 100 MPG!!!! That too was shut down. The government bought the inventors patent and that was the end of that. Now fast forward to The Gulf War and more recently The Afganistan and Iraq Wars. Funny how all those Humvees and Tanks would drive DAYS at full throttle without filling up with fuel. I drive back and forth to work in my SUV and need to fill up every other day or so. So answer me this, if this all happened in the 70's during that gas crunch why are Hybrids just surfacing claiming to get 30MPG (most are closer to 25 MPG)? Oooh really that's amazing! Gee talk about slowly releasing technology to the public. Tactical to Practical must take 50 years or so before we as consumers can reep the benefits. If we go from TANG to Velcro to Visco Elastic Memory Cell beds in the course of 50 years guess what the military is up too right now! I bet its not drinking TANG anymore!! They just might be using it to fuel the Tanks, Humvees and UFO's.

I have heard of Multi-fuel engines that run on traditional gasoline, propane, natural gas, cooking oil, used motor oil.

But water thats new to me. Thats like the Holy Grail for clean running engines the worlds only 70% covered in it. Did he explain anything about how water has used as a fuel?

No, he wasn't allowed to "Look behind the curtain of OZ." Any questions were answered with, "Ill get back to you on that". His job was only to switch between the seperate fuels at random intervals, like accelerating, decelerating, highway driving, stop lights, during trafic jams at rush hour and record the numbers. It kinda reminded me of Back to the Future when the Doc put banana peels and garbage into the Delorian for fuel. just imagine a car that could run on several types of fuel depending on its availability and or price. You could switch it up at will. Talk about free market and competition in the fuel markets!

I've known that way more efficient engines are out there and have been out for some time now and all kind of different fuels. I am lost and have trouble believing an engine could run on water alone and would LOVE to see how that works. I do believe that the oil companies have a strong hold on our policy makers and are the ones keeping this beneficial technology from going mainstream.

The secret was in the engine head. Some guy designed this revolutionary intake maifold that could burn almost anything.

intake manifolds only carry one or two things, air or air and fuel. they dont burn anything. they are the couriers of the mixture that gets burned IN the combustion chamber.

now most of the fuels you mention can burn at a realtively low 8:1 compression ratio. head design has nowthing to do with that, head design can effect torque for example it can even enchance combustion but it doesnt make an engine burn something it wasnt designed to burn. like you cant use diesel fuel in a gasoline engine, it requires a hotter spark, which is why diesel engines have an incredibly high compression ratio compared to gasoline engines and requires not spark plugs but...glow plugs! they glow red hot to ignite the mixture, once the engine reaches operating tremperature the glow plugs are no longer needed as the compression is so high the air fuel mixture is squeezed so hard it gets very hot, hot enough to burn on its own.

being a former ASE certififed auto tech and all enables me to know such things.

im still curious how a gasoline burning engine can burn water.

BTW the car makers we're testing air bags in the 60's and 70's but shhhh, that'll be our little secret. k?

fuel economy is but a number, designing a PRACTICAL (not some one off model some college kids made that can only hold on person a fuel cell and little else doesnt count) to have very good fuel economy is not an easy balancing act. weight becomes an issue, aerodynamics, gearing, safety feeatures such as brakes air bags...did you know even tire pressure can effect fuel milage by as much as a few miles to the gallon? its true! tire pressure can also effect brake performance as well but we wont go into that in this thread. even something as simple as changing the air filter and oil regularly can effect fuel milage. the engine design is but one component in a larger picture.

sure we've all seen the thread that shows someone can make a car that can get 500 MPG but has no trunk one seat and goes about 15 MPH.

now i've been around cars for some time and i've heard a lot of the "i had a friend" stories. in fact i've heard so many very few are ever true. i challenge you to find your friend to show some documentation of what he's told you. im betting dollars to donuts noone made a carburetor that got 100 MPG. i've seen lots of carbs in my time and none have gotten close to what EFI can do.

now i've done conversions on trucks for gas or promane use and having a multifuel engines is very real and possible but a gas/propane/water engine? something about that strikes me as highly improbable. ive seen a lot of engines but never saw one burn water. seen em burn propane, alcohol, nitro methane, even kerosene, but not water.

i've heard this water burning claim before. even saw a site that claimed it but never explained how it worked. but for a certain amount of money you could bolt on this "universal kit" and burn water...yeah i've heard of this and never seen it. and believe me aside from the old steam engines from a copuple centuries back i dont think anyone could have found a way to combust water and kept a lid on it for any length of time without it getting out to the public somehow. even the government has leaks like a sieve.

The closest to a water burning engine I ever heard of was some chemical pills made by a Portuguese inventor. He put the pills in the tank, full of water, and the engine, a normal gasoline engine, would burn the mixture in the tank.
He never said what the pills where made of and he disappeared while he was travelling by boat to the USA.

The Portuguese are very good at inventing things, but we are also very good swindlers, so it could be just a trick.